Akosua Paries-Osei explores the enduring legacy of enslaved women’s reproductive resistance and knowledge.
In anticipation of her upcoming talk at Fulham Palace on 19 November 2024, Akosua Paries-Osei shares insights from her research, which sheds light on the invaluable medical knowledge of enslaved and Indigenous women. Despite the brutal realities of slavery, these women used their understanding of medicine and fertility to exert agency over their bodies and lives. We hope this compelling blog will inspire you to join us for Akosua’s talk, where she will explore the connections between her research and the history of Fulham and Fulham Palace.
Seeds of sedition: the enduring legacy of enslaved women’s reproductive resistance & knowledge
The utilisation of African medicinal knowledge during slavery has historically been overlooked and often dismissed, but contemporaneously it disrupted the business of slavery and the authority of Western naturalists and doctors. This was particularly pertinent regarding African women’s knowledge of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives.
Botanical knowledge of abortifacients and contraceptives was transferred from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean with the women who were enslaved. Slavery rendered the enslaved female’s body the legal possession of her owner; her womb and her reproductive capacity became a site of contestation and control. Slavery in the New World sought not only to control the lives of enslaved women and girls but also to capitalise on and commodify their wombs. The ability to bear children was, for her owner, the ability to reproduce wealth in the form of human stock because, the children or the presumed future ‘increase’ in human stock an enslaved woman was expected to produce belonged, not to the enslaved woman, but to the slave owner.
The ability to control her fertility, for the enslaved woman, was often an act of political defiance in the face of overwhelming violence and coercion. In fact, enslaved women and girls were often sold and highly valued as ‘breeders’ whose reproductive capacities to ‘breed’ or ‘increase’, would increase the planters’ human ‘stock’. The enslaved woman was uniquely exploited during slavery by her ability to produce and reproduce.
It was not uncommon for plantation doctors, planters and those involved in the slave trade to write disparagingly about enslaved women’s use of anti-fertility botanicals. Plants such as ‘yam, papaya, lime and the roots and barks of cotton trees’ and chilli were known to be employed by enslaved females to limit their fertility.
Enslaved African and Caribbean women and girls drew on their botanical knowledge, brought with them from Africa or handed down to them by their mothers, sisters, friends and others. They learnt from their new surroundings, from the Indigenous people with whom they interacted turning their botanical knowledge into their own science of reproductive resistance. Enslaved women engaged in their own scientific inquiry to gain control of their reproductive capacities from the violence of the plantation system.
Enslaved women refined and improved their knowledge of anti-fertility botanicals in the Caribbean. They may have recognised similar medicinal roots and herbs with anti-fertility properties to those in their homelands and utilised them for this purpose. This was however a very risky and deadly practice, many enslaved people died from poisonings. However, it testifies to the knowledge and skill enslaved women possessed and to the learning, sharing and caring women from across the racial divide provided to each other. This sisterhood enabled women to make choices regarding their reproductive futures and to resist some of the most oppressive and invasive aspects that slavery imposed on the most intimate areas of enslaved women and girls’ lives.
The abortifacient and contraceptive qualities of these African botanicals were utilised during slavery and beyond. They were incorporated into modern Western contraceptive treatments; the enduring legacy of enslaved women’s reproductive resistance and knowledge has continued to shape and control women’s fertility, now as it did then.
About the the author
Akosua is a Fulham resident and a 3rd year PhD student at Royal Hollway, University of London, undertaking a racial justice placement at the Natural History Museum (NHM). Her research at the NHM explores the medicinal use of botanicals by enslaved African women to manage and control their reproductive health. In particular, she is interested in African (and New World) botanicals that have been incorporated into the European pharmacopeia through knowledge gained from the enslaved.