Making mothers: Missionaries, medical officers and women's work in colonial Asante, 1924-1945.

Abstract

For four days in June, 1931, government, church and business representatives from eight European countries and from several colonial territories in Africa met in Geneva to discuss the welfare of African children.' Summoned by the Save the Children International Union during the depths of the world-wide Depression, the participants discussed the application of the 1924 Declaration of Geneva and its provisions for the protection of children to the children of colonized Africa. Echoing much of the broader discourse surrounding maternal and infant welfare of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the conference participants blamed social diseases, poverty, 'native midwives and their anti-hygienic practices', mothers' 'carelessness' and 'irrational feeding' of infants, superstition and, finally, 'lack of sufficient medical aid' for infant mortality rates which exceeded seventy percent in some areas. Although the conference repudiated the 'tendency to blame the mother', its published conclusions focussed almost exclusively on the education of mothers and children and avoided pronouncements on the effects of migrant and forced labour, cash-cropping or taxation.3 Indeed, as Evelyn Sharp, the conference's chronicler, wrote, 'the urgent need for education . . . was brought persistently to the notice of the delegates, although the questions before them were nominally pathological and economic'. In short, 'Making African History at Geneva' (the title of Sharp's first chapter) required, above all, the making of African mothers.