Esther O. Ajayi-Lowo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Women and Gender Studies
Texas Christian University

Abstract:
African Indigenous Midwives: Remembering, Reclaiming, and Resisting Through Birthwork
Childbirth was one of the ways that the colonizers reinforced their epistemologies and methods as superior to those of the colonized. As the menace of maternal mortality ravages African countries, the rationale for displacing indigenous birthing methods remains the same in the current global maternal health strategy as in the colonial era. The popular call to either ban or “medically” train traditional birth attendants in Africa is premised on the assumption that they are “unskilled,” a belief that results from conflating “skilled” birthing knowledge with Western education and Western medical training. Using Indigenous midwives and their birthers in Southwest Nigeria as a case study, I discuss how African indigenous birthing knowledge and practices resist colonial interruptions, challenge the conception of Western modernity, continue to evolve, and even thrive in Nigeria. The marginalization of indigenous midwives and their birthers in Nigeria and other African countries stems from the belief that there is no evidence that traditional birth attendants hold any unique birthing knowledge for safe childbirth. Expanding what counts as evidence beyond the Western, medical, and numerical, I rely on oral narration, paper documentation, and researchers’ ethnographic observation to insert the perspectives of African Indigenous midwives and their birthers in global maternal health discourse, amplifying their voices, choices, experiences, and knowledge.
Bio:
Esther O. Ajayi-Lowo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University (TCU). Her passion as a scholar-activist-teacher lies at the intersection of gender, race, healthcare, and social justice. Dr. Ajayi-Lowo is a trained full-spectrum doula, and her current research interests include Indigenous Birthing Epistemologies, African Feminisms, Transnational Feminism, Black Maternal Health, and Global Reproductive Justice. Her latest article “Safe Motherhood Initiative: Whither African Indigenous Birthing Knowledge?” was published in Meridians in 2024. She is working on her book manuscript, Decolonizing Childbirth: Mothers, Midwives, and Modernity in Southwest Nigeria, which is an ethnographic exploration of the contemporary African Indigenous birthing epistemologies and approaches.