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, Feb, 2018),explores the place 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 kañelengcounter the burden of childlessness and redefine the cultural construction of womanhood.
His classes at OU include:
HIST 2713 African Civilization;
HIST 3723 Africa Since 1945;
HIST 3943 Muslim Societies in Africa;
HIST 4493 Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade;
HIST 6700 Colonialism in Comparative Perspective.
Before coming to OU, Saho worked in The Gambia as Director General of the National Centre for Arts and Culture and Director of the Oral History Archive.
