Finding Strength in Harmony: How Gambian Women Turn Infertility and Loss 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.

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.

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.

For Mentending Trawally, the tradition shaped her life long before she understood its meaning. When she married as a young woman, she dreamed of a home filled with children. Instead, five pregnancies ended before she could carry a baby to term. Returning to the Kanyeleng tradition she grew up watching, she found a circle of women who knew the pain of losing pregnancies and children, allowing her to share her grief without having to explain it.

Sitting beside Trawally, 28-year-old Suntukung shifts forward to share her own story. After marriage at age 22, Suntukung gave birth to her first child, followed by heartbreak and miscarriages. Seeking answers, she eventually visited a spiritual healer who advised her to find women who understood what she was going through. That search led her to Trawally's compound in Bakau, where the women welcomed her, sang with her, and gave her a new protective name, Suntukung.

Meanwhile, 78-year-old Tida Fofana knows a different kind of grief: the pain of never holding a child. After three years of marriage with no child, her husband took second and third wives as permitted under Islamic law. Though polygamy is common in The Gambia—where about 96 percent of the population is Muslim and 34 percent of married women aged 15 to 49 were in polygynous unions according to the 2019-2020 Gambia Demographic Health Survey—Fofana found enduring peace in her garden and among the children of her co-wives who call her mother.

For 58-year-old Naju Ceesay, known within the Kanyeleng as Totala or "no name," grief is tied to the children she lost. She keeps a small cardboard box beneath her bed containing tiny socks, birth certificates, and keepsakes belonging to Amina, her only daughter who died at six months old, alongside four stillbirths. Her husband, Ba Demba Ceesay, notes how the losses affected them both, though societal pity and pressure fell disproportionately on his wife.

These personal stories unfold against persistent challenges in maternal and newborn care. The World Health Organization estimated The Gambia's maternal mortality ratio at 354 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023, while a 2025 study recorded a stillbirth rate of 51.3 per 1,000 births. Women's rights advocate Tabou Sarr and psychologist Fatou Kinneh Kantara of the University of The Gambia emphasize that gatherings like the Kanyeleng offer crucial collective grief work, transforming private suffering into a shared emotional experience where women do not have to hide their pain.