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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | 'Le Bebe en Brousse': European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo |
Author: | Hunt, Nancy R. |
Year: | 1988 |
Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
Volume: | 21 |
Issue: | 3 |
Pages: | 401-432 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Congo (Democratic Republic of) Belgium |
Subjects: | colonization maternal and child health care Women's Issues Health and Nutrition colonialism History and Exploration Cultural Roles Health, Nutrition, and Medicine Family Planning and Contraception Historical/Biographical Women and Their Children |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/219448 |
Abstract: | This paper examines colonial efforts to increase the birth rate, promote infant and maternal clinics, and socialize African women as biological reproducers and mothers in the Belgian Congo. Diet and health, the quality and volume of Congolese women's breast milk, the frequency and timing of nursing, and the appropriate time for and method of weaning became issues of Belgian concern in the Congo, during and following the demographic panic of the 1920s. These efforts were linked to a discourse which explicitly objected to prolonged lactation and postpartum abstinence practices, and argued the pro-fertility benefits of reducing birth intervals. The consequences of these maternal and infant health programmes remain enigmatic. Even so, the decline in birth spacing customs and intervals in twentieth-century Africa appears less an innocent and inescapable outcome of 'modernization' in light of the candid colonial aspirations to shorten them in the Belgian Congo. Notes, ref. |