Elsevier

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 71, Issue 10, November 2010, Pages 1757-1763
Social Science & Medicine

Loss in childbearing among Gambia’s kanyalengs: Using a stratified reproduction framework to expand the scope of sexual and reproductive health

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.05.001Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with Gambian women who have experienced infertility and/or child mortality and who have consequently become kanyalengs. Kanyaleng kafoos are groups of women united by their reproductive difficulties whose bold public performances are designed to “beg God” for fertility and for children who will survive. I situate ’kanyalengs’ disrupted childbearing within a framework of stratified reproduction, which reveals the tensions between ongoing demands to meet norms of high fertility, women’s heavy burden of reproductive disease and the limits of a reproductive public health agenda narrowly focused on family planning and HIV prevention. To ameliorate these tensions, I call for an expansion of the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) agenda in Gambia to include RTI/STI prevention, diagnosis and management. This expansion reflects the goals set out by the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development for a broader approach to reproductive health, the productive potential of linkages between SRH and HIV prevention efforts, as well as the reproductive objectives of Gambian women and men.

Introduction

Kanyaleng kafoos are groups of women (kanyalengs) who are experiencing or have experienced infertility or child loss (Fassin and Badji, 1986, Hough, 2008, Skramstad, 1997, Sundby, 1997, Weil, 1976). Many Gambian kanyalengs are Mandinka or Jola, but kanyaleng kafoos may include women from other ethnic groups, as well. These organizations provide social, emotional and financial support for women who have been unable to achieve the local reproductive ideal of a large family. Kanyaleng membership serves as both a coping mechanism and as a proactive effort to overcome primary or secondary infertility and/or child loss.

Drawing on life history interviews with kanyalengs and participant observation data, this paper has two aims. First, to situate ’kanyalengs’ childbearing challenges within a framework of stratified and disrupted reproduction that highlights Gambian reproductive norms and women’s relationship to motherhood as both a symbolic good and a political economic necessity. Second, to demonstrate how kanyalengs’ experiences underscore the need for creative approaches to family planning and STI/HIV prevention for all Gambians, and suggest new directions for an expanded sexual and reproductive health (SRH) agenda in line with goals set out by the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) (see DeJong, 2000). Taking Gambians’ reproductive ideals into account demands a public health approach that mobilizes safer sex strategies and contraceptive use as a means of potentially preserving, rather than limiting, fertility by preventing the spread of STIs, including HIV.

Kanyaleng traditions appear to have diffused across Senegal’s Casamance border into Mandinka villages in the Jarra and Kiang regions in the 1950’s (Weil, 1976, pp. 184–185; see also Fassin, 1987, Fassin and Badji, 1986). Gambian Mandinkas are said to have adopted rituals aimed at improving fertility and preserving the lives of children from Jola kanyalengs in Casamance, but Mandinkas in Casamance are also known to have similar organizations called dembajasa, or “joking mother” fertility societies (Schaffer, 2003, p. 180). Whether these groups developed alongside Jola kanyalengs or are derived from them is uncertain. Fassin (1987) contends that kanyaleng tradition is not found in any other Mande group besides the Mandinka.

The most significant public role played by kanyalengs is in performance at celebrations to mark important events such as baby namings, marriages, and departure for or return from hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The vast majority of Gambians, and all of the kanyaleng informants for this research, are Muslim. Their bold song and dance performances enable kanyalengs to shame themselves before Allah in hopes that their outrageous behavior will convince divine will to take pity and make them fertile or allow their children to live. This is commonly referred to as “begging God” for children. The activities and behaviors that constitute “God begging” enable kanyalengs to break with conventional gender roles and expectations in hopes of having children that will survive. Specifically, kanyalengs may dress in men’s clothing, tease men about their sexual prowess, beg for or steal food, and undress when performing in public. Just as an infertile or childless woman defies reproductive ideals across Gambian ethnic groups, so kanyaleng performances contravene standards of proper behavior on many levels. Initiation into a kanyaleng kafoo reaffirms the liminal status of women confronting reproductive difficulties. It does not bring them out of their infertile or “relatively childless” status, but indicates a hope that they might overcome these problems and join the ranks of women with adequately large families.

In recent years, kanyalengs have been recognized for their performance skills tied to their “God begging” activity and have been recruited by governmental agencies and NGOs to promote health development messages as “traditional communicators” who perform songs and dramas based on issues as diverse as malaria prevention, maternal nutrition, and HIV awareness. Kanyalengs are considered well-suited to this work insofar as they are culturally sanctioned to speak openly and explicitly about sensitive issues like sexuality.

In pro-natalist Gambia where most women have few avenues to economic and social security outside of motherhood, the presence of kanyaleng kafoos underscores normative constructions of reproduction and gender, and highlights local reproductive stratification. Anthropological studies of reproduction have been profoundly influenced by theories of stratification which conceptualize the increasingly globalized inequalities bound to reproductive politics and practices (Colen, 1986, Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995). Examining these reproductive hierarchies articulates the links between the individual body, the social body and the body politic (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987) and interrogates the dynamics that determine whose reproductive or care-taking capabilities are valorized and whose are vilified on global and local scales.

Important sites of stratification and difference, or “contested reproduction” (Browner, 2000, Petchesky, 1990) illustrate that “pathologized or otherwise stigmatized reproduction can be used as a red thread” (Rapp, 2001, p. 469) that allows us to see reproductive norms in contrast, and levels of stratification more clearly. In this vein, the anthropology of reproduction has drawn increased attention to instances of “reproduction gone awry” (Inhorn, 1994a, Jenkins and Inhorn, 2003) or “reproductive disruptions” (Inhorn, 2007) that constitute loss in childbearing, particularly infertility (Feldman-Savelsberg, 1999, Hollos et al., 2009, Inhorn and VanBalen, 2002a, Kielmann, 1998), pregnancy loss and stillbirth (Cecil, 1996, Layne, 2002). Kanyalengs’ reproduction, disrupted by infertility and child mortality, is a bright red thread running through the fabric of Gambian women’s reproductive lives that draws attention to the persistent ideal of large families as well as the limits of reproductive health initiatives, largely focused on family planning, undertaken by Gambian governmental agencies and NGOs alike.

Section snippets

Research methods

From January through September 2004, my research assistant Naisatou Konteh and I conducted life history interviews with 62 kanyalengs. Contacts at NGOs and Department of State for Health (DoSH) agencies provided contacts with kanyaleng kafoos involved in development work. Interviews with women in these groups would often lead to interview opportunities with nearby kafoos. Occasionally, personal contacts or chance encounters would lead me to a new group of kanyalengs. Consequently, my

Women as mothers and the large family ideal

Across ethnic groups in The Gambia, reproduction plays a major role in identity formation for women. Becoming a mother and, preferably, bearing many children is a central aspect of the adult female role. Anthropologists have explored cross-cultural rationales for childbearing (e.g., desires for social security and social power as well as social perpetuity) and these explanations hold true in Gambia (see Browner & Sargent, 1996). The rationales for bearing many children are pragmatically rooted

Discussion

Anthropological studies of stratified reproduction have aided in the redefinition of the “local” and “global” by detaching these concepts from their geographical moorings and focusing on how the smaller-scale local is both constituted and contested by the transnational or global, thus also pulling reproduction to the center of social theory (Rapp, 2001; see also Inda & Rosaldo, 2007 on global/local relations). Accounts of reproduction, therefore, have moved toward investigating people and

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the kanyalengs interviewed for this project and to Naisatou Konteh. Bregje de Kok, Beckie Marsland, Alexis Matza, Sarah Ono, fellow participants in the Loss in Childbearing in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia Interdisciplinary Workshop at the University of Edinburgh, and two anonymous reviewers provided insightful comments on earlier drafts. The research for this paper was funded by a University of Iowa T. Anne Cleary International Dissertation Research Fellowship and

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