Old World Young Africa

How a TV Hit Sparked Debate About Having Too Many Babies

Many African women have far more children than women on other continents do: Women in Nigeria have an average of over five children, while American and European women have about 1.5, and Chinese women even fewer. And recent progress in reducing child mortality in Africa means more of them survive into adulthood than ever before.

But Africa’s birthrate is also gradually dropping: It has fallen by about 38 percent over the past 60 years. That is largely because of education, economics and shifting attitudes toward family size on display in conversations prompted by shows like “Gidan Badamasi,” one of the biggest hits of recent years on the leading Hausa-language television channel.

“It’s a very bad habit, breeding children he can’t take care of,” said Sani Ibrahim, 53, a school principal and the father of the six siblings laughing along to the show on the sofa last year, tutting at the show’s lead character.

The subject was close to home, though, Sani admitted. Sani came from a big family, but had wanted “two, or at most three,” children himself, he said. He blamed his wife for having six.

“It’s a problem for me,” he said, “that I have this many children.”

Counting the Pennies, and the Babies

Northern and southern Africa have long been going through “fertility transitions” — significant reductions in their birthrates. But in most of the rest of Africa, fertility has mostly stayed high.

That is not the case everywhere, though. Four decades ago, Kenyan and Malawian women had more than seven babies on average; today, that has come down to 3.4 and 3.7 respectively. Rwandan women had six babies on average in 2005, and four a decade later. The birthrates fell after contraception became more available, girls became more educated and governments encouraged having fewer children.

Even in places like Kano, home to the Sani family, change is afoot.

In Kano, a religiously conservative city, large families are considered a blessing and a sensible bet to ensure care in old age.

But for many in Kano — and across Africa — the economic and social calculation is changing.

Families used to live in large compounds, the children cared for by a whole extended family. Now, they increasingly live in smaller units in urban areas, putting parents under more pressure to provide. Far more children survive into adulthood than did 40 years ago, when one in five African children died before turning 5. Contraceptives are now more available and less controversial than before. And education is accessible and desired — including education for girls, which has been shown to reduce birthrates.

But paying school fees for big families gets expensive, as Sani knows only too well.

As the children watched the show’s protagonist flirt with his latest 22-year-old wife on the screen that Thursday night, Sani and his wife, Fatima Ado Saleh, 37, hovered in the tiny courtyard outside.

They were anxious.

The children, whose ages range from 3 to 16, were putting the family’s finances under serious strain.

Sani spent his days teaching other people’s children, but could not afford the school fees for his own. He could barely afford a $42 sack of rice on his $72 monthly salary. The annual rent payment of about $120 was almost due — and between food, clothes and school fees, he had none of it.

Researchers have long said that the richer societies get, the lower fertility rates become. But in Kano, many said it was the other way around: Rich men still have dozens of children with multiple wives, but most people have fewer because of soaring living costs.

Sani’s father had four wives and 19 children; Fatima’s, three wives and 30 children, six of whom died as infants. Her grandfather had four wives, each of whom had at least 10 children, though many did not survive into adulthood.

So their six represented a major break from previous generations.

Getting Educated

As the light gradually materialized in their small gray home one morning, the Sani children got ready for school.

The two eldest, Saratu and Juwairiyyah — who go by the nicknames Baby and Nana — smoothed down their uniforms. Under their head scarves, each put on one earring of the pair they shared, small golden apples like the tech company’s logo. Like most Kano families, they had no running water, so Sadiq, the only boy, washed his face with water bought by the jerry can from a vendor. Baby swept the concrete courtyard, then set before her siblings two large plates of beans and homemade pasta. Bought pasta was too expensive.

Then, stepping onto the sandy street, she and Nana left for school, setting off in opposite directions.

Baby and Nana were exceptionally bright girls. Wide-eyed Baby, 16, was very academic; Nana, 14, more sage and worldly.

Sani had managed to get Baby into an excellent private school for underprivileged children, with free tuition. But Nana had not been so lucky. Somehow, he cobbled together about $9 annually for Nana’s private school, but he sighed as he flipped through her exercise books. He could tell the school was substandard.

“It’s obvious that Nana’s intelligence is deteriorating because I can’t afford a good school for her,” he said that afternoon after work on the sofa, cuddling Asma’u, then 2.

And after Baby and Nana, there were four more children to educate.

Sani had a diploma. Fatima had completed high school — unusual in their part of Kano, where some consider an educated woman to be unmarriageable. But they were determined their girls’ educations would be even better than their own.

Perhaps, as educated girls have been shown to have fewer children, his daughters would realize his dream and have smaller families themselves, Sani thought.

Discovering Birth Control

The problem, as Sani saw it, was his wife’s circle of girlfriends.

He suspected they held the traditional view, that modern contraception was bad, and were influencing her.

Clinics with free pills, condoms, implants and shots — much of it funded by international organizations — are in most Kano neighborhoods. But a taboo around contraception persists.

Many believe using it is un-Islamic — despite a half-dozen Kano clerics giving assurances, in interviews, that it was perfectly acceptable. (They all said the withdrawal method was preferable, however.)

Despite all of the free contraceptives, it is not always easy for women to get hold of them.

At one dilapidated clinic serving Fatima’s neighborhood, the family-planning provider said she used to send women home to get their husbands’ permission if they did not already have it. If they were unmarried, it was always a straight no.

“Religiously, you can’t give an unmarried woman contraceptives, when she’s under her parents’ supervision,” said the provider, Halima Umar Baba, before handing pills to a woman who had hidden under a face-covering niqab to walk to the clinic.

Recently, though, Ms. Baba has relented on husbands’ permissions. Over the past decade, Nigerians have suffered through two recessions, runaway inflation and a cash crisis — and the women coming to her often do not have enough food. So she helps limit the mouths they have to feed. Often, she invites women to her home at night for their shots, so nobody sees them at the clinic.

Sani said he tried to talk to his wife about injectable contraceptives. He did not consider condoms viable, as they reduced pleasure. He said Fatima would not listen until their sixth child was on the way, and she realized what financial straits they were in.

“Now,” he said, “she understands what I was trying to say.”

That is not how his wife tells it. She found out about contraception from her sister Samira, she said, when she was pregnant with her third child in five years. It was a revelation. Having three infants in diapers “wasn’t a healthy situation,” she said.

Fatima got the shots and started spacing out her children. But she did not stop having them altogether.

Fertility Influencers

One Friday night, Sani’s imam, Sheikh Goni Auwal Alhassan, swept into the soundproofed studio of Radio Aminci, a bevy of clerics in his wake, for his weekly show.

The clerics had officiated at four weddings that day. They had advised each groom to keep close tabs on any children they might have.

These influential clerics said family size was a common topic of conversation among Kano’s imams. But ultimately the number depends on the parent, they said, citing a former emir of Kano and a business tycoon, each of whom had at least 60 children.

“It’s not about the number,” Salisu Al Hassan, one of the clerics, said, as they sat together on a plastic mat outside the radio station after the show, stars twinkling reddish in the dusty sky.

Many, including the creators of “Gidan Badamasi,” disagree. In an interview in a Kano hotel last year, the show’s main writer, Nazir Adam Salih, said there was a widespread view that people were having too many children for their own good — and for society’s.

“Gidan Badamasi” had a “massive, instant” effect, starting conversations about reducing family size. It succeeded, he said, where many international organizations had failed.

“You can’t just come to this part of the world saying that people should not get married, people should not give birth to many children, people should get birth control,” Mr. Salih said.

For decades, African leaders have pushed back against Western characterizations of African population growth as a problem that needs solving.

One morning in a Kano grain depot, Mohammed Mahmoud, an accountant with a sideline as a social media influencer, who has a large following in Kano, explained to his colleagues why he was a birth control skeptic.

A vocal proponent of early marriage and large families, Mr. Mahmoud pointed to shrinking populations in the West and their reliance on migrant labor.

“So many Western countries are having problems due to this birth control. Why should we imbibe it? Why should we accept it?” he said. If Nigeria started having labor shortages, he said: “Who will migrate to us? Will Americans? No way!”

Praying for a Boy

After her fourth and fifth children were born — both girls — Fatima said she decided that was enough. But then, she said, she went to her local clinic for her latest contraceptive shot, and was told she did not need it.

“The nurse said I had enough in my blood already, and that my blood was too weak to take any more,” she said. The clinic declined requests for an interview.

Fatima’s sister Samira doubted this story. She thought her sister was trying for another boy. As in many patriarchal societies, sons are often valued more highly than daughters. And Sani’s family had never hidden their disapproval of Fatima producing girl after girl. Fatima recalled bitterly the day her mother-in-law told her she was “giving birth to liabilities.”

When she became pregnant with their sixth child, Fatima said she was distraught. The family was already under severe financial strain. How would they cope?

She even considered abortion. In Kano, sharia law applies, and abortion is almost always illegal, taboo and dangerous.

“It’s forbidden,” she said. But, she added, “I just had these feelings in me.”

Her circle of girlfriends said Fatima should have the baby, but ensure it was her last. Then, knowing the pressure she was under from her in-laws, they immediately started praying for a boy.

Fatima prayed fervently for a boy, too.

But she had another girl.

Today, that girl, Asma’u, is a dearly cherished 3-year-old, constantly stealing the TV remote and trying to escape into the street. But because she is a girl, Fatima said she and her mother-in-law no longer speak to or visit each other.

Nana, especially, feels the sexism from her father’s relatives keenly, and fights fiercely against the idea that boys are inherently better than girls.

“You hate us, but we’ll make you proud of us,” she said she recently told her aunt.

A Woman’s Place

Feet up on the sofa, Baby and Nana whispered into each other’s shoulders as they watched the “Gidan Badamasi” star rage at his latest love interest.

“He found out she had six children, so now he doesn’t want to marry her,” Baby explained.

Fatima ducked into the living room and picked up Asma’u, whose bedtime was approaching. Having spent most of the day at a naming ceremony for a new niece — the latest addition to her huge extended family — she had missed most of the “Gidan Badamasi” episode. But she knew Nana, the resident expert, would catch her up later.

The power went off. The children poured into the dark courtyard, unrolling a plastic mat and turning back to their homework, writing by the light of a cellphone. By the time the power came back on, Alhaji Badamasi had abandoned his new wife.

Before she got married, Fatima longed to become a nurse, but she was reliant first on her father and then her husband, and they did not support her. But, she said, since she grew up, “Things have changed.” Many families are reconsidering the place of women and girls in society, particularly as more women are getting jobs and helping pay for soaring household expenses.

Many of Baby’s friends at Quranic school are getting married. But Baby wants to train as a doctor at medical school first.

Fatima wants that, too, and wants Nana to become a nurse, fulfilling her own old dream.

Determined that nothing will stop her daughters, she has gone to extreme lengths, telling credulous Baby that merely touching a boy will get her pregnant.

“I missed out on things,” Fatima said.

If she can help it, she said, her daughters will not.

Ismail Alfa and Ismail Auwal contributed reporting.