KC Thuletu Tikili-Hanene from Zambia on the way in which cultural norms relating to neonatal care are changing.
I was on a minibus from Mtendere to town when a baby on board started crying. The driver asked the mother to breastfeed her child to stop the sound of the baby.
The mother did not feed her baby as requested and her baby continued to cry. The driver told the mother that her baby’s crying would make the other baby in the bus cry. Then the second baby started to cry as if on cue from what the driver had said.
The cultural norms of traditional African neonatal care do not allow mothers to breastfeed their babies in the presence of other babies. This is due to charms known as Chibele. Some people believe that, when a baby wears these charms it can cause babies who do not wear them to fall ill. This view was aired by the mothers and I was surprised when the other passengers, many of whom were men and had been quiet up to this point, began to join in the conversation encouraged both mothers to breastfeed their babies.
Some passengers talked about how Christianity had helped reduce the use of charms on babies. Some encouraged the breastfeeding mothers to protect their babies by praying for their babies and not to worry about the Chibele charms.
I was surprised at how the comments showed the generation old myth about using Chibele, which was common among most families less than 10 years ago, was no longer as common.
Sensitization about HIV prevention has made people make informed choices about what type of traditional rituals and practices to follow without putting their children at risk of infection. It was common for certain tribes to smear semen of baby’s father on a newly born baby as way of the making baby strong. This practice is slowly being replaced with other rituals as people have realised that such practices may put the newly born baby at risk of contracting HIV.
As I dropped off the bus at Longacres, I realised that there have been changes in the way people think about some of the traditional neonatal guidelines of the past, which used to put the health of not only babies, including newly born children, at risk but other family members as well. I was happy that Zambian men were slowly getting involved in MNCH issues not only in their families but in their communities as well.
