Banjul, The Gambia – The ladies arrive laughing earlier than anybody hears them sing. Greater than a dozen of them are wearing outsized males’s shirts and free trousers to point out they’re as robust as males. Upon their heads are brightly colored headscarves of yellow, pink and inexperienced.
They tease each other as an empty plastic water bucket is turned the other way up and overwhelmed like a drum.
The hole beat fills the compound as voices rise in Mandinka, one girl main a verse earlier than the others reply in refrain.
“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 didn’t come right here for meals; my abdomen is already full. I’ve come for one thing better than that.”
At weddings and naming ceremonies, they’re entertainers, drawing crowds with jokes, dancing and track. The small donations they often obtain at these occasions may also help help the group and their actions. However beneath the laughter is one other story.
At 84, Mentending Trawally is slight and stooped, her face lined by time. A yellow veil frames her face, overlaying her ears. She not sings as loudly as she as soon as did.
When the Kanyeleng, whose custom provides solidarity to girls who’ve skilled infertility and baby loss, collect on a Sunday night in July within the shade of a home in Bakau, a coastal city on the outskirts of Banjul, it’s youthful voices that now carry the songs she first discovered as a teen.
13 girls sit shoulder to shoulder because the late afternoon warmth begins to melt, some swaying gently to the rhythm, others clapping in time. Outdoors the compound gate, neighbourhood youngsters stand on tiptoe, peering by means of the doorway because the singing spills into the road.
Trawally sits amongst them, gently tapping her ft towards the bottom, smiling each time somebody forgets a verse she nonetheless is aware of by coronary heart. Age has slowed her physique, however it has not dimmed the songs which have stayed together with her for greater than seven a long time.
“I used to be born into Kanyeleng,” she says.
Bakau is residence to one of many largest concentrations of Kanyeleng with about 10 teams, however the custom extends throughout The Gambia’s seven areas. Historian Hassoum Ceesay estimates there are greater than 100 teams nationwide, and related traditions are present in neighbouring Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone.
The precise age of the custom is tough to find out, however Ceesay traces its roots again generations. Deeply related to Mandinka tradition, Kanyeleng is a cultural slightly than non secular observe and isn’t confined to 1 ethnic group. Associated traditions have been tailored throughout communities. Amongst Fula individuals, for instance, the time period “geedereh”, which means “dumpsite”, is used whereas the Wolof time period “morrso” refers to a rag.
The custom formed Trawally’s household lengthy earlier than she understood its which means. Her maternal grandmother turned a Kanyeleng after shedding each baby in infancy besides Trawally’s mom. Years later, her mom would be a part of too.
Trawally remembers little of her grandmother herself. As an alternative, she remembers the songs, the clusters of ladies gathering within the household compound and the rhythm of dozens of dancing ft.
In Mandinka, Mentending means tomato, a reputation her household linked to survival, like a plant that continues to develop regardless of hardship.
Trawally smiles as she tells the story, her palms folded loosely in her lap. “My mom gave me that identify as a result of I survived,” she says.
When she married as a younger girl, she dreamed of a house stuffed with youngsters, little ft operating by means of the compound and the enjoyment of watching them develop.
As an alternative, 5 pregnancies ended, for causes she doesn’t know, earlier than she might carry a child to time period.
“I cried till I had no tears left,” she tells Al Jazeera.
In her neighborhood, motherhood formed how girls have been seen and valued. Folks noticed the absence of a kid, she says, however not the ache behind it.
After marriage and the heartbreak of repeated miscarriages, Trawally returned to the Kanyeleng custom she had grown up watching.
The ladies welcomed her right into a circle of others who knew the ache of shedding pregnancies and shedding youngsters. Amongst them, she not needed to clarify her grief.
Many years later, Trawally nonetheless remembers the verses she discovered as a teen. She remembers the ladies who got here earlier than her and the youthful voices now carrying the songs ahead.
“These songs are my life,” she says.
For the Kanyeleng, track permits experiences that may be tough to articulate in bizarre dialog to be expressed collectively. By means of humour and shared rhythm, they flip experiences of loss into moments of connection
Each Sunday because the solar units, the ladies collect at Trawally’s residence, a modest household compound with two corrugated iron-roofed homes organized round a partly tiled courtyard. A small mango tree casts shade throughout the yard the place the ladies sit in a circle, singing, clapping and punctuating the verses with laughter.
Every member contributes 200 dalasis (about $2.70) to a shared fund that’s put aside to assist any girl going through hardship, whether or not by means of sickness, bereavement or different surprising difficulties.
Neighbourhood youngsters linger exterior the compound gate, drawn by the rhythm of the singing and the hole beat of the improvised drum. Wearing T-shirts and shorts, they peek by means of the doorway.
To a customer, it seems to be like a celebration.
Trawally smiles. “Outsiders see solely the efficiency,” she says. “They don’t see the grief that created it.”
