Abstract
Few if any books achieve the remarkable balance found in Barbara Cooper's incomparable Countless Blessings. It is an intimate and deeply personal history but also a virtual encyclopedia, packed with information covering key concepts and broad patterns. Cooper hunts down facts and figures but also historicizes and humanizes the very data that demographers and development workers cite in their lamentations of Niger Republic, the nation with the world's highest total fertility rate, where “the health, education, and bureaucratic infrastructure simply can't keep pace” (1). This book explores the contradictions of fertility amid scarcity and the problem of infertility, working “from the intimacy of the individual body to the infrastructure of the state to the logic of the international NGO” (2). At none of these levels is the meaning of childbirth simple. Cooper shows, for example, that in Niger, “to fail to produce children is in a sense to die permanently oneself” (305). Thus, producing children touches virtually every aspect of life, especially for Nigerien girls and women. Cooper allows their voices and their emotions—from shame and sadness to joy—tell the story.
This is not to say that the book ignores Nigerien men, French colonialists, development workers, or others—including both men and women—who all invest childbirth with importance and seek to control or change it. Yet for Nigerien females, their very personhood and most of their relationships are defined by the many intricate phases of reproduction—from childhood to menopause. As Cooper sets the scene and describes in great detail the layers of meaning and actions surrounding childbirth and reproduction, the reader may question if all the details matter: the Sahelian landscape, the differences between agriculturalists and nomads, the way children play, or a woman's sounds while she is in labor. These details do matter, and Cooper brings them together to convincingly show that the perilous situation of fertility in Niger today is the outcome of a concatenation of historical forces.
The introduction lays out the central factors in Niger's “whole demography,” an approach that Cooper uses to go beyond the logics of Western population theory and demography of Malthus and others that are seemingly blind to realities in West Africa, where women are not merely expected to bear children but should do so in ways that are socially sanctioned. Her deep description of the political and cultural economy of the region is especially useful for readers who are not Africanists. Uncertainties abound in West Africa. The ecology of the Sahel, straddling the Sahara and the more verdant savannas to the south, requires specific agricultural strategies and migration patterns among nomadic and semi-nomadic populations. For many centuries until the early 1900s, the local and trans-Saharan slave trade consigned certain populations—sedentary farming peoples belonging to certain ethnic groups—to enslavement and others to trade in and own humans. This dichotomy bred fears not only of physical capture but also of social stigma of hereditary low status. French colonization and the attendant medical apparatus that prioritized bodies for extracting military service, other kinds of labor, and taxes added new problems and rarely provided any help for women in need of reproductive healthcare. The political independence of Niger brought military rule and structural adjustment programs that deepened economic insecurities and brought increased scrutiny on women and reproduction from Nigerien political leaders, the international agencies, and global health institutions. Buffeted by these winds, Nigerien desires for children as a source of stability and for control over childbirth are entirely understandable. Moreover, children “reflect on the makeup of their families and communities” (8)—that is the past—and are seeds for the future, unless they are those who “bring shame on the household and undermine the well-being of everyone as a result (8).
Cooper weaves the theme of control—specifically women's exercise of restraint, modest behavior, silence, and stoicism in social relationships and childbirth—into a wider examination of emotion and affect. The first three chapters, which merge historical and ethnographic methods, reveal how the expressions and language of feeling are tied to practices for desired outcomes to ensure fertility and wealth. She describes this connection throughout chapter 1, in agricultural practices farmers use to attract spirits to help gain greater yields as well as in spiritual-medical practices in which women seek protection and healing in childbirth. In contrast to the Malthusian model, the fertility of the land and of humans are one—not in an inverse relationship—in the indigenous cosmology of the Sahel. Spirit relations with one another and human relations to the land also give meaning to human relations, including courtship and sexual play, which was encouraged to foster fecundity.
Cooper's focus on women's shame is perhaps one of the most original and important contributions of the book. Islamization, which occurred first in urban areas, stigmatized sexual precocity (particularly pregnancy outside of marriage) as a sin (52) and with this judgement came significant pressure on women's reproductive lives as the basis of their honor. Indeed, Cooper argues that Islamization and concomitant urbanization also gave rise to new urgency to engage more spiritual forces of protection and potential for reproduction. Working between Islamic and spiritual prescriptions was a delicate balance for many women and may explain why spirit possession (bori) became fixed in women's domains in urban households, especially among domestic slaves who were largely women from predominantly non-Muslim ethnic groups. Women's attraction to bori, in turn, made them easy prey for accusations of kafiranci (paganism, unbelief).
While the sources for this early history are rather limited and in some cases are filtered through the observations of colonial observers in the twentieth century, Cooper's analysis—drawn from her deep knowledge of the region, the Hausa language, and experience living with Nigerien women—is convincing. The foundations laid in the first three chapters through her deep ethnography of the region help illuminate profoundly unsettling transformations ushered in by French colonization and medicalization and, after 1960, postcolonial developmental discourse and interventions. The French abolition of slavery and the colonial privilege given to Islamic leadership and norms, which coincided with a rapid expansion of Islam in French West Africa, had enormous consequences for women. For one, shame (and honor), which conditioned sexual relations and servitude (76), were increasingly associated with being Islamic definitions of propriety and personhood. The high value placed on virginity at marriage in order to protect the paternal lineage as a priority in Islamic convention meant that sexual restraint became a marker of Muslimness. Adolescent sexual play of earlier times carried significant risks, and older women became the moral teachers holding girls to account to prevent sexual peril. Second, French institutions such as the courts adopted harsh stances on infanticide and further stigmatized illegitimacy, a common reason for infanticide. While such cases had troubled the French legal system even in the metropole, Cooper reminds us that focus on the mother as a criminal obscures the “construction of the child as monstrous” (96). She argues that the revulsion towards the bastard child reveals “the moral coercion” that made women murder.
The second half of the book delves deeply into French machinations to manage African populations in order to shore up labor, tax revenue, and military strength. Chapter 4 shows that despite French natalist interventions, government mismanagement produced famine that in turn led women to seek to reduce births. Even as the push for Africans to have children continued, women's and children's healthcare was not prioritized. Traditional birth attendants (matrones), whom the French relied on to provide women's healthcare, had neither the qualifications nor the will to intervene during birth—women who gave birth alone in silence were considered mature and valorous and their children thus correct. Matrones, who were postmenopausal women, acted mostly as postnatal caregivers (Chapter 5). When the colonial authorities established a medical school in Senegal for all of French West Africa in 1918, the women auxiliaries, sage-femmes, constituted a small group who were mostly offspring of European fathers and African mothers. They rarely spoke local languages and consequently did not gain ready acceptance (Chapter 6). While their numbers grew haltingly throughout French West Africa, their strangeness combined with the guiding belief of the French medical system that the environment of the Sahel was fundamentally to blame for the poor stock of babies born in the region stymied the growth of women's medical services. Women were also blamed for subjecting their children to cruel indigenous practices.
Chapters 7 through 9 focus on the postcolonial era, when women and fertility come to represent fundamental concerns of the Nigerien nation and of the international development world. Cooper argues that Nigeriens understood women's citizenship—their role in public life—in terms of motherhood in the male-headed household. Despite the high degree of variability of birth rates among different ethnic groups in different parts of the country, this overall conception of womanhood created a disincentive for women to regulate their fertility. Contraception, for Nigeriens, was not a new topic of consideration but had been an issue of birth spacing for the quality of life of couples; for development agencies, however, it was connected to the issue of overpopulation. Whereas once Nigerien couples had practiced abstinence during the period of nursing, which could last two years, more rapid resumption of marital sex translated into a hasty weaning of children and accelerated fertility. It also came to be justified as the duty of wives towards their husbands. Furthermore, nursing while pregnant was believed to produce monstrous children. Thus, Nigerien women had to use formulas, cow's milk, and replacement foods that brought babies more gastrointestinal problems and higher infant mortality. Accelerated fertility brought a new meaning to shame, as women blamed men for having no restraint to wait for babies to wean to satisfy their sexual desires.
Cooper argues that Nigeriens are caught in differing and at times conflicting moral orders concerning reproduction (234). While Islam recognizes the rights of women and children and could help expand protections for both, the overriding concern for properly birthed persons that emerged over the longue durée prevents reforms. For instance, in 2005, when the Nigerien government proposed to revise the personal code to end legal pluralism inherited from the colonial era, the proposed legal recognition by fathers of their children born outside wedlock elicited enormous protest (234). Opponents argued that such a move would sanction adultery and children born from this sinful act. Cooper is unequivocal in tracing many of Niger's social problems—from high population growth relative to resource availability to child maltreatment and women's illiteracy—to the disgust for illegitimate children (236). Can laws or medical intervention protect children from such an intense revulsion (258)?
This question, like so much of the book, is haunting. Much more can be said of the book's strengths: the writings by West Africans—including women and men—that Cooper uncovered, and the sophisticated approach to wholistic demography that will set a new bar for future studies of childbirth and reproductive politics in both developing and developed societies. Among its many contributions, perhaps most important is that Countless Blessings is a beautiful and disturbing portrait of the hopes and fears that make childbirth a universal and enduring drama.