Reproductive Mobilities: Transatlantic Healing Networks in Afro-Brazilian Communities in Brazil and Nigeria, 1835–1914

The transatlantic slave trade stands as one of the darkest chapters in African history, marked by the forced mobility of millions of Africans to the Americas. Among those enslaved were skilled professionals, including traditional healers, birth attendants, artisans, and builders, whose expertise significantly shaped reproductive practices in the Americas. Existing historiography has extensively explored how enslaved Africans and their descendants transformed European institutions and ideologies within the Black Atlantic, particularly in areas such as public health, slave welfare, legal systems, and plantation productivity.

In Nigeria, scholarship on mobility, migration, and health networks has largely emphasized the Sierra Leonean returnees, who utilized British colonial systems to advance medical and social mobility in colonial Lagos. This paper however shifts the focus to Afro-Brazilian returnees, examining how their reproductive health practices, rooted in their experiences in Salvador, Brazil, created a reverse diaspora effect in colonial Lagos. It underscores the pivotal roles Afro-Brazilian returnees played in shaping Lagos's biomedical and reproductive health systems, particularly their contributions to the development of reproductive healthcare infrastructure and practices.

Beyond viewing mobility as a social, political, and economic category, this paper conceptualizes them as emotive experiences, emphasizing the socio-medical implications of mobility and the deeply personal and collective narratives of human movement. I argue that Afro-Brazilian returnees’ contributions to Lagos’s reproductive health systems provide a crucial lens for rethinking the intersections of migration, mobility, and health in Africa. By adopting historical and spatial analyses, the paper explores how the spatial arrangements of Afro-Brazilian settlements in Lagos influenced reproductive health practices, demonstrating the interplay between movements, place, space, and reproductive medicine in colonial Lagos.