Twenty-two years under the bonnet
Demba learned the trade the way most mechanics here learned it — standing beside an older man, handing up spanners, being told to listen. He spent his first years in a shared bay off the Kololi Road working on the Peugeot 504s and Mercedes 190s that were still the backbone of the Gambian road in the early 2000s. In 2003 he took the lease on his own unit and put his name above the door.
What changed the business was not a new machine or a bigger bay. It was a phone. Customers kept calling to say the car would not move — and Demba kept discovering that nine times out of ten, the car did not need to move. A dead battery, a corroded earth strap, a fuel pump relay, a seized handbrake cable. Jobs that take twenty minutes in a driveway and half a day if you have to tow the vehicle across Serrekunda first.
So the van was built out. It carries a jump pack, a diagnostic reader, a full socket set, brake fluid, coolant, belts, two spare batteries, a trolley jack and a compressor. Modou, who has worked alongside Demba since 2011, drives it. Between them they cover the whole of the Greater Banjul Area — Serrekunda, Kololi, Kanifing, Bakau, Fajara, Bijilo, Sukuta, Latrikunda, and out along the highway towards Brikama when a customer is stuck.
“Half the cars we go out to never needed a workshop. They needed somebody to open the bonnet and actually look.” Demba Sanneh, owner
The work is honest and it is priced that way. You get told what the fault is before anything is touched, and you get told when a repair is not worth doing. If a gearbox is finished, Demba will say so and send you to a transmission specialist rather than take the job and the money. That is why the same families have been calling the same number for two decades, and why the taxi drivers on the Kololi Road route still bring their cars here.
The bay itself is a working one — not a showroom. There is a pit, a hoist, a bench that has been rebuilt twice, and a wall of parts drawers labelled in Demba’s own handwriting. Walk-ins are welcome during opening hours, but the phone is answered first, because the phone is usually somebody stranded.
We work on petrol and diesel, manual and automatic: Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Hyundai, Kia, Mitsubishi, Honda, Ford, and the older Volkswagen diesels that are still going strong out here. If it has an engine and four wheels, it is worth a look.