Birth Politics by Ogechukwu Ezekwem Williams examines the complex sociopolitical history of childbirth in Nigeria throughout the twentieth century. It explores how indigenous midwifery, the Aladura movement (a prominent indigenous Christian movement that emerged in Western Nigeria during the 1930s), Christian missions, and colonial governance intersected and competed to shape the practices of motherhood and reproduction, in what she terms the birthscape. For many decades, the history of reproduction in Nigeria has been fragmented and incomplete. Despite this fragmentation, it has been primarily described using a simplistic comparative analysis that compares African traditional birthing practices and colonial maternity. This perspective has reproduced binary narratives in the history of medicine and healing in Africa, which positioned Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) and biomedical midwives as opposing categories of Black or white, good or evil, clean or dirty.
In contrast to this logic of binarism, Birth Politics offers a new perspective by highlighting the tensions, collaborations, adaptations, and co-constitutive relationships among three birthing professional categories: biomedical midwives, TBAs, and the Aladura movement. It centers these actors within a framework of medical pluralism, which emphasizes relationality and hybridization, rather than opposition or hierarchy. Williams challenges the patient-healer narrative by arguing that reproductive care in Nigeria is shaped by ongoing dynamics of contestation, negotiation, and cooperation among various therapeutic institutions responding to societal birthing needs. Birth Politics explores this by asking three key questions: What forms of child birthing practices exist among these professionals? How did their contestation and interactions influence Nigeria’s birthing landscape? And who facilitated and participated in these exchanges and adaptations?
In framing childbirth as a contested political and cultural landscape where both institutions and individuals exercise agency over social control, Williams shows how European and African birthing actors and institutions, though often in conflict, profited from mutually beneficial exchanges. This happened as they adopted elements of each other’s birthing practices in pursuit of healing legitimacy—a process influenced by the changing social, economic, and political contexts. While Birth Politics focuses on Nigeria, Williams draws on a broad range of historical and anthropological evidence derived from archives, libraries, and fieldwork across national and imperial borders. This methodological breadth allows her to address the scarcity of archival records on childbirth in Nigeria.
Birth Politics is organized into five chapters. It starts with a methodologically grounded introduction, including a compelling anecdote about Williams’s ethnographic experiences in southeastern Nigeria. The first chapter then explores gender and birthing practices in precolonial southeastern Nigeria and explains how, subsequently, colonial gendered educational policies laid the groundwork for African women’s motherhood. The chapter compares precolonial marriage and birthing practices with the emerging colonial political economies to show the evolving relationship between women’s economic labor, marriage, and reproduction up until the 1930s. Chapter Two contributes to the history of medicine as a tool of social colonial control by centering institutions such as medical missions and colonial administration. It raises critical questions about what policies and tactics these institutions employed to achieve the colonial agenda, how local women navigated these policies by choosing which aspects of biomedical birthing they assigned value to, and what impact these processes had on the Nigerian birthscape.
Chapter Three introduces a unique institutional and individual category within the Aladura movement led by Joseph Ayo Babalola in the 1930s. Here, Williams historicizes the emergence of the indigenous Aladura faith-healing movement by focusing on women and their agency. It also explains Babalola’s opposition to biomedicine and anti-traditional birth practices, and its role in creating a new space within Nigeria’s emerging birthscape. This complicates the rigid colonial and postcolonial binary narratives of birthing politics and reproductive care in Nigeria. The fourth chapter focuses on the late colonial and postindependence period by highlighting the social and political shift from state-controlled, expansive birth-control policies to NGO-led, restrictive birth-control policies, and their role in shaping the Nigerian birthscape. This chapter traces the British colonial discourse on global population, examines the postcolonial rhetoric of birth control in Nigeria, and explores the agency of women’s organizations, medical practitioners, and local religious institutions in the appropriation and localization of the global birth-control movement. The final chapter explains how contested birthing spaces became intersectional, through the co-constitution of biomedical, traditional, and faith-based birthing institutions, along with their adaptations to the political economy of birthing, population, and birth-control technology.
All these chapters advance the central argument of the book: various actors negotiated birthing power and medical pluralism within Nigeria’s contested and intersectional birthscape. Despite its many contributions, however, Birth Politics is constrained by its provincial focus and underdeveloped engagement with the reproductive histories of northern Nigeria. While the book positions itself as the first comprehensive historical monograph on reproduction in Nigeria, it concentrates mainly on southern Nigeria rather than the whole nation. The first and second chapters focus on southeastern Nigeria, while the third chapter is set in the southwest. It forgoes the opportunity to compare reproductive healing practices available in indigenized Islam in northern Nigeria with those of the Aladura movement in western Nigeria, a comparison that could further explain the regional dynamics of faith-based reproductive healing within Nigeria’s birthscape.
Although Birth Politics explores the social and political history of childbirth, its analysis primarily emphasizes the changing political economy of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. However, analyzing postcolonial national macroeconomic issues through development plans, censuses, resource distribution, and their effects on population and birth-control policies and policy reactions, has the capacity to bring the North into the broader national context. Such an approach would further enrich our understanding of the complexities of reproductive politics and histories in Nigeria.
Despite these critiques, the book remains a valuable resource for historians, anthropologists, and policymakers seeking a deeper understanding of maternity in Africa—a field that has hitherto focused epidemiologically on colonial medical actors and TBAs. Williams introduces the Aladura movement as a middle category and productively weaves together the colonial and postcolonial sociopolitical logics to explain contemporary birthing politics in Nigeria. The book also serves as an excellent source of methodological and analytical lessons for graduate students on how to triangulate diverse source materials to maximize scarce and fragmentary historical records. Ultimately, Birth Politics cogently reveals how to integrate distinct yet similar healing categories through case-study analysis.
