Contested spaces : culture, faith, and childbirth in Nigeria, 1900-1960

Drawing from oral traditions, colonial files, Christian missionary records, and museum artifacts, my dissertation examines the shifts from traditional midwifery to hospital births and faith-based birthing homes in colonial Nigeria. I study the interactions between these three birthing cultures and how the tensions that ensued among them shaped the reproductive sensibilities that pervaded Nigeria at independence. I analyze the moments when women became objects of the colonial medical gaze - as instruments of evangelism for missionaries and health propaganda tools for the colonial administration. I also examine the emergence of the Aladura Movement, a religious movement that developed in Western Nigeria in 1929 and culminated in the creation of birthing institutions separate from and hostile to traditional medicine and biomedicine. Through a socio-cultural lens, my dissertation highlights the use of medicine as a form of resistance and indoctrination among colonized populations. It challenges a historiographical tradition that studies traditional, biomedical, and faith-based childbirth in isolation. By evaluating these modes of childbirth jointly, it offers a comprehensive view of the religious and socio-political dynamics that molded Nigeria’s reproductive landscape, and the importance of medical pluralism in attaining a sustainable health care model. My dissertation is the first comprehensive study of midwifery in Nigeria. It offers an important historical context to the lackluster reception, especially in official circles, towards non-biomedical birthing institutions.