A Most Unwanted Outcome: Maternal Deaths and Meaning Making in a Nigerian Community

Between 1912 and 1913, the Ibibio people – an ethnic group in Southern Nigeria – recounted to a female British ethnographer that the bodies of women who died in or before childbirth were regarded as unclean and left outdoors with sunken heads and hanging hands until their bodies were covered by vegetation. Death in pregnancy or childbirth was viewed as sacrilegious, a most undesirable outcome. As a result, the bodies of women who fell victim to such fate during this period were treated with derision, as though by some unclean act they had brought their fate upon themselves, or at best failed in the communally expected act of reproduction. In a 2021 interview among the same community more than a century later, remnants of the old traditions persisted in the ways in which unexpected maternal deaths or difficulties in labor were blamed not on medical or health conditions but on the belief among certain communities that the deceased died or was at risk of death due to some unclean act, notably unfaithfulness to a spouse. This account highlights the impacts of age-old cultural practices on maternal deaths and the discourses surrounding it. In this paper, I explore the ways in which Nigerian communities have interpreted or grappled with maternal deaths in varying environments throughout the twentieth century. I frame this research around understanding local conceptualizations of maternal deaths and how these interpretations have shifted over time and shaped conversations or silences around such losses.