The Fear of Infertility

The belief that each child born has a companion, a double, is characteristic of the Sahelien region (Malinke, Bambara, Dogon, Mossi) and is frequently associated with the placenta (Rabain Reference Rabain1994). Mossi women in Burkina Faso placed the placenta in a piece of pottery along with the umbilical cord, an ancient practice still observed into the 1980s. The placenta was then buried to protect it from being stolen by a sorcerer who might use it to kill the baby (Bonnet 1988:45). Such beliefs are not limited to non-Muslims. Niger is today a predominantly Muslim country in which day-to-day lives are regulated by the tempo of prayer, and disputes are mediated largely in light of Islamic teaching. Nevertheless, even among women who have adopted relatively Islamized practices and idioms, the placenta is treated as a being in its own right.

Hadiza Moussa argued that the concern to bury the placenta properly should be seen as a ritual of protection to prevent secondary infertility. The placenta should not be buried by a woman who has never had a child, who might somehow communicate her infertility, but by an older woman who has given birth. The perception that a woman can be rendered infertile if her placenta is “tied up” feeds fears of witchcraft (Moussa Reference Moussa2012:176–77). The association of thwarted fertility with a kind of malevolent “tying up” brings to mind an image of a closing off, a blockage of flow from one place to another—as if indeed the companion or baby could no longer traverse from one realm to another.

Of all the women to whom a placenta might be entrusted, one’s co-wives, with whom one competes to produce heirs, are the least desirable. When I asked one Zerma traditional birth attendant whether women feared that sorcerers might steal the placenta she responded, “No, the real fear is that a co-wife might take it and eat it so that she can become more fertile.” This remark captures the intense reproductive competition between co-wives. The significance of placenta burial may in fact be amplified by the association of Islam with polygyny.

The careful handling of the placenta, at least in contemporary Niger, appears to be more a matter of concern to protect the mother—and more particularly her reproductive capacity—than to protect the child. Protecting her fertility appears to be mainly the responsibility of other women close to her. This differs from the common pattern in, for example, Burkina Faso and Benin, where the most significant determinant of paternity is whether or not a man or his close kin take part in burying the placenta in the father’s home courtyard (Bertho Reference Bertho2013:222; Flossi-Kpadonou et al. 2015:1).

The only accounts I heard in my interviews in 2014 in which it was alleged that someone had mishandled the placenta involved co-wives. In one story, a woman’s co-wife had been given the placenta in a plastic bag in the hospital. She buried it unceremoniously in the plastic bag. Only later did the parturient woman’s older female relative discover the error and rebury the placenta properly, so that happily the woman was successful in having more children later. The attentions of a woman’s entourage, what John Janzen (Reference Janzen1978) has referred to as the “therapy management group,” are crucial in this case to sustaining her fertility.

In a far more outlandish story, I was told that a woman who had been entrusted with her co-wife’s placenta decided to fry it up to eat it. The desire of the co-wife to eat her rival’s placenta reflects a belief that fertility resides in the afterbirth, and that to surpass her rival, a co-wife must consume the source of that potency. The oft-remarked-upon linguistic convergence of sexuality, conquest, and consumption in the same expressions in the Hausa language is of a piece with this narrative trajectory (Gouffé Reference Gouffé1966). In this story, however, the witch-like co-wife gets her come-uppance when the when the placenta becomes animate and speaks angrily to rebuke her for attempting to steal what is not hers. This story was always related to me at second or third hand but with great conviction. The placenta in such a narrative is more than simply the double of an infant; it is a being with moral authority (like a queen or a mother) with a sense of duty towards a specific woman and her fertility.

Such urban legends resonate with Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg’s study of women in polygamous households of the Cameroon grassfields, where cooking food and producing children are conceptually and spatially congruent. Sex, cooking, and fertility are aligned in such a manner that the placenta is buried “under a banana or plantain tree somewhere near the mother’s kitchen within the child’s patrilineal compound” (1999:89). Malicious meddling in a young woman’s reproduction, accordingly, is expressed in terms of cooking and eating.

Rethinking the Significance of the Traditional Birth Attendant

In her memoir of life in Mali in the years before and after independence, Aoua Kéïta emphasized the shared bodily and moral habits of the women whose babies she had delivered as a sage-femme: “Songhai, Bambara, Wolof, Malinke, Kassonke, Serer, Samoko, Pehlhs, Diolas, Sarakoles and Bobos that I have had the occasion to assist in my long career as a midwife have all had the same behavior in the face of the pain of labor… All these women had an admirable capacity to bear the pain caused by contractions” (Kéïta1975:261). Her admiration was tempered by a concern about the vigilance this required on the part of the midwife, because women were likely to attempt to give birth at home without letting anyone else know—“their kin would proclaim proudly that the traditional birth attendant only woke up when she heard the cries of the baby” (Kéïta Reference Kéïta1975:261). To fail to bear such pain with self-restraint and dignity could be a source of deep shame to the woman, her mother, and even her close friends. Women did not take part in wars, hunting, fishing, or other dangerous activities: “their battlefield being childbirth, it was their duty to bear the pain of labor with courage and dignity… For them, it was a test to be borne with honor” (Kéïta Reference Kéïta1975:262).

If this fortitude in the face of labor was honorable and admirable, it had the effect of diminishing the practical knowledge and experience of the traditional birth attendants. Romanticized by some, vilified by others, the traditional birth attendant is at the heart of arguments over pre-colonial birthing practices, their relationship to bio-medical institutions introduced under French colonial rule, and the prospects for building both robust and culturally legitimate health systems with the capacity to meet the vast reproductive health needs of contemporary West African women (Lane & Garrod Reference Lane and Garrod2016).

In her conversations with an elderly and illiterate Soninke traditional birth attendant named Sokona in the mid-1950s, Kéïta attempted to learn the nature of their practices. Eventually, the traditional birth attendant Sokona confessed the following:

The surviving child, imagined to be a bastard, was until recently regarded as having killed the mother, perhaps because it was a malevolent spirit. The body of a woman who died in childbirth could be regarded as dangerous; in Hausa-speaking parts of Niger such a woman might be buried far away so that her misfortune could not spread to others. Difficulty in childbirth has been attributed to a woman’s infidelity in a variety of settings across the African continent (Douglas Reference Douglas1992:5, 27, 29).

Kéïta explained to Sokona that her skills had been earned through lengthy schooling, but that traditional birth attendants could still teach hygienic practices, use sterile instruments to cut the cord, disinfect the newborn’s eyes, bandage the cord, clean the mother, and keep watch over the mother and baby in order to call a trained midwife in a hospital setting in the case of complications. In Kéïta’s medicalized vision of an interface between traditional and bio-medical practices, the ritual dimensions of childbirth entirely disappear and the focus is upon the second stage of delivery of the baby. But for the traditional birth attendant, ritual was critical.

Mary F. Smith’s late colonial life history of the elderly traditional birth attendant Baba of Karo suggests that her role in the actual delivery in the early decades of the twentieth century was to cut the cord and to take the grandchild and clean him up. Once others had arrived, Baba took the placenta behind the hut, buried it, and covered the place with a stone. Baba oversaw a painful washing therapy for forty days to clean the genitalia of the birth mother. A woman who did not endure this painful washing silently would be treated with contempt and called a bastard (Smith Reference Smith1981:249–50). The capacity to endure pain during post-partum cleansing rituals was of a piece with the requirement to labor in silence: it was seen as a mark of freeborn status, legitimacy, and proper breeding. Baba had much more to report about this post-partum ritual washing than about the childbirth itself.

Despite the limited practical knowledge of the traditional birth attendants of the region, colonial medical officers persisted in the hope that indigenous practitioners could fill the enormous gap in health services that resulted from the lack of medical personnel and financing necessary to build a robust medical system. This necessary fiction led to the semi-formal French colonial medical staff designation of the matrone—an older birth attendant given some modest training in hygienic cutting of the umbilical cord who would, it was hoped, bring any complicated cases to the maternity ward. Such older women proved difficult to train and disinclined to adhere closely to a medicalized hygienic regimen—their role was, after all, normally related to the handling of the placenta and lengthy post-partum ritual washing.

Despite repeated failed colonial era experiments to enlist elderly birth attendants, these attendants continued to play a major role in Niger well after independence. Two decades after independence, in 1979, students from the national school of public health conducted unstructured interviews with seventeen traditional birth attendants in rural areas. They discovered food taboos which reduced pregnant women’s consumption of protein, forcible feeding and drinking during labor that could slow delivery and cause vomiting, the discouragement of actively pushing even when fully dilated, and an unduly long section of the umbilical cord. Numerous traditional practices, they felt, could lead to infection or hemorrhaging (Mounkaila & Oumarou 1980:37–39).

For better or for worse, even today, the skeletal maternal and infant health system in Niger does not have the capacity to function without the free labor of traditional birth attendants. In the most recent study of maternal health across Niger, only 29 percent of births were assisted by a trained medical professional (INS, DHS 2012:8). Perhaps this is because in local thinking, the delivery of the baby is the responsibility of the silently laboring mother; the delivery of the placenta, meanwhile, falls to the traditional birth attendant, who may not even be called upon until the baby has already appeared. The practical knowledge of the traditional birth attendant becomes evident in the third stage of labor. This is why women value her. They are acutely aware that often when problems occur they begin when the placenta is retained (Olivier de Sardan, Moumouni, & Souley 2001).

Among the techniques used to encourage the delivery of the placenta by Tuareg traditional birth attendants far in the desert are: gently pulling on it by tying a weight to the cord, putting something down the throat of the birth mother to induce vomiting, and using snuff to prompt sneezing (Noël Reference Noël2000:54). It is common for women in rural areas to call upon herbal infusions to assist in the expulsion of the placenta, drawing upon the same materials that can be used to induce an abortion or prompt a period (Levin Reference Levin and Basu2003:111). Not all such practices are harmless—often, as Mounkaila and Oumarou found, traditional attendants will put pressure on the uterus that can cause hemorrhaging. Everywhere in Niger, the traditional birth attendant is likely to call upon a Muslim scholar to recite specific prayers (Olivier de Sardan, Moumouni, & Souley 2001:16). The placenta is of such centrality to the experience of childbirth that once it has been delivered, the traditional birth attendant will often attend to burying it before turning to care for the infant and finally the mother (Olivier de Sardan, Moumouni, & Souley 2001:15).

Grasping the Centrality of the Placenta

Clearly the ministrations of the traditional birth attendant contribute to poor maternal outcomes in Niger. As a result, it was not until I set aside my disappointment at the technical limitations of the traditional birth attendants during the second stage of labor that the significance of the placenta for women and their entourages began to dawn on me. Simply because I had not regarded the handling of the afterbirth as a major event in the unfolding of a successful birth did not mean that it was not experienced as a crucial moment in childbirth for women and their families. The burial of the placenta is the culmination of the act of giving birth—the process is not finished until the placenta has been delivered, carefully washed and prepared, and finally buried. The conclusion of birth is this burial. In the absence of a successful third stage of labor, the mother may die along with any prospect of other progeny and, most likely, the newborn as well. People of the region have long expected delivery to be difficult and dangerous. In the 1970s among Zerma, childbirth and death were so closely associated that “a tomb [was] prepared for the woman while she [was] in labor” (Fikry Reference Fikry1977:37–38). It was the traditional birth attendant’s job to ensure that it was the placenta that was buried rather than the mother.

The placenta, then, holds the key to life and death, birth and burial. The proper handling of the placenta continues to be a matter of great concern in West Africa, even among women who give birth in maternity wards. In her historical study of birth ritual in colonial Congo, Nancy Hunt argued that the colonial medicalization of childbirth in the space of the hospital did not preclude the persistence of ritual practices in the conceptual and literal space of custom, including “burying the cord with a plantain tree to ensure future fertility; and properly disposing of the placenta, a ‘Mama’ being with teeth and a mouth that lives next to the baby during pregnancy… whose substance, if tampered with, can be used to block a woman’s future fertility” (Hunt Reference Hunt1999:315). Hunt’s depiction signals a fundamental ambivalence towards the placenta, which is at once powerful and dangerous. Similarly, women who give birth at the maternity hospital in Niger today depend upon the elderly women in attendance to handle this critical part of the birth process correctly, illustrating the entanglement of bio-medical and traditional practices. It is essential that the placenta be entrusted to the right person, usually an older woman in the family, but sometimes the husband or men of the family (Fikry Reference Fikry1977:40), who will take it to be buried in the child’s paternal birthplace.

The anthropology of childbirth is rich in observations and analysis related to the handling of the placenta. A survey of ethnographic literature indicates that it was likely to have been placed in a pot, pottery shard, or cylindrical bamboo container; it might be buried by the father under the house, or perhaps hung in or buried at the base of a tree (Hart 1965:63–64; Rajadon 1965:170–71). Quite commonly, one’s birthplace was referred to as “where one’s umbilical cord was cut and the placenta buried” (Coughlin Reference Coughlin, Hart, Rajadhon and Coughlin1965:242). Sometimes the placenta was personified and thought to have a special relationship to the child as a kind of sibling or double (Jones & Kay Reference Jones, Kay and Dundes2003:109). Less commonly, “the placenta was seen as part of the mother, continuing to act on her even after it separated from her body,” with implications for her future fertility or infertility (Jones & Kay Reference Jones, Kay and Dundes2003:110). In some cultures, it might simply be thrown unceremoniously in the kitchen trash or into an animal pen (Jones & Kay Reference Jones, Kay and Dundes2003:110).

Such a cavalier attitude towards the placenta is typical in the United States, where it is thought of largely as medical waste, although increasing awareness of the cultural significance of the placenta to immigrants and Native Americans has engendered discussion of “cultural competency” among medical personnel in this country (Birdsong Reference Birdsong1998; Helsel & Mochel Reference Helsel and Mochel2002). Women drawn to the home-birth movement may see the placenta as “more than clinical waste” (Burns Reference Burns2014). A body of recent work reflecting upon the philosophical, ontological, and ethical significance of the placenta has emerged that is suggestive of just how rich, perplexing, and generative the figure of the placenta can be even in the United States (Yoshizawa Reference Yoshizawa2016; Waldby & Cooper Reference Waldby and Cooper2010; Santoro Reference Santoro2011). The placenta, it turns out, is good to think with (Colls & Fannin Reference Colls and Fannin2013). Not incidentally the placenta has also served as an ingredient in cosmetics, provided stem cells for research, and been dried and placed in capsules for consumption as a postpartum nutritional supplement.

Doum Palms and Cotton Seeds

Even in parts of West Africa where the placenta is evidently treated as garbage, news coverage suggests a profound discomfort with the mismanagement of it along with other kinds of medical waste (Fomba Reference Fomba2012; Kwawukume Reference Kwawukume2005:137). Although Niger has a similar problem disposing of bio-medical waste, the placenta itself does not appear to feature alarmingly in studies of the problem (Djibo et al. Reference Djibo, Kamahye and Baden2013). The placenta is routinely handed over to the family, which buries it with little or no fanfare (République du Niger, 2000:42). Certainly when I initially began asking women about the management of the placenta, they told me matter-of-factly that it is taken home and buried so that dogs and other scavengers will not get it. As a matter of hygiene, this is a tremendous boon for Niger, where simply by weight alone placentas must make up an impressive proportion of medical waste. Every woman of every ethnic background or religious persuasion I specifically asked had disposed of the placentas of her children through burial. Or to be more precise, a handpicked older woman had buried it—none of my informants mentioned placenta burial by a man, although evidently it had been performed by Zerma men in the past (Fikry Reference Fikry1977:40). When I pushed young women who had recently given birth to talk about how the placenta had been handled they responded either in annoyance or embarrassment that they had never done it themselves; that is the work of older women who know how to do it properly.

Turning instead to their grandmothers for more detail I discovered the beauty and resonance of these rituals. However, to situate some of the elements of placenta burial—to help us see it as “more than medical waste”—I need to take the reader back in time, before the relatively recent near universal conversion to Islam since the 1950s and the massive growth of urban centers in Niger. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the linear eschatology of orthodox Islam had not yet overshadowed the more cyclical understanding of time and space characteristic among farmers and pastoralists of the region.

The rich ethnographic evidence collected by anthropologist Guy Nicolas in the Maradi Valley shortly after independence in 1960 provides glimpses of non-Muslim practices in the early decades of the century (Nicolas Reference Nicolas1975). Among Hausa speakers who were not Muslim, protecting fields, animals, and wombs called for respect for male and female complementarity, a respect enacted through spatio-temporal balance in every domain of life. Directions, numbers, crops, the calendar—all were ordered in light of gender. A lovely image recorded by Guy Nicolas links marriage, home, womb, and vegetal fecundity in ways that render the marriage bed the axis mundi:

Among the distinctive features of the doum palm tree, beyond its abundant fruitfulness, is that it grows in such a manner that it creates a fork, which is much prized in the building of huts and the erection of tents. Even in the absence of a “real” pole, the seed planted in the floor gives rise to a kind of potential central pole, an axis that will support a woman’s hut, her married life, and her ability to produce children.

When a baby was born in the bride’s hut, Nicolas reported, the woman who assisted the mother would cut the umbilical cord three finger lengths if the child were a boy, four if a girl, and then place the placenta and remaining cord in a pottery shard. She would then place some cotton seeds in the vessel and bury it on the eastern side of the mother’s hut. Even today, when a person returns to his or her maternal home, he or she is said to return to the umbilicus, the link to the mother’s womb. The birth assistant later would place the ashes left from heating the wash water of the mother and child generated over the course of seven days in a geometric pattern at a crossroads—three points for a boy (who like the stable triangle and hearth can be counted on to remain with the lineage), four for a girl (who must leave her natal home to marry, but guarantees the fertility of her new home just as she helps to work the quadrilateral fields). This process would be repeated for all subsequent births (Nicolas Reference Nicolas1975:84–85, 540).

This account of turn-of-the-century non-Muslim practice shows the conjoined understandings of agricultural fertility with proper procreation, and with the rightful orientation of humans to their environments. The burial of cotton seeds with the placenta calls to mind the thread women used to spin from the cotton grown in the family fields. Such thread was then woven into the tapestries offered as gifts to a bride by her mother, kinswomen, and friends to weave together the strands of sociability across generations (Cooper Reference Cooper1993). Gift-giving of this kind provided an occasion for friends and relatives to return home for weddings and birth celebrations. The placenta nourished those seeds and those relationships, both literally and figuratively. This ritual enacted the enracination of humans in a landscape occupied equally by plants and spirits.

Catherine Baroin and Marguerite Le Coeur, in another early independence-era ethnographic study of Kanuri speakers (Manga) in eastern Niger, reported that naming-day practices included the planting of a “bouquet” of doum palm in the hole in which the placenta had been buried. The doum palm cluster, anointed with a scented butter used in women’s toilette, was carefully buried by three older women in “an almost furtive manner” in a protective cloud of incense. Subsequently the doum palm tree would mark the burial place of the placenta (Le Coeur & Baroin Reference Le Coeur and Baroin1974). The prolific fertility of the doum palm would similarly enhance the future reproductive prospects of the mother. Among Tuareg in Niger, the elderly women who bury the placenta today take care, before leaving the birth hut, to place incense in front of the mother to protect her from malevolent, jealous spirits (Rasmussen Reference Rasmussen1999:65). Such rituals surrounding the placenta served both to protect and to enhance fertility.

Treating the Traveling Companion with Respect

So far I have described practices as they might have been carried out in the early years of colonial rule before the rapid expansion of Islam into rural areas. Today, birthing practices and beliefs related to childbirth across Niger among sedentary populations are broadly similar. The following is a lengthy description of childbirth practices elicited from a Hausa woman in 2000:

The elaborations to the ritual here appear largely to concern the socialization of the infant into Islam and come only after the burial of the placenta. The shift of the site of burial to the “north” rather than the “east” perhaps reflects a concern to avoid idolatry, yet the association of male with three and female with four has its origins in pre-Islamic cosmology. Where in the village fertility and abundance might have been associated with farming, here a more mixed farming pattern favored the use of manure. Placing pottery shards on top of the placenta calls to mind the wood or stones placed on top of the body in Muslim burials to prevent direct contact between the body and the soil that will fill the grave.

As Islam has become a more conspicuous part of community life beginning in the 1950s, the burial of the placenta appears to have gradually taken on some features of a proper Muslim burial. In discussions with older women in Niamey in 2014 I was intrigued to discover that the birth assistant today washes the placenta carefully and then wraps it in a clean white cloth like a shroud to be buried in a hole in the concession. I asked one elderly woman how Muslim scholars felt about this practice. She suggested that for the most part, they see the burial of the placenta as a sign of respect and that sometimes a man might even say a prayer.

“Why would the men agree to pray over a placenta?” I asked, puzzled by what appeared to me to be residues of a pre-Islamic practice. A more classically Islamic answer might have been that like fingernails or hair, the placenta is part of the mother and must be buried as a result. But instead she explained patiently, “The placenta is like another person, you must treat it with respect. If you treat it badly, then later you will have trouble in your next childbirth.” Respectful behavior, seen now as intrinsic to Muslim comportment, justified the continued practice. If indigenous birth practices could become entangled with bio-medical practices in the maternity ward, it seems they could become entangled with understandings of Islamic propriety as well.

Reciprocity and respect between elders and juniors make possible an accord between the carefully buried placenta and the entourage of the birth mother. If treated with respect, the placenta will draw forth children in the future. Fertility ritual is bound up with proper Muslim comportment in this way of thinking. Yet the “traveling companion” comes perilously close to being taken for a genie, spirit, or ancestor. The implied threat is that the dishonored spirit could be compelled or persuaded to refuse to provide the mother and her extended family with further children. The threat, which one presumes would be actualized through the jealous disruption of a co-wife, is that her “inside” would be “tied up.”

Intriguingly, the notion of “tying up” or blocking the womb can also have a more positive connotation. When I spoke to another elderly Zermaganda woman about childbirth in her youth she explained that it used to be that a woman who had just given birth would take her placenta and the umbilical cord before it was to be buried by the birth attendant. She would tie a number of knots in the cord, one for each year she wanted to rest before becoming pregnant again. In effect, the umbilical cord and traveling companion could come to a kind of contraceptive accord with the woman. My informant’s young female housemates, who had been bored by the interview up to this point, suddenly perked up. “Did it work?” I asked. “Yes!” she replied. “Would she tie two, or three?” I inquired (pursuing my interest in women’s birth spacing preferences). “It was up to her,” she replied, “whatever she wanted. But she wouldn’t tell her husband about that. Once you had made that decision you couldn’t undo it, you had to commit to it for the full amount of time.” Now the housemates could no longer feign indifference. “Couldn’t you untie it?” they wondered, for young women today are very wary of any form of birth control that is not readily reversible. “No,” she replied, somewhat amused. “By then it would be gone, dissolved where you buried it. But if the placenta were not buried properly, with the umbilical cord carefully coiled on top of it facing towards the sky, the woman would never become pregnant again.”

Fertility in an Evolving Agricultural Economy

Seeing the burial ritual as a kind of compact between a woman and the traveling companion casts the evolution of elements buried together with the placenta in an interesting light. Judging from my multigenerational interviews and a variety of ethnographic sources, the repertoire of seeds planted with the placenta has evolved over the decades, in something like the following manner:

The intertwined vegetal, human, and spirit worlds of the turn of the century—initially secured through cotton seed and doum palm—continues to be very much in evidence, although the plants associated with the burial have evolved.

Women’s relationships to the agricultural economy have shifted over time, as have the meanings of various crops. At some point, women began burying the placenta with millet and sorghum as well as cotton. Although the French administration initially hoped to promote the cultivation of cotton for export to cushion its cloth manufacturing against the vagaries of the American cotton market, cotton production was difficult to enforce and had eventually to be renegotiated (van Beusekom Reference van Beusekom2002). Farmers in the Sahel far preferred to grow food crops and raise livestock, which could be sold or exchanged while at the same time ensuring food needs. In some regions, rice was introduced as an alternative to cotton, but in most of the Sahel, the seed crops millet and sorghum came in a rather literal way to represent well-being against the backdrop of colonial exactions that aggravated and sometimes triggered food crises (Gado Reference Gado1993).

In order to meet their tax obligations under colonial rule, farmers had to produce a cash crop, usually rice or cotton. In the 1920s in Niger, peanuts became the signature cash crop. Peanut production competed with millet production; by the 1960s, Niger was no longer self-sufficient in grain production. Peanut production challenged the cosmological structuring of indigenous farming practices, particularly in the Hausa-speaking heartland where most of the food was produced. Rather than intercropping “male” and “female” plants in furrows that were oriented relative to the cardinal points, entrepreneurial farmers mono-cropped peanut fields using ox-drawn plows to maximize the area of land under cultivation. No one that I interviewed ever told me that they had planted peanut seed with the placenta. One can readily see how the symbolic and cosmological resonance of millet and sorghum outstripped that of peanuts. Additionally, peanuts have long been associated with forced labor and taxation, both of which can be destructive to fertility. In recent decades, crop disease has rendered peanuts a particularly unlikely stimulant to future fertility.

Gradually, urbanization and food imports introduced less common items into the repertoire, such as rice and wheat, while cotton lost its appeal. Cotton rarely appears in the quite diverse repertoires of seeds buried with the placenta today. This may be a reflection of the waning symbolic and economic significance of cotton. One would be hard pressed to find a contemporary young woman who still knows how to spin a mazari spindle or who has the skill to draw out an extended, smooth, and uniform thread. The repertoire described for placenta burials today reflects the rise of a broad range of foodstuffs beyond the classic Sahelian staples of millet and sorghum, to include, among others, rice, wheat, and corn. While millet and sorghum still form the bedrock of the agricultural economy of Niger, rice, wheat, and corn seem to signal the more cosmopolitan aspirations of the women I interviewed in the urban center of contemporary Niamey.

A mother hopes that she will have some children who will be suited to producing the food crops that offset the high cost of living and to stake a claim to family farmland. Parents also hope for some children who will do well in school and eventually earn a salary, perhaps even finding work in Europe or the United States. A woman needs some children with the street smarts that drive the informal economy to help her with her trade ventures. She hopes for boy children to please her in-laws, and she hopes for girl children to ease her domestic burdens and to care for her in old age. The variety of seeds planted with the placenta captures the varied hopes and aspirations that bridge the gulf between the terrain of the village and the global scale of international migration.

One of the more readily identifiable recent changes in the ritual is the innovation of cleansing the placenta with bleach. With the advent of the AIDS epidemic, women who go to the hospital to deliver are required to supply disinfectant as well. In effect, the washing of the placenta has been transformed into a medicalized purification ritual that prepares the traveling companion for passage to the otherworld even as it contains contagion in this one. This makes sense, since secondary infertility is bound up with STDs, and AIDS imperils the reproductive aspirations of couples. Nothing has threatened the urgency to produce another generation of children quite as fearsomely as the AIDS epidemic (Rhine Reference Rhine2016).

Complexities of Urban Life

Women’s practices in Niger have often come under sharp rebuke by Islamic purists who endeavor to police women’s dress, movements, sexuality, and marital status (Masquelier Reference Masquelier2009). Placenta burial, a quiet affair that valorizes women’s childbearing responsibilities, may have simply escaped much notice. Nevertheless against a backdrop of increasingly strident calls for Islamic “orthodoxy” of one variety or another, some elements of these rituals will inevitably be called into question. Despite one informant’s insistence that Muslim scholars in her entourage would not object to practices that conjoin planting with burial, another woman disagreed vehemently:

In remarking that “we Zerma” don’t bury seeds, she implied that this practice had been introduced by others. She was also suggesting—as is quite common—that “her” people had always been Muslim while other people had not. Clashes over the interpretation of Islam have been particularly acute in the densely populated urban centers of Niamey, Maradi, and Zinder.

Rapid urbanization has inevitably affected the practice and meaning of placenta burial. In principal, “home” is where the placenta and umbilicus are buried—until recently, this was generally one’s father’s village. Often women were married to cousins in nearby villages. Going “home” to give birth to her first child near her own mother would ensure that even if that child “belonged” to her in-laws, its home would be with her family. Subsequent births in the home of her in-laws would entail burying the placenta close to her marital hearth and home.

In cities like Niamey, Maradi, and Zinder, where housing is often precarious, families in poorer neighborhoods are densely packed into compounds. Siting the burial of the placenta is a bit more complicated. A birth mother and her entourage might choose a particularly trusted woman to bury the bundle in her own concession. Where renters do not have permanent access to their dwellings, such a solution might provide some sense of continuity and permanence, transforming Niamey into “home,” rather than the village. For a woman far from her maternal kin, perhaps the next best thing is an older woman who is not a relation at all—someone who has no reason to have an ill will. One Zerma informant indicated vaguely that an old woman in the neighborhood had buried her placenta. It seems the old woman was Fulani, and she reported shyly that she had buried the placenta with manure.

Another urban dilemma is that to respect the placenta, care must be taken to choose a place in the crowded compound for the burial where no one will step on either the seeds or the placenta. Many women emphasized that urban burial is dictated by this concern. Now the placenta and seeds are often buried as close to a wall as possible, with little reference to the cardinal directions. Such plants growing along the wall mark the burial place and protect the placenta from disrespectful trampling. The orthodox Muslim woman quoted above may have been unhappy with the vegetal growth emerging from the placenta burial ritual because in a sense avoiding stepping on the plants implicates her in what she sees as pagan practices.

What are we to make of her implication that the practice of planting seeds was introduced into western Niger? The earliest references to planting seed do appear to be in Hausa contexts, where cotton seed was an important symbol of the threads that bind humans to one another and to the spirit world. However, as the practice has migrated, other seeds have entered in, predominantly grains, as a kind of proxy for the trees so common in placental burial across the globe. Doum palm seems to have fallen out altogether, a symptom perhaps of shifts in home construction techniques and towards shade trees such as neem, which are popular in urban areas. Eventually manure was introduced, so far as I can tell. The contemporary practice, which has spread and been elaborated upon across Niger, offers a lovely example of the profound intermingling of peoples, ideas, and practices, of the region, the brassage cultural celebrated by cultural linguist Ousseina Alidou (Reference Alidou2005). If Hausa speakers may have carried with them a practice of planting the placenta, others appear to have improvised upon it, recasting it as both a kind of planting and a form of burial. Not surprisingly, such a recasting opened the way for something akin to burial shrouds and the invocations proper to a Muslim burial.

“It’s a nice practice,” one woman remarked, “you put in seeds of all different kinds, that way you will have variety in your children, not just girls, not just boys.” This particular woman diversified her seed repertoire with the novelty of cowpeas. A woman whose family had arrived in Niger from Benin under colonial rule, she was a reasonably successful white collar worker, not quite typical of most Hausa and Zerma women in Niamey. And yet, she arranged for the burial of her placentas just like everyone else. There does not seem to be a single coherent and consistent set of beliefs at play—we see ensembles and family resemblances, not a rigid doxa. There is general, but unarticulated, sense that the spirit world, or perhaps the world of ancestors, is the source of children, and that that world is mediated by the placenta. But when pushed, women seem disinclined to articulate precisely how the placenta does the work of a traveling companion, or where it goes to find the child.

Conclusion: Fertility and Entrustment

Placenta burial entails the participation of women of different generations—the birth mother and an elderly woman in her entourage. In ways that the relationship between a parturient woman and a bio-medical sage-femme can never capture, childbirth depends upon the trust of one generation in another. The most morally binding debts are trans-generational, forms of what Parker Shipton calls “entrustment.” Such debts are not necessarily reciprocal—you pay me, I pay you back. Rather they are likely to be serial, passed from one generation to the next, as “a favor expected to be passed on to someone else, and to keep moving” (Shipton Reference Shipton2009:17). Across Africa, these kinds of debts shape the contours of social life: the school fees parents pay for older children are repaid when those children pay the fees of their younger siblings, the loan of an animal might be repaid with the next generation of its offspring, and the filial debt of a son to his mother repaid by fostering his child with its grandmother. In a sense, people are born in debt and will pass debt to their children, who will pay it as they can and pass it along to theirs.

The placenta is the essential broker in what may be the most sacred of these entrustments—the transit between the worlds of the living and dead through the permeable bodies of women. At the same time, the placenta is the threshold through which such debts are resolved. The family owes it to the placenta to treat it with respect. In an unarticulated intergenerational agreement, the unborn (perhaps spirits, perhaps ancestors) will be ushered into the world of the living through the mediation of the placenta as its “twin,” “mother,” “brother,” or “traveling companion.”

The practice of ritually burying the placenta with seeds will undoubtedly continue, despite the reservations of a few Muslim scholars, because of this sense of debt or entrustment. To fail to produce children is both to die permanently and to disappoint the trust of one’s ancestors and in-laws. Without children, there will be no one to repay the debt with which each of us is born, and there will be no one who owes a debt to us in turn. Anything that threatens fertility threatens far more than an individual. The burial of the placenta is one part of an ever-evolving repertoire of protective measures women and their entourages undertake to preserve their fertility. These reflections on the practices surrounding the placenta and the role of the traditional birth attendant remind us that fertility is not merely an attribute of the individual. It is produced and sustained by and for families, across generations, in recognition of the intertwining of the spirit, human, and vegetal worlds. Maintaining a respectful and positive relationship to the placenta entails the intervention of a mature woman who can mediate between this world and that of ancestors or spirits, and babies. This concern with maintaining a woman’s future capacity to reproduce shapes many decisions of her therapy management group and is generally under-appreciated among bio-medical professionals and policy-makers, who focus almost entirely upon reducing maternal mortality and population growth through the promotion of medicalized childbirth and contraception (Cooper Reference Cooper2013). Yet a greater attention to the fear of infertility would surely enhance the attractiveness of seeking the assistance of trained birth attendants alongside traditional birth attendants. The two are not mutually exclusive. On the other hand imagining that the traditional birth attendant can become the panacea for all that ails maternal and infant care in Niger continues to be unrealistic.

Despite major shifts in social life with the expansion of Islam, urbanization, and the growth of consumerism and cash cropping, placenta burial has continued and very likely spread. It has absorbed elements of Islamic burial, new kinds of seeds, and purification through disinfection. Whatever the differences between women of different ethno-linguistic groups, class backgrounds, or degrees of cosmopolitanism, women across Niger appear to share this concern for future fertility as well as the diffuse cosmology that the placenta burial ritual implies.