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Gambia: Former Speaker Passed Away

The news has been announced of the death of Mrs. Belinda Bidwell, former Speaker of the National Assembly. Mrs. Bidwell was reported to have died in the early hours of Saturday 28th April 2007 in Fajara after a sudden heart attack. Mrs. Bidwell, who was 72 years, served as the Speaker of the National Assembly of the Gambia from April 2006 to January 2007 after having served as deputy for almost four years.

Before her appointment as Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly in 2002, Mrs. Bidwell spent a number of years in the teaching field, and thought at the St. Joseph’s Senior Secondary School and the High School.

Mrs. Bidwell studied at Reading University in Oxford, England, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. She later studied at the University of Chicago in the United States, where she graduated in 1973. Upon completion, she returned to The Gambia and resumed teaching, this time at the Gambia College, where she taught till her retirement in the early 1990s. Several years into her retirement, Mrs. Bidwell returned to teach voluntarily at the  St. Augustine’s Junior Secondary School in Banjul. It was after this that Mrs. Bidwell was made a deputy to the speaker of the country’s highest law-making body.

Mrs. Bidwell has been greatly missed by members of the assembly who remember her as a motherly figure of fair-play and discipline in spite of her affability. Mrs. Bidwell who was staying alone in her house in Fajara was said to have driven herself to a friend’s house to be taken to the hospital when she had a sudden cardiac arrest. Details of the funeral arrangement are yet to be disclosed.