Africa Initiative

Chernoh Alpha M. Bah is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Africa Initiative at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Bah is a historian and investigative journalist specializing in West Africa’s medical, legal, and economic history with complementary interests in Africanist anthropology. He received his PhD in History from Northwestern University where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Service at Chabraja Center for Historical Studies (CCHS). His research focuses on the history of medicine and medical experimentation in colonial West Africa. His current book project examines how prison labor was central to different kinds of medical and agricultural projects in Sierra Leone between the First and Second World Wars; and the ways medical researchers from Liverpool and colonial officials in Sierra Leone conceptualized and justified the use of convict labor.

Bah has worked extensively in West Africa as a journalist, anti-corruption campaigner, and writer. He is the author of The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians (2015), and Neocolonialism in West Africa: A Collection of Essays (2014), and is currently the editor-in-chief of the Africanist Press, a media agency and investigative journalism project focusing on anti-corruption, democracy, and free speech in Africa. His investigative journalism has been featured on the BBC, Radio France International, AFP, DW, among others. Bah also runs the weekly podcast series, Voice From Exile produced by the Africanist Press.