204pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781431437153

Dr Mmatshilo Motsei draws on ancestral guidance, Indigenous midwifery knowledge and practices, academic inquiry, and her lived experience as a trained midwife and spiritual healer to explore childbirth as a sacred African rite of passage. She offers both a searing critique of obstetric violence and medicalisation in South Africa's hospitals and demonstrates what decolonial scientific and medical practice can and should look like.

"I have promoted facility delivery with skilled biomedical care in an enabling environment all my career, thinking it was better for mothers and newborns. This book made me reflect on the problems with this strategy." Loveday Penn-Kekana, Assistant Professor: Maternal Health and Health Systems, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

"There are books that inform and books that initiate. Dr Mmatshilo Motsei's work does the latter ... what she has built is not simply an argument for Indigenous midwifery. It is an honest reckoning with the in-between space, the threshold between the colonised self and the self that that is slowly returning. The book does not offer easy restoration. It offers something more honest: a way of seeing clearly enough to begin. For anyone who suspects that how we are born and how we birth shape the world we are capable of imagining, this book offers the necessary medicine." Kainyu Njeri, birth worker and regenerative systems designer, Tanzania

Social scientist, midwife, healer and writer Mmatshilo Motsei is a founder and Executive Director of Afrika Ikalafe Pluriversity for land-based healing, learning and living. With a background in nursing, midwifery, psychology and a PhD in Sociology, she has worked in government, academia and grassroots movements while centring the lived experiences and ancestral knowledge of rural women. She is the author of Hearing Visions Seeing Voices and The Kanga and The Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma.

WAYS OF BEING BORN, tracing the footprints of birth in Africa

: Motsei (M.)

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