During a press conference at the Elysée Palace in January 2024, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, expressed concern at France’s declining fertility rate. He said, “Our France will also be stronger by relaunching its birth rate. Until recently, we were a country for which this was a strength… It’s been less true in recent years.” He then announced a “demographic rearmament” plan to combat declining fertility.
Conversely, seven years earlier, the very same Macron suggested that Afrika has a “civilizational” problem as many Afrikan countries have seven or eight children per woman. Then, in 2018, while speaking about Afrikan fertility at a Gates Foundation Goalkeepers Summit, Macron likened a woman having many children to a girl being forced to marry at a young age. Three years later, a brave Afrikan woman, Adelle Onyango gave an “honest interrogation” of Macron on France’s “denial” of its “destructive past” during a New Africa-France Summit panel discussion held in Montpellier, France.
This paradox of Macron’s attitude to Black fertility vis a vis Western fertility is a classic example of the Western double standard in its discourse of population size. While Black babies generate fear among Western thinkers, the declining number of White babies in the West arouses concern. For centuries, Western royalty, Western media, Western scientists, Western conservationists, Western politicians, Western NGOs, Western billionaires, and Western academics have been obsessed with Afrika’s fertility. One must look at the history books to understand gynaecolonialism, which is the control of women’s reproductive bodies in an independent nation-state by a foreign entity.
Eugenics, a Darwinian concept that contends that selective breeding of a population could advance civilization, forms the basis of the scientific justification for gynaecolonialism. Positive eugenics encourages those with superior genes to procreate, while negative eugenics ensures that those with inferior genes are prevented from procreating. Some of the most prominent eugenists include Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Marie Stopes, and Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of family planning. Several tactics were used to cull Black populations. In the US, in North Carolina, Black women were disproportionately targeted for sterilization, while in Mississippi, unnecessary hysterectomies were carried out on Black women without their prior consent. Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project deliberately targeted Black communities. Harriet Washington, in her book Medical Apartheid, noted that Sanger applied negative eugenics to address Black social ills.
The economic justification for gynaecolonialism is based on Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, written in 1798, and Paul Ehrlich’s book titled The Population Bomb, written in 1968. While Paul Ehrlich linked overpopulation to global instability, Malthus linked population growth to resource scarcity.
“While Black babies generate fear among Western thinkers, the declining number of White babies in the West arouses concern”
These scientific and economic theories have helped shape contemporary Western attitudes toward Afrika’s population size, which manifests in many ways. Western thinkers frame Afrika’s growth rate as threatening global security, causing environmental degradation, harming biodiversity and ensuring economic insecurity. Besides President Macron, many other prominent Westerners have had something to say about Afrika’s population. Prince Williams has expressed concern that Afrika’s “rapidly growing human population” was putting “enormous pressure” on “wildlife and wild spaces.” Prince Williams’s father, King Charles, called for population control in the developing world. His grandfather, Prince Phillip, said, “Overpopulation is to blame for many of the problems afflicting millions of people around the world.” Sir David Attenborough, the patron saint of conservationism, said that attempting to solve famine in Afrika by simply sending flour bags is “barmy,” and if the world does nothing to control population, the “natural world will do something.” Bill Gates, the patron saint of global philanthropy, and his Gates Foundation report says that Afrika’s “rapid population growth” is a challenge to poverty reduction in the continent and the world. The Western media have also been strong supporters of gynaecolonialism. According to The Economist, Afrika could face a “Malthusian nightmare” due to its population increase, while The Financial Times, in its editorial, advocated for pushing down high birth rates, particularly in Africa.
“While Black babies generate fear among Western thinkers, the declining number of White babies in the West arouses concern”
Besides rhetorics, Westerners have taken various steps in contemporary times to implement gynaecolonialism. After a 1966 census revealed that the Aboriginal population in Australia was growing, White Australian experts took steps to reduce what they described as the Aboriginal population explosion. Coercive practices were implemented to solve the population increase through “top-down institutional approaches to funding Aboriginal organisations themselves to implement government policies.” Shirley Smith aka Mum Shirl, a prominent Wiradjuri woman and founder of the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, informed the Royal Commission into Human Relationships that Aboriginal women were pressurized to use intrauterine devices (IUDs) even though many were apprehensive about it.
Family planning (with its cloaked “objectives” of population control) has been the go-to tool used by Western organizations to control Afrika’s populations. Western agencies and NGOs have invested billions of dollars and lobbied Afrikan governments to adopt population control policies. In 2012, the British Government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted a Family Planning Summit. Together with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and other international organizations, they announced a family planning strategy of $2.6 billion. According to Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), between 2012 and 2017, the top ten donor Western governments provided $7.4 billion in bilateral assistance for family planning to countries in the Global South. In her book, “Target Afrika: Ideological Neocolonialism in the Twenty-First Century” Obianuju Ekeocha notes, “In the last two decades, the developed world has sent a staggering $106.2 billion to the [underdeveloped] world to slow its population growth.” During the South Afrikan Apartheid, the government (led by Dr Wouter Basson aka Dr Death) created a covert biological and chemical weapons program in the form of an anti-fertility drug. The drug focused on reducing the fertility of the Black population by contaminating drinking water with contraceptives in Black-populated areas.
In the time of the Atlantic Enslavement era, the White slavers relied on the assistance of Black elites to enslave Afrikans; today, Western neo-Malthusians have come to rely on Black elites to cull Black population growth. When Margaret Sanger wanted to unleash the Negro Project on the Black community, she engaged the services of Black ministers. In a letter to Clarence Gamble, a eugenist and grandson of the co-founder of US consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, Margaret wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” W.E.B. Du Bois, the patron saint of Afrikan-American intellectualism, was an adviser to Sanger. In his essay Black Folk and Birth Control in the Birth Control Review a magazine established by Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “As it is, the mass of Negroes know almost nothing about the birth control movement… They must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.” Mo Ibrahim, the patron saint of Afrikan philanthropy, argued at a 2023 Financial Times Afrikan Summit that family planning was the ultimate solution to usher in a brighter future for Afrika. Furthermore, many Afrikan governments are eager to receive funds from Western entities to implement population control initiatives.
After centuries of focusing its gaze on the bellies of Black women, the West, in a twist of fate, has now been confronted with its own declining fertility. The replacement level fertility rate (RLF) at which a woman should give birth to maintain the population level is steadily declining in the West. The RLF in the developed world is 2.1, and many countries in the West are below that level. According to research by Lancet, the total fertility rate in Western Europe is projected to fall from 1.53 in 2021 to 1.44 in 2050 and 1.37 in 2100. This declining fertility is causing panic in capitals throughout the West. With the West facing declining fertility, the rhetorics used to describe the increased population are changing. We are not hearing much about the linkage between population rise and the environment, global security, and poverty. Instead, the declining fertility has been expressed in terms of economic anxiety. We are now being told about the negative impacts of declining fertility, such as labor shortage, slower economic growth, strain on pension systems, and increased public debt. These negative impacts were not used when Western thinkers called for Afrika to cull its population.
While the West funds Afrika and other countries in the Global South to implement family planning programs to reduce its population, paradoxically, it is implementing financial incentives and family-friendly policies to increase its Western population. In Hungary, the government has offered free IVF, tax breaks, and low-interest loans for families with children. Australia, which in the past engaged in a systematic attempt to reduce its Aboriginal population, had implemented a baby bonus program to incentivize women to give birth. In its 2024 budget, the Italian government allocated 1 billion euros to address low fertility.
Some Western countries have turned to immigration to address the issue of declining fertility. This policy has led to angst and fear, which has manifested in the Great Replacement Theory that Black and Brown immigrants from the Global South will ultimately replace the White people of the West. Viktor Orban, the Prime minister of Hungary, noted that Europe was facing civilizational suicide due to its declining fertility and high immigration. Representatives of political parties in the Netherlands, Germany, and France have also expressed concern that immigrants are replacing the Western population. Elon Musk, the patron saint of technology, described the declining birth rate as a risk to civilization. He also warned Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom that the Netherlands would die at its own hands if its declining birth rates continued. However, Musk had nothing to say when Western countries agitated for Afrika to reduce its population.
“…gynaecolonialism is rooted in eugenics, which is a tool for White supremacy”
The Western concern about Afrika’s population growth and anxiety about the West’s declining fertility is a manifestation of the West’s longstanding hypocrisy. The double standard says a lot about how the West views other parts of the non-White world. As mentioned earlier, gynaecolonialism is rooted in eugenics, which is a tool for White supremacy. To reinforce the superiority of the White race, Western scientists, sociologists and anthropologists created the concept of racial hierarchy in which the White race was placed at the top and the Black race demoted to the bottom of the racial totem pole. With this racial hierarchy set, systems were then put in place to justify and reinforce the racial status quo. The White race was classified as having superior intelligence, superior values, and superior behavior. In contrast, the darker races were classified as having inferior intelligence, inferior physical characteristics, inferior values, inferior sexuality, and inferior civilization. With this hierarchy in place, it then became easy to advocate and justify the eradication of the darker races.
The prevalence of Black babies is a threat to White supremacy, especially as it occurs at the same time as the rate at which fewer White babies are born. In 1700, there were 127 million people in Europe compared to 122 million people in Afrika, i.e. a ratio of 1.04:1, Europeans to Afrikans. Today, there are approximately 746 million people in Europe compared to 1.4 billion people in Afrika, that’s one European to every 1.87 Afrikans. This ratio is expected to get larger over the years. Under the guise of global insecurity and economic and environmental unsustainability, the subtext is that Black babies are a threat to Western hegemony. So, it should not come as a surprise that more Black babies are an unwelcome development, and more White babies would be a welcome development.
“All of the founding texts upon which the human rights framework was built were designed as the rights of White men. Within the West these rights have been extended, to some extent, to those who are not White and male.”
Kehinde Andrews, The New Age of Empire, 2021
The racialization of the fertility discourse fits into the pattern of the West talking out of both sides of its mouth. With one side of its mouth, the West says, “Population increase is bad,” while with the other side of its mouth, the West screams, “Declining fertility is bad.” We see this form of doublespeak in other spheres of life. The West talks about being a bastion for democracy and freedom, while it has a long history of undermining democracy and freedom in different parts of the world, such as South Afrika, Chile, Brazil, and Guatemala. The West brags about being the upholders of the rule of law. However, when the law works against its interest, the West finds ways to bend the rules by rewriting them to enable it to seize a sovereign nation’s assets to fund weapon supplies to an ally. Universal human rights have been appropriated by, moralized about and clothed as core Western values, and the West is quick to lecture the Global South on the need to respect human rights. But once Western interests are threatened, the West would waste no time in breaching human rights or supporting its allies that violate human rights.
When it comes to describing population increase in the Black-populated parts of the world, the West will use dehumanizing alarmist terms like: “Population boom,” “explosion,” “astronomical proportion,” and “unprecedented.” In contrast, it uses softer phrases and words like: “worrisome,” dwindling workforce,” and “concerning” to describe declining fertility in the West. When addressing the Black population increase in Afrika, the West invokes “Family Planning”; however, when addressing the population decline in the majority-White world, the West invokes “Family Support.”
The West frequently ignores the agency of AfriKans in reproductive rights in its attempt to limit Afrika’s population—something it does not do when engaging with Western women. Afrika is typically subjected to Western standards without consideration of the local context. Furthermore, Afrikan voices are often ignored. In other instances, coercive procedures are sometimes carried out on poor Afrikan women without their informed consent, as in the case of the use of Depo-Provera, which has carcinogenic effects in Kenya, South Afrika, and other Afrikan countries as well as Afrikan female migrants to Israel. As a result of the disregard for Afrikan women’s agency, the White savior complex arises whereby the White westerner comes down to Afrika from Europe and America to help prevent Afrika from destroying itself due to its population size.
“The West frequently ignores the agency of AfriKans in reproductive rights in its attempt to limit Afrika’s population—something it does not do when engaging with Western women”
My detractors may argue that my analysis amalgamates emotionalism, conspirational thinking, and nuance anemia. I present a counter-narrative to analyzing an issue not widely covered by the Whitestream media. The historical precedence I have highlighted in this essay addresses any suggestion of conspirational thinking. My emotionalism is a response to Western attitudes toward Afrika’s population size, which is rooted in racism.
Ever since the Portuguese traders landed on the western coast of Afrika in the late fifteenth century, the West has continuously exploited Afrika. From slavery to colonialism to neocolonialism through to gynaecolonialism, the West has dictated the narrative and taken all the spoils. The chickens of the West’s never-ending focus on curbing the number of Black babies has finally come home to roost with the West’s declining fertility. Perhaps it is time that the West turns its White paternal gaze from the bodies of Afrikan women and spends its energy on tackling its depopulation. It’s time for the West to discard its colonial zero-sum view of the world, in which it thinks progress and growth of the Global South can only come at its own expense. With this shift in mindset, the world will be a better place for all.
Finally, the West should get over its fears and concerns; after all, a Black baby is as precious as a White baby.
Selah.