Ritualizing the Womb

In The Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau, childless women, or kañeleŋ, join voluntary organizations to collectively cope with their infertility struggles. These often-interethnic associations (kañeleŋ kafo) use rituals, public performances, and communal and social services to increase their members' chances of bearing children who survive to adulthood. In doing so, they also construct a space for themselves in a society where childlessness is often stigmatized.

Ritualizing the Womb explores how these practices shape kañeleŋ as agents of change whose blending of Quranic knowledge and traditional medicine reconfigures female-male relationships, facilitates the formation of new kinship bonds, and provides voices for other women. Drawing on multisite oral interviews, songs, artifacts, and archival materials to center the voices of these women, author Bala Saho describes how they make use of the spoken and performing arts to improve reproductive health and negotiate household power structures. By activating the social and spiritual power of kañeleŋ associations, Gambian women and men handle the exigencies of marriage, reproduction, and futurity.

A must-read for scholars of religion, cultural anthropology, women and gender studies, and African studies more broadly, Ritualizing the Womb explores crucial sites for understanding female agency in West Africa.