Black babies and the myth of “overpopulation”

Africa is the youngest continent on Earth, yet instead of celebrating our children as the future, many have spent decades treating Black births as a problem to be solved.

Alkebulanians,

Talk to any Western demographer or policy analyst about Africa and you will hear the same refrain repeated like a drumbeat: population growth.

Not culture, not creativity, not our unmatched resilience. No. Their obsession is how many babies are being born here, how fast, and what that means for the future.

The language they use gives it away. They speak of a “challenge,” a “problem,” even a looming disaster of overpopulation. And at the centre of all this anxiety are Black births, our children, framed not as blessings but as numbers to be managed.

In this post, I will tell you why I think this has been happening and what we should do about it.

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Next in this series will be: Medical Memory: Trials & Betrayals, from Pfizer’s disaster in Kano to Ebola’s neglect, proof that African mistrust of global health is not paranoia, but memory.

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Now back to the scheduled programming.

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