You're listening to Chapter 9 Metamorphosis.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

Maya Angelou. There are certain rituals that Nigerian moms immediately after birth, you know, straight out of the hospital.

They do, they need to do do they have to do so number one

ritual or tradition that I like to share with you guys that Nigerian mothers do is the

sitting on hot water slash vaginal steaming okay in Ethiopia after after you give birth, you count 40 days or 80 days.

If it's a boy, you count 40 days. If it's a girl, 80 days.

And when they get to that age, you celebrate your family members and your friends would take care of you so they would wash your clothes

they would make your food they would bath your kid they would do whatever you

need to do in order for you to relax and for your body to heal. All All around the world and across the black diaspora, countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia

honor the period after birth, a postpartum, in their own ways.

As the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of black people to the U.S.,

African midwives, healers, and childbirth attendants aboard those cargo ships

also brought with them their traditions and vast knowledge of the human body.

The African American midwife, or granny midwife, as are commonly referred to,

would emerge as a vitally important health

care worker for enslaved people and many poor women in the rural South.

Next morning, I go to see how I don't her baby getting along.

Look like everything's fine with her,

and Lord, that baby a healthy, a little old thing as you ever saw, yes, he is.

As birth moved into hospitals and the field of gynecology became more prominent in the early 20th century,

public health departments launched campaigns to eliminate granny midwives.

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