Radical care: voetvroue and the reclamation of pleasure in reproductive health.

Obstetric violence, rooted in the racialised and gendered logics of colonial medicine, has long served as a tool for disciplining reproductive bodies. In both 19th-century Antebellum slavery and the Cape colony, Black women's bodies became 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. Yet this erasure was never complete. In Eldorado Park, Black autonomous midwives, or voetvroue, have cultivated grounded, place-based forms of reproductive care: treating infertility, facilitating births, and enacting rituals transmitted along 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 re-fashioned her two-bedroom backroom in Eldorado Park into a birthing space, or "hospitaal". I argue that the huis-hospitaal constitutes 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. Here, pleasure is conceptualised as emotional, spiritual, and relational: a mode of re-imagining reproductive justice beyond the confines of state-sanctioned care. By 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. In doing so, they revalorise locale-specific modes of knowledge and technologies and prioritise holistic approaches to birthing care.