Re-Africanizing breast feeding as Africa's gift to global health in this era of globalization

Abstract

This chapter by Kelebogile T. Setiloane broaches how African countries have some of the highest child undernutrition and mortality rates globally. She argues that more than 50% of child deaths could be averted if children were not undernourished. She posits that the protection, promotion and support of exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life is acknowledged in parenting as the single most critical strategy to be employed if African countries are to reduce their child mortality rates. She delineates that while breastfeeding is tradition in every culture in Africa regardless of socioeconomic status, in the late 1960s it took a steep downward turn when it was discouraged through the aggressive marketing of commercial breastmilk substitutes. The introduction of these commercial breastmilk substitutes to African societies, she purports, shifted breastfeeding as the traditional way of feeding infants to more 'modern' ways of infant formula, preempting the increase in infant mortality. This shift, she proposes, also helped to entrench Eurocentric ideas in the guise of modernization. Consequently, European practices became the norm to be copied, first by African recipients of Western culture, education and life-style, and then by others who see these recipients as 'role models' to be emulated.