bridgingbirth

Tag: Africa

  • The Hidden Wisdom Behind Yoruba Pregnancy Taboos

    The Hidden Wisdom Behind Yoruba Pregnancy Taboos

    The young woman adjusted her wrapper and reached for the door.

    It was just after one in the afternoon. The market was only a short walk away, and she wanted to buy vegetables before the evening rush.

    Before she could step outside, her mother-in-law called from the courtyard.

    “Nibo lo n lọ?” she asked.

    “To the market.”

    The older woman looked toward the blazing afternoon sun before turning back to her daughter-in-law.

    “Not now.”

    “But it’s only the market.”

    She shook her head.

    “Come back inside. A pregnant woman does not walk under this sun.”

    The younger woman sighed, convinced it was another one of the many rules that suddenly seemed to govern her life. Don’t stay out late. Wear a safety pin whenever you go to the market. Don’t let anyone cross over your stretched legs. Don’t whistle at night. Don’t…

    For many women, pregnancy in Yorubaland is accompanied by a long list of instructions. To outsiders, they can appear restrictive, mysterious, or even irrational. Yet during my conversations with traditional birth attendants, mothers, and elderly men and women, I discovered that these instructions were never described as arbitrary rules. They were acts of protection.

    Protection for the mother.

    Protection for the unborn child.

    Protection for a journey considered too precious to be left to chance.

    One of the most common instructions concerns time itself. Many Yoruba elders discourage pregnant women from walking outside between one and three o’clock in the afternoon or moving about late at night. Within Yoruba belief, these are periods when unseen forces are especially active, making the expectant mother and her unborn child spiritually vulnerable.

    Whether one shares this belief or not, the practice also reveals another layer of wisdom. Avoiding the intense afternoon sun reduces exposure to extreme heat, dehydration, and exhaustion. Staying indoors after dark minimizes encounters with physical dangers, including crime and accidents, at a time when mobility and balance are already affected by pregnancy.

    The same layered thinking appears in another familiar practice: fastening a small safety pin to a pregnant woman’s clothing before entering crowded places such as markets.

    Many Yoruba families explain this through the symbolism of iron (irin), the sacred metal associated with Ògún, the deity of iron, craftsmanship, and protection. Iron is believed to possess a potent force capable of clearing pathways and shielding people from harmful spiritual influences. A simple safety pin therefore becomes more than a household object; it becomes a quiet declaration that both mother and child are under protection.

    Others have offered a different interpretation. They suggest that the safety pin provides psychological reassurance during pregnancy, helping women feel safer in environments that can otherwise feel unpredictable. That sense of security may itself reduce anxiety, illustrating how cultural practices can support emotional well-being alongside spiritual conviction.

    Another instruction I heard repeatedly concerned something as ordinary as sitting down.

    “If you stretch out your legs,” one elderly woman warned me, “don’t let anyone step across them.”

    Within Yoruba belief, allowing someone to cross over the legs of a pregnant woman may interfere with the baby’s journey into the world, potentially leading to a difficult birth.

    Again, there is another way to understand the practice. A woman sitting with her legs extended creates a tripping hazard. Someone stumbling over her legs could fall onto her abdomen or pull her from her seat, placing both mother and child at risk. Even without an accident, remaining in that position for extended periods can increase strain on the lower back and pelvis during pregnancy.

    The more stories I listened to, the more I realized these practices were doing something remarkable.

    They transformed everyday behaviour into a culture of care.

    A grandmother’s warning was more than a warning. A safety pin was more than a piece of metal. Waiting until the sun softened before leaving home was more than caution.

    Together, these practices created an environment in which pregnancy was treated as something worthy of constant attention and collective responsibility.

    Perhaps that is the question these traditions invite us to ask today.

    Instead of dismissing them as mere taboos, what happens when we begin to see them as Indigenous public health practices: systems of care that weave together spirituality, environmental knowledge, psychology, and generations of lived experience?

    Sometimes, hidden beneath what appears to be a simple cultural rule is an entire philosophy about how a community chooses to protect life before birth.

    A Question to Carry Home: How many cultural practices have we dismissed as superstition before asking what purpose they were meant to serve?

  • ‘Welcome Back’: The Yoruba Philosophy of Pregnancy and Birth

    The first cry of the baby had barely faded when the room erupted, not in applause, but in recognition.

    “Kaabo Baba mi!” an elderly woman exclaimed as she stretched out her arms toward the newborn. “Welcome back, my father.”

    Another woman smiled through her tears. “He has finally returned.”

    Nobody in the room seemed surprised by the greeting. There were no puzzled faces asking who the old man was or why everyone was welcoming him into the body of a newborn child. To them, the answer was obvious. A child had not merely been born; an ancestor had found the way home.

    Months later, while speaking with traditional birth attendants and elderly women in Yoruba communities, I heard variations of this story over and over again. Sometimes the welcome was Kaabo Iya mi “Welcome back, my mother.” Sometimes the baby would later be named Babatunde, Yetunde, or Iyabo, names that quietly announce to the world that someone beloved has returned.

    One elderly woman laughed as she recalled how, when a baby cried endlessly, family members would abandon the child’s given name and instead call the name of the deceased ancestor they believed had returned.

    Adunbi, ma sunkún mọ́, they would say. “Adunbi, don’t cry anymore.”

    Whether or not the child’s official name was Adunbi hardly mattered. What mattered was acknowledging who the family believed the child truly was.

    That conversation changed the way I thought about pregnancy.

    For many of us today, pregnancy begins with a positive test, a hospital registration card, or the first ultrasound image. But among many Yoruba families, pregnancy begins much earlier and with a very different imagination. It is not simply the biological development of a fetus. It is the anticipated return of lineage, memory, and ancestry. A pregnancy carries not only a child but also the possibility of reconnecting the living with those who came before them.

    Once pregnancy is understood this way, many aspects of Yoruba maternal care begin to make sense.

    Why do families become anxious when a newly married woman does not conceive? Why are mothers and mothers-in-law often the first to seek prayers, herbal remedies, or spiritual intervention? Why is pregnancy surrounded by rituals, advice, restrictions, and careful observation?

    The answer lies beyond reproduction. Pregnancy is viewed as a sacred passage through which Ẹlẹ́dùmarè permits families to welcome another generation and perhaps, the return of an ancestor. Protecting the expectant mother therefore becomes much more than safeguarding her health; it becomes safeguarding a sacred journey.

    This is where my own journey into Indigenous maternal healthcare began, not with medicinal plants or traditional birth attendants, but with a simple greeting spoken to a newborn child.

    “Welcome back.”

    In those two words lies an entire philosophy of pregnancy, motherhood, family, and care.

    Over the coming weeks, this blog will explore that philosophy through stories gathered from traditional birth attendants, mothers, herbal practitioners, and elders across Yorubaland. Together, we will see that long before hospitals and maternity wards became central to childbirth, communities had already developed rich systems of knowledge about caring for pregnancy: systems rooted in memory, spirituality, ecology, and generations of lived experience.

    A Question to Carry Home
    Before we ask how the Yoruba cared for pregnancy, perhaps, we should first ask what pregnancy meant to them?

  • In the Quiet Beginnings of Care………


     
    A woman begins to notice the changes in her body. Before any test is taken, before any clinic is visited, those around her begin to read the signs with her. Advice is offered quietly: what to eat, how to rest, what to avoid. Care begins here, in ways that are rarely recorded but deeply understood.
     
    In many communities, maternal health does not begin in hospitals. It begins in knowledge; knowledge that is shared, practiced, and carried across generations. It is found in the attentiveness of caregivers, in the guidance of traditional birth attendants, and in the everyday practices that shape pregnancy, childbirth, and recovery.
     
    Yet, these Indigenous Knowledge Systems are often absent from dominant conversations about maternal health, which tend to prioritize clinical frameworks and measurable outcomes. While these are important, they do not fully capture the lived realities of care in many parts of the world.
     
    This space is an attempt to begin from a different place.
     
    It is dedicated to exploring how Indigenous Knowledge Systems shape maternal care, not as relics of the past, but as living, evolving systems that continue to sustain women and communities. Through stories, reflections, and engagement with community knowledge holders, this platform seeks to document and think with these practices.
     
    Here, maternal health is understood not only as a medical concern, but as a social, cultural, and relational process.
     
    What you will find here are stories from the field, voices of caregivers and traditional birth attendants, reflections on research, and conversations that bridge Indigenous and biomedical understandings of care.
     
    This is not a space that claims to have all the answers. It is a space that begins with attention, with a willingness to see, listen, and learn from forms of knowledge that have long been present, even when they are not always recognized.
     
    To understand maternal health, we must look beyond where it is measured, to where it is lived.
     
     

  • Welcome to this space!

    Every journey begins with a first step and every story begins with a voice.
    Here, we begin telling the stories of maternal care as it is lived in communities, shaped by Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and carried through generations of women, men, caregivers, and families.