The Gambian women turning grief into song

Banjul, The Gambia - The women arrive laughing before anyone hears them sing. More than a dozen of them are dressed in oversized men's shirts and loose trousers to show they are as strong as men. Upon their heads are brightly coloured headscarves of yellow, red and green. They tease one another as an empty plastic water bucket is turned upside down and beaten like a drum. The hollow beat fills the compound as voices rise in Mandinka, one woman leading a verse before the others answer in chorus. “Domori wo nteh'mang'na domorilan n'konobeh faring'neh sankuruwayang, nteh'mang'na domorila sankuruwayang. Meyeng naati wo tanbi'ta wola leh,” they sing. “I did not come here for food; my stomach is already full. I have come for something greater than that.” At weddings and naming ceremonies, they are entertainers, drawing crowds with jokes, dancing and song. The small donations they sometimes receive at these events can help support the group and their activities. But beneath the laughter is another story. At 84, Mentending Trawally is slight and stooped, her face lined by time. A yellow veil frames her face, covering her ears. She no longer sings as loudly as she once did. When the Kanyeleng, whose tradition offers solidarity to women who have experienced infertility and child loss, gather on a Sunday evening in July in the shade of a house in Bakau, a coastal town on the outskirts of Banjul, it is younger voices that now carry the songs she first learned as a teenager. Thirteen women sit shoulder to shoulder as the late afternoon heat begins to soften, some swaying gently to the rhythm, others clapping in time. Outside the compound gate, neighbourhood children stand on tiptoe, peering through the entrance as the singing spills into the street. Trawally sits among them, gently tapping her feet against the ground, smiling whenever someone forgets a verse she still knows by heart. Age has slowed her body, but it has not dimmed the songs that have stayed with her for more than seven decades. “I was born into Kanyeleng,” she says. Bakau is home to one of the largest concentrations of Kanyeleng with about 10 groups, but the tradition extends across The Gambia’s seven regions. Historian Hassoum Ceesay estimates there are more than 100 groups nationwide, and similar traditions are found in neighbouring Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. The exact age of the tradition is difficult to determine, but Ceesay traces its roots back generations. Deeply associated with Mandinka culture, Kanyeleng is a cultural rather than religious practice and is not confined to one ethnic group. Related traditions have been adapted across communities. Among Fula people, for example, the term "geedereh", meaning "dumpsite", is used while the Wolof term "morrso" refers to a rag. The tradition shaped Trawally’s family long before she understood its meaning. Her maternal grandmother became a Kanyeleng after losing every child in infancy except Trawally’s mother. Years later, her mother would join too. Trawally remembers little of her grandmother herself. Instead, she remembers the songs, the clusters of women gathering in the family compound and the rhythm of dozens of dancing feet. In Mandinka, Mentending means tomato, a name her family connected to survival, like a plant that continues to grow despite hardship. Trawally smiles as she tells the story, her hands folded loosely in her lap. “My mother gave me that name because I survived,” she says. When she married as a young woman, she dreamed of a home filled with children, little feet running through the compound and the joy of watching them grow. Instead, five pregnancies ended, for reasons she doesn’t know, before she could carry a baby to term. “I cried until I had no tears left,” she tells Al Jazeera. In her community, motherhood shaped how women were viewed and valued. People saw the absence of a child, she says, but not the pain behind it. After marriage and the heartbreak of repeated miscarriages, Trawally returned to the Kanyeleng tradition she had grown up watching. The women welcomed her into a circle of others who knew the pain of losing pregnancies and losing children. Among them, she no longer had to explain her grief. Decades later, Trawally still remembers the verses she learned as a teenager. She remembers the women who came before her and the younger voices now carrying the songs forward. “Those songs are my life,” she says. For the Kanyeleng, song allows experiences that can be difficult to articulate in ordinary conversation to be expressed collectively. Through humour and shared rhythm, they turn experiences of loss into moments of connection Every Sunday as the sun sets, the women gather at Trawally’s home, a modest family compound with two corrugated iron-roofed houses arranged around a partly tiled courtyard. A small mango tree casts shade across the yard where the women sit in a circle, singing, clapping and punctuating the verses with laughter. Each member contributes 200 dalasis (about $2.70) to a shared fund that is set aside to help any woman facing hardship, whether through illness, bereavement or other unexpected difficulties. Neighbourhood children linger outside the compound gate, drawn by the rhythm of the singing and the hollow beat of the improvised drum. Dressed in T-shirts and shorts, they peek through the entrance. To a visitor, it looks like a celebration. Trawally smiles. "Outsiders see only the performance,” she says. “They do not see the grief that created it.” Sitting beside Trawally, 28-year-old Suntukung shifts forward, smoothing the blue headscarf wrapped around her hair before beginning her own story. As one of the youngest members of the Bakau Kanyeleng, she smiles as she remembers the first time she walked into Trawally’s compound. Suntukung was not always her name. Before joining the group, everyone knew her as Ma Yama. She still remembers arriving at the compound feeling uncertain. “I was nervous,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone.” After marriage, at age 22, Suntukung gave birth to her first child. Then came the miscarriages. One pregnancy after another began with hope and ended in heartbreak. With every loss, the questions from others became harder to answer. Her experience sits within a wider maternal and newborn health challenge. According to the World Health Organization, The Gambia recorded an estimated maternal mortality ratio of 354 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023, compared with a global average of about 197. Its neonatal mortality rate stands at 24 deaths per 1,000 live births. The Gambia Demographic and Health Survey 2019-2020 estimated maternal mortality at 289 deaths per 100,000 live births in the seven years preceding the survey. Despite progress, gaps remain in access to timely, quality antenatal, delivery and emergency obstetric care. “I felt like I was the only one going through it,” she says. “People would ask me when I was going to have another baby. They didn’t know what I had already lost.” She searched for answers through prayer and sought help wherever she could. Eventually, she visited a marabout, a spiritual healer, who listened before offering her a different kind of guidance. “Find women who understand what you are going through,” she remembers him saying. “Find those who have walked the same road.” “Find women who understand what you are going through. Find those who have walked the same road.” For some Gambian families, seeking out the Kanyeleng remains a cultural response to repeated pregnancy losses or difficulty having children alongside medical care. Suntukung’s cousin also urged her to find the women. That search led her beyond her hometown of Brikama, about 30km (20 miles) south of the Kanyeleng women of Bakau. She made the journey in a yellow taxi, paying 800 Gambian dalasis (about $10.72), a considerable sum for many Gambians. As the taxi pulled up outside Trawally's compound, the women were already waiting. They gathered around to greet her, embracing her as she stepped out. Trawally welcomed her into the group. The women sang with her, prayed for her and asked God to bless her with another child. Then they gave her a new name, Suntukung. It means “dumpsite”. She laughs softly. “People are always surprised when they hear it.” Within the Kanyeleng tradition, women often receive names that may sound unusual to outsiders. Rooted in long-held beliefs, they are thought to protect mothers and future children from the spirits traditionally associated with repeated miscarriages and infant deaths. Protective names have become less common elsewhere in The Gambia, Ceesay says, as families increasingly choose Islamic names, but they persist within Kanyeleng circles. As the women sang around Suntukung that first day, they poured water and porridge over her before embracing her one by one, welcoming her into the group. Around her, the older women nodded quietly. “When I joined them, I felt like I had found my family,” she says. As the singing fades, Tida Fofana moves closer to the women around her. Many of them know the pain of losing a child. Fofana knows a different kind of grief, the pain of never holding one. Although younger than Trawally, 78-year-old Fofana has belonged to the Kanyeleng longer than anyone else in the group, joining in 1965. When she married at 17, she imagined a home filled with children, a future measured by little footsteps and the bustle of a growing family. Instead, she and her husband built a quiet life together in Bakau. He taught at a local school while Fofana tended a garden of onions, hibiscus, salad vegetables and bitter tomatoes. As she begins to speak, she lowers her eyes and pauses for a moment before continuing. “After three years of marriage with no child, I was devastated,” she says. “I cried myself to sleep. Even after six decades, I still do.” The pressure came not from her own family, who stood by her, but from her husband’s relatives. They urged him to marry again. Eventually, he did. Then he married a third wife. Polygamy is permitted under Islamic law and remains relatively common in The Gambia, where about 96 percent of the population is Muslim. According to the 2019-2020 Gambia Demographic Health Survey, 34 percent of married women aged 15 to 49 were in polygynous unions. The practice is not linked to infertility. “I was his first wife,” Fofana says softly. “It was painful because I knew why he was marrying again.” She watched her co-wives become pregnant, give birth and raise the children she had spent years imagining as her own. “There were days I would ask God, ‘Why not me?’” Inside her sitting room, grey floor tiles stretch between two black sofas. On the wall hangs a framed photograph of her late husband, taken when he was much younger. As she speaks, she turns towards it. “He died two years ago,” she says. “He died with the dream of carrying our child together. That never happened.” Despite everything, they remained together until his death. “He never stopped respecting me,” she says. “We shared our life together.” Outside, children move through the compound. They are the children and grandchildren of her co-wives. “They all call me mother,” Fofana says, smiling. When the days feel heavy, she retreats to her garden, tending vegetables that she sells at the market. Among her plants, she says, she finds peace. While Fofana spent a lifetime waiting for the child she never held, Naju Ceesay, 58, spent hers remembering the children she lost. Dressed in a bright yellow two-piece polyester outfit, she sits quietly in her home. Her voice is gentle until the conversation turns to Amina, her first child and only daughter, who died at six months old. The memory still changes her expression. Beneath Ceesay's bed sits a small cardboard box, its edges worn with age. She bends down slowly, slides it across the floor, then rests it carefully on her lap. For a moment, she does not open it. When she finally lifts the lid, she reveals tiny socks, neatly folded birth certificates and a handful of keepsakes she has guarded for decades. Her fingers linger over the smallest pair of socks. “They belonged to Amina,” she says softly. Tears gather in her eyes before slipping down her face. “This is all I have left of my children.” Known within the Kanyeleng as Totala, meaning “no name”, Ceesay became pregnant five times. Four pregnancies ended in stillbirths. Amina was the only one born alive. More than two decades later, Ceesay cannot remember what doctors told her about the possible causes of the stillbirths, nor does she recall Amina having been diagnosed with a specific medical condition before her death. “Anytime we got pregnant, my husband and I would rejoice,” she says, her voice breaking. “Again and again, every child died.” Each pregnancy began with prayers and ended in mourning. The box beneath her bed became the place where she kept the few tokens of her children she could not bear to lose. She runs her hand over the birth certificates before carefully placing them back inside. “These are all the memories I have of Amina and her brothers,” she says. Across the room, her husband, Ba Demba Ceesay, speaks only briefly. “The losses affected both of us,” he says. “But people only spoke about my wife.” After each loss, relatives urged him to marry again, hoping another woman could give him the children he longed for. But he chose not to. “People pitied me more,” he says. “They never asked how she felt.” Naju closes the box gently and slides it back beneath the bed. “I keep them there because they are still part of my life,” she says. Among the Kanyeleng women, she found people who understood that grief does not end with time. “They understand,” she says. “They know what it means to lose a child.” The stories of loss among the Kanyeleng unfold against persistent challenges in maternal and newborn care. A 2025 study of 97,276 births recorded between 2013 and 2018 across 10 major public health facilities found that 4,873, or 5.1 percent, resulted in stillbirths, an overall rate of 51.3 per 1,000 births. More than half, 53.8 percent, were intrapartum stillbirths, meaning the babies died during labour. Researchers said the high proportion of intrapartum stillbirths raises concerns about the quality and timeliness of care women receive during labour and delivery. Dr Mustapha Bittaye, chief medical director and a gynaecologist at The Gambia’s main referral hospital, says preventable deaths remain a concern. For women who experience such losses, the medical crisis can be compounded by social expectations.“Motherhood is one-sided,” women’s rights advocate Tabou Sarr says. “It is always tied to whether a woman can conceive and bear children.” Across both rural and urban communities in The Gambia, motherhood remains closely tied to a woman's social standing. Women who experience infertility, pregnancy loss or the death of children often face not only grief but also stigma, isolation and misconceptions surrounding childlessness. Sarr describes the Kanyeleng as both “a symbol of resilience” and “a reminder of the social expectations women continue to face”. But within the Kanyeleng, “everybody is the same,” she says. Psychologist Fatou Kinneh Kantara of the University of The Gambia says the gatherings offer something many grieving women rarely find: a place where loss can be shared openly rather than endured alone. “What they are doing resembles collective grief work,” she says. “They transform private suffering into a shared emotional experience. “It creates a space where women do not have to hide their pain,” she says. “They are able to express what they have carried for years and heal together.” The women sitting in the shade of Trawally’s yard arrived there through different paths. Trawally lost pregnancies before she could carry a child. Fofana spent a lifetime longing for the ones who never came. Naju Ceesay knew the joys of motherhood, only to lose the children she had waited so long to hold. But Hassoum Ceesay, the historian, says the performances of the Kanyeleng tell only part of their story. “The public sees the music and laughter,” he says. “What they do not always see is where it comes from. “They were judged by what they could not do - give birth - rather than recognised for who they were,” he says. “So they created their own community.” The older women teach songs from memory, verse by verse, and the younger women answer, learning through repetition. Trawally watches, sometimes correcting a forgotten line, sometimes she simply smiles. “I want them to continue after us,” she says. “These songs have helped many women. They will help others too.” As the Sunday evening sun sinks over Bakau, the voices of the Kanyeleng grow louder, filling the compound with song. Trawally, at 84, no longer sings as loudly as she once did. She listens. The voices around her are younger now. “When I am gone,” Trawally says, “the songs will remain.”