Radical Care: Voetvroue and the Reclamation of Pleasure in Reproductive Health

Tamia Bianca Botes^*

• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Obstetric violence; rooted in the racialised and gendered logics of colonial medicine; has long served as a tool for disciplining reproductive bodies. In both nineteenth-century Antebellum slavery and the Cape colony, black women’s bodies were sites of medical experimentation, regulation, and control. Gynaecology emerged as a site of race-making, displacing black autonomous midwives and erasing their knowledge from official medical archives (Deacon, 1998). Yet this erasure was never total. In Eldorado Park, black autonomous midwives, or voetvroue, have crafted grounded, place-based forms of reproductive care: treating infertility, facilitating births, and enacting rituals that are shared across familial and communal lines. Drawing on archival research and life history interviews, this paper traces the erasure of ‘voetvroue’, or black autonomous midwives, from the medical archive and discusses the colonial transformation of birth and obstetrics into a site of surveillance, control, and violence. It follows the lives of three voetvroue, Aunty Faeeza, Aunt Rose and their grandmother, Ouma, who had re-fashioned her two-bedroom backroom in Eldorado Park into a birthing space, or ‘hospitaal’. I argue that the huis-hospitaal is a radical commons of care that offers a counter-space to colonial, biomedical logics not through overt refusal, but through the everyday enactment of pleasure, dignity, and agency. Pleasure here is conceptualised as emotional, spiritual, and relational: a mode of reimagining reproductive justice beyond state-sanctioned care. In reframing reproductive health through the lens of radical care, voetvroue reclaim space, knowledge, and autonomy for black birthing women in the face of ongoing racial-capitalist violence. They revalorise locale-specific modes of knowledge and technologies and prioritize holistic birthing care.