Africa-Press – Gambia. As Europe’s far right grows louder, the outspoken Left Party lawmaker is refusing to be silent despite the danger to himself and his family.
When Momodou Malcolm Jallow appears on screen for our Zoom interview, it’s not from the echoing halls of Riksdag, Sweden’s Parliament, nor the streets of his political base in Malmö. He’s joining from an island – its name withheld – not out of mystery, but out of necessity.
For years, the Gambia-born Jallow has lived under threat from far-right extremists enraged by both his politics and his identity. It’s why he won’t disclose his whereabouts, especially to a journalist he’s speaking to for the first time.
Now the first person of African descent to chair a parliamentary committee in Sweden – the Civil Affairs Committee – he lives under constant surveillance, harassment, threats and is forced to adapt even the most mundane parts of life to stay safe.
“I’ve had to change the way I move,” he tells me. “What schools my children attend, what routes I take to work. It’s exhausting, but it’s necessary. Some people would rather I disappear than speak the truth.”
With his neatly trimmed beard and unwavering gaze behind thick-rimmed glasses, Jallow carries the calm authority of a man long accustomed to walking through fire.
“… that I stood up when it was easier to sit down. That I carried the weight of a people and never dropped it. Even when my voice trembled, I still spoke. Even when they threatened me, I did not shut up.”
He had warned me that the internet on the island might be patchy, so I braced myself for frozen screens and dropped calls. However, the signal holds. For nearly an hour, he speaks with the emotional clarity of someone who has spent years not just surviving, but resisting both the institutional coldness and the more intimate cruelties of racism in a country that so often prides itself on tolerance.
From Bakau to Malmö
Born in the coastal Gambian town of Bakau in 1975, Jallow’s political worldview wasn’t shaped in the corridors of power, but, as he puts it, “on the dusty streets of Gambia and in the ice-cold silence of Europe”.
He grew up in a working-class family, part of a tight-knit community where poverty coexisted with pride. “We didn’t have much,” he says. “But we had each other.”
Still, even as a child, he sensed the weight of what wasn’t said in his community; the quiet discomfort around injustice, gender inequality, and colonial legacies that lingered like ghosts. “Those silences,” he says, “taught me how much power lies in truth”.
Jallow arrived in Sweden as a teenager, carrying hopes of opportunity and inclusion. However, what he encountered shattered any illusions about the Nordic ideal of openness. “I was the only Black person on the flight,” he recalls. “At the airport, the police took me aside. They made me strip to my underwear. I cried. That’s when I realised my Blackness would always come before my humanity in their eyes.”
It’s exhausting, but it’s necessary. Some people would rather I disappear than speak the truth.
That early experience of being singled out never left him. It shaped how he navigated Swedish society, not with blind optimism, but with a sharpened sense of justice. Over time, activism became his language of resistance. In Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, he embedded himself in grassroots work, campaigning on issues of racial justice, housing, and migrant rights.
Jallow’s entry into partisan politics was catalysed in 2010, after he publicly denounced a racist mock slave auction at Lund University, Sweden. The incident triggered a wave of threats against him and his family, including the circulation of a dehumanising image portraying him in chains, as an enslaved African.
After years of working as an activist, including as chair of the Afro-Swedes’ Forum for Justice, he’d start his parliamentary journey in 2017. When fellow Left Party MP Daniel Sestrajcic stepped down, Jallow was appointed to replace him in the Riksdag, followed by his re-election in both 2018 and 2022.
Racism on first day at work
In 2022, he made history by ecoming the first person of African descent to chair a Swedish parliamentary committee. “Symbolism matters,” he says. “But it also comes with a price.”That price is security threats, character assassinations, and relentless efforts to undermine his legitimacy. “They expect me to be quiet, grateful, obedient,” he says. “Instead, I speak up.”They made me strip to my underwear. I cried. That’s when I realised my Blackness would always come before my humanity in their eyes.Even his 2017 entrance into Parliament was marked by racism. “At the time, I was the only person of African descent in Parliament,” Jallow recalls. “Now there are two of us; myself and a woman from Somalia. But back then, I was it. Just me, and for some people, that created a kind of cognitive dissonance. They couldn’t process it.” He remembers his first day walking into the Riksdag with his young daughter. They were dressed formally, badges in hand, like any other MP. But a parliamentary staffer stopped them and began directing them toward the visitors’ gallery.“My daughter and I just stood there, shocked,” he says. “Before I could even respond, one of my colleagues turned around and asked her, ‘Why are you sending him to the visitors’ area? He’s a Member of Parliament, like all of us.’”The staffer looked at Jallow and, without switching to Swedish, said: “Oh, I’m sorry. Please, you can proceed to the chambers.”“My colleague told her, ‘He speaks Swedish. He’s a Swedish MP.’ And I just stood there, holding my daughter’s hand.”It was a moment of public humiliation that Jallow says cut deeply not just for him, but for his daughter. “She asked me afterward, ‘Why did she do that?’” he says. “And I had to explain that in this country, racism is institutionalised. Whiteness is still seen as synonymous with Swedishness. So a white person from South Africa or Spain can be seen as more Swedish than a Black person born and raised right here.”It’s the kind of moment that echoes through his daily life, a life he describes as a constant balancing act between being a father, a parliamentarian and a Black man in Sweden, roles he never gets to separate.“A typical day?” he says, pausing. “It begins early, with the weight of three worlds on my shoulders.” Jallow, whose middle name “Malcolm” is a homage to iconic US Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, wakes up as a father first, checking in on his children before stepping into Parliament, where, as he puts it, he carries “the hopes of communities long silenced”.“Every meeting, every debate, every policy discussion is a battlefield,” he says. “I have to be twice as prepared, twice as calm, twice as strong to be seen as equal. Then I come home carrying both victories and scars, hoping my children will grow up in a country where they don’t have to fight just to belong.”
PKK protest and backlash
Since entering parliament, Jallow has used his platform to speak out against what he calls “Sweden’s culture of polite denial”. One of his most memorable speeches – This is not ignorance. This is a political choice – was aimed squarely at Swedish institutions that deny systemic racism even as they perpetuate it.“I was speaking to power,” he says, “but I was also speaking for the mothers whose pain is ignored in maternity wards, for the children who shrink themselves in classrooms, for the worshippers whose mosques are vandalised.” Racism in Sweden, he says, is not accidental. “It is a structure. A policy. A decision.”The cost of that outspokenness has been high. In 2022, he appeared in a photo next to a flag of the PKK – a Kurdish militant political organisation and armed guerrilla group primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of southeastern Turkiye – during a protest against Sweden’s NATO accession prompted by Ankara’s demands for tougher anti-terror laws. The backlash was swift. Even Sweden’s justice minister at the time called the act “unacceptable”.Every meeting, every debate, every policy discussion is a battlefieldJallow doesn’t flinch. “I don’t measure my actions by the comfort of the powerful,” he says. “That protest was against hypocrisy. Against criminalising Kurdish refugees while ignoring Turkish state violence. Against a democracy willing to trade human rights for NATO membership.”
Death threats and police protection
Jallow has been living under police protection for years. He’s received death threats. One message warned that his home would be bombed with his children inside.He describes the experience as both “surreal and painful”. To walk into the halls of democracy, and
know your presence alone is a trigger for hatred, makes you question, he says, “Who is this democracy really for?” So what keeps him from giving up?“Love. Rage. Memory,” he says. “I hold on to my mother’s courage. My father’s passion. The rage of the oppressed, and the memory of all those who came before me who didn’t have a microphone or a mandate but fought anyway.”When asked how his idea of “home” has changed between The Gambia, Malmö, Strasbourg (home of the European Parliament), and the wider diaspora, Jallow doesn’t hesitate.“Home is no longer a place. It’s a people. A cause. A mission,” he says. “The Gambia raised me. Malmö shaped me. Europe challenged me, and the diaspora, from Ferguson to Kinshasa, reminds me we are part of one struggle across oceans.” If Sweden ever writes an honest account of itself, what would Jallow want his chapter to say?“That I made them look in the mirror,” he says. “That I stood up when it was easier to sit down. That I carried the weight of a people and never dropped it. Even when my voice trembled, I still spoke. Even when they threatened me, I did not shut up.”
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