Bala Saho

Professor Saho is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century West Africa (religious, legal, cultural, and social, women and gender history). His book, Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905–1965, (Michigan State University 2018), explores the role of women in the formation of colonial Bathurst, the evolution of women’s understanding of the importance of law in securing their rights, as well as the ways in which women utilized the new qadi court system to fight for growing rights within the domestic sphere. He is currently working on a second book titled, Ritualizing the Womb: The Peril of Childless (Kañeleng) Women in The Gambia. It investigates how voluntary associations of childless women shape perceptions of infertility in modern Gambia and how kañeleng counter the burden of childlessness and redefine the cultural construction of womanhood.