About Me
About Me
Chernoh Bah
Chernoh Alpha M Bah is a historian and journalist specializing in West Africa’s medical, legal, and economic history with complementary interests in Africanist anthropology. He is currently the editor-in-chief of 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.
During the Sierra Leonean civil war, Bah lived in Guinea where he co-founded the Young Writers Association (YWA). This group, representing writers and journalists from all over Africa who had been attacked and otherwise persecuted, grew quickly. The group defended the rights of West African refugees and exposed human rights violations committed against the refugee population by Guinean security forces.
As an anti-corruption campaigner, Bah has defended the rights of oppressed people in Sierra Leone and elsewhere ever since he was a teenager. He has exposed corruption many times, founded and led organizations that publicize wrongdoing, and written books and given speeches about bad governance and human rights in Africa. He has been the harassed, exiled, and threatened with lawsuits even as he lives in exile in the United States. Nonetheless, he continues his anti-corruption campaign against the governments of Sierra Leone and other African countries.
Growing up during Sierra Leone’s civil war, Bah has spent virtually his entire life fighting dictatorship and defending oppressed African communities against the arbitrary power of multinational corporations. He developed a sense of what was right and what was wrong in terms of human dignity at an early age. When he was only 15, Bah helped form and then led the Pan-African Movement for Human Rights and Democratic Development, which advocated for civil rights for people in Sierra Leone. Two years later, he helped form the Awareness Movement, again, to instill democratic values among young people in his country.
In 2002, Bah formed the Africanist Movement, an organization with a goal of promoting African liberation, unification, and democratic socialism, soon numbered in the thousands. During a conference in London in 2005, Bah spoke of the new organization: “We believe that this is a new period in the history of our struggle for the liberation and unification for Africa and African people worldwide.”
While being an activist for civil rights, Bah also pursued higher education, receiving a bachelor’s degree in history and sociology from Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone, and then a PhD in history at Northwestern University in the United States. He has written many books and given many speeches in universities in Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere focusing on political corruption, financial crime, and multinational exploitation. Bah’s advocacy has remained at the forefront of his political and intellectual activities, and his work continues to inspire generations of young people across West Africa and beyond.
For 25 years now, Bah has extensively written on various issues of governance, including multiple investigative reports exposing corruption, detailing, for example, unlawful political campaigning by the former President of Sierra Leone Ernest Koroma, calling on the country’s Political Parties Registration Commission (PPRC) to help stop the illegitimate use of public and state resources, accusing the First Lady of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds on personal amenities, and accusing the Office of the Chief Minister of illegally thwarting procurement regulations and illegally awarding contracts. Bah’s work continues to ignite and inspire major political debates and controversies in Sierra Leone and other West African countries, placing him in direct conflict with many of the regimes in the region.
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Email : cherbohbah@africanistpress.com
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