Countless Blessings offers a compelling and beautifully crafted history of reproduction and emotions in Sahelian Africa. Looking at individuals, households, and institutions, the work sets out to explain the meaning of childbirth for Nigeriens and their preference for multiple children. This preference is embedded in a paradox: although Niger has the world's highest fertility rate, it is also grappling with issues of infertility. Barbara Cooper explores this paradox by focusing on the cultural importance of motherhood and its interaction with personhood from the late precolonial era to the present, in which maternal mortality remains high due to early marriage and long childbearing careers.Relationality plays a key role in Cooper's analysis. Personhood and fertility are relational, connecting the living with one another and with ancestors. Bearing children is a moral obligation to the ancestors. This obligation is first introduced in the background chapter 1 and traced in the following chapters to the conclusion, in which Cooper argues that in order to address pressing social issues in Niger today, it is necessary to talk about illegitimate children, thus, to confront the fear and shame associated with them. Like Achille Mbembe in Critique of Black Reason,1 Cooper presents an argument intrinsic to the entanglement of humans and nonhumans in the past, present, and future. The entanglements occur in physical space and continue to blend Muslim with non-Muslim practices, such as the placenta burial ritual that signifies an ongoing bond between the worlds of the living and dead, mediated through the female body.Situating the female body and its vulnerability, whether giving or not giving birth, in the environment on the eve of colonial conquest, Cooper accounts for the disruption caused by turning Niger into a peripheral territory of French West Africa. Military rule and French preference for Islam and masculinity shaped personhood and affect in the first half of the twentieth century. The French instigated three significant changes: suppression of slavery, colonial medical culture focusing on the military, and rapid Islamization concomitant with establishing a colonial state. Chapter 1 shows that the female body was more vulnerable in Islamized urban centers that witnessed increased mobility, disease, and new forms of wealth and consumption.Chapter 2 explores the impact of abolition on social structure. Shame and honor, as inheritable traits of the freeborn nobility, became closely tied to Muslim identity under colonial rule. Gender and sexuality served to distinguish notions of honor and thus the enslaved from the free, with men using the female body and its ability to re/produce to control labor. Marriage became an increasingly important means to achieve this goal. Chapter 3 shows how, through infanticide, shifting meanings of shame altered the reproductive landscape. By the late 1930s, society and colonial officers proved less understanding toward women bearing illegitimate children who, like enslaved humans, embodied shame and lacked social recognition. Cooper explains the shift with the expansion of Islam and Islamic education, which articulated ethical concerns about infanticide “that had hitherto been regarded as not only acceptable but as morally desirable” (99). The colonial state's enforcement of punishment and control was projected onto the female body through chastisement and fertility regulation, thereby ignoring the welfare of the fetus and child.As chapter 4 demonstrates, colonial bureaucratization and number crunching clashed with “the moral and cosmological reckoning typical of the peoples of the Sahel” (115). Niger's location in the political and economic periphery of French West Africa exacerbated lack of attention to reproductive health and reliable data. That childbirth was embedded in social meanings and served as a nexus between the living and the dead eluded the colonial administration determined to generate reliable statistics and population growth without protecting the people it subjugated. Concern about population growth drew colonial attention to women and children in the interwar years. Although the late 1930s saw the creation of more accurate counts, absence of consistent civil registry continued to haunt Niger after independence.Changes in childbirth until 1950 are the focus of chapter 5, which illustrates how abstinence during the customary two years of nursing became increasingly ignored in the mid-1950s, when men argued for the right to have intercourse with their wife after forty days following childbirth. Cooper concludes that Islam was a double-edged sword for fertility. Polygyny provided options for extended nursing. Yet Islamic law was also invoked to narrow the period of marital abstinence, which imperiled the well-being of nursing babies.Health care only became a priority during decolonization and after independence. Despite an almost absent health infrastructure, by the mid-twentieth century colonial officers were aware of high infant mortality and the need for less expensive and more approachable African medical personnel. However, women in Niger did not respond well to health-care providers as mediators. The colonial state's desire to have healthy laborers who would produce healthy children did not materialize due to its ethnic, ahistorical reading of the population and distorted focus on the male body stripped off social contexts. Tangible improvements in infant and maternal care would occur after independence, when the first systematic demographic study was conducted.The United States's concern about population growth and potential communist increase during the Cold War shaped postindependence Nigerien discourse about demography and contraception. To reduce the number of people who might become communists, the United States provided international access to contraceptives by the 1960s. Hence, Nigeriens came to associate contraception with Western imperialism as well as promiscuity. When by the 1980s husbands drew on Islam to increasingly claim resumption of conjugal relations after forty days post-childbirth, women could no longer invoke moral authority to challenge the demands. Interestingly, Cooper's interviewees had no recollection of nursing patterns and sexual restraint practiced in the first half of the twentieth century. The decline in abstinence during nursing is not peculiar to Niger and well-attested elsewhere. Equally counterproductive is a widespread assumption that practices to prevent pregnancy while nursing equate “intrusive innovation of outsiders” (231).Illegitimate children and Nigeriens’ refusal to confront their feelings toward them are the focus of chapter 8, which revisits the topic in contemporary times. It argues that the unresolved moral dilemma how to deal with illegitimate offspring fuels “many central social problems facing Niger today—child marriage, female illiteracy, infanticide, child abandonment, dangerous illicit abortions, and a high population growth rate relative to available government resources” (235–36). Nigeriens fear that legitimization of children born out-of-wedlock might, like use of contraceptives, amount to Westernization and permit fornication. The final chapter on contemporary childbirth and sexuality attests that healthy motherhood is more challenging today, because appropriate birth spacing and a healthy reproductive life have become less attainable due to decreasing abstinence while nursing. Thus, Cooper surmises that married women today may have recourse to abortion more frequently than in the past.Drawing on an impressively wide range of visual, material, oral, and written sources, Cooper convincingly demonstrates how power dynamics in a changing social and political landscape continuously deprioritized female well-being while nurturing ongoing anxiety about female sexuality and shame. In a call for action, she invites Nigeriens to talk about children born out-of-wedlock and about shame, an affect closely associated with childbirth. Cooper took great care to make the book accessible to Africanists outside the fields of gender, sexuality, and reproduction as well as to readers with thematic expertise in other world regions. Conceptually and methodologically, she skillfully attends to the micro- and macro-levels, such as by problematizing the untranslatability of some Hausa terms and showing how regional and global processes, like colonialism, Islam, and international aid, have shaped Niger's health-care system and lack thereof. Countless Blessings is a tour de force at all levels.