NDUMISO NGCOBO | Give the nursing mums a break

Yesterday marked the beginning of the 35th World Breastfeeding Week, which takes place from August 1-7 annually. It is a UN-sponsored initiative to promote nursing across the globe.

A friend who has been a career activist and NGO type for the past 30 years has strong opinions on breastfeeding. She reckons that if some version of artificial general intelligence colonises humanity and starts harvesting our bodies for electricity to make batteries for its machines like in The Matrix, we should look no further than the moment we stopped breastfeeding our offspring for the beginning of the end.

My response to her theory is my stock response to any matter related to the female reproductive system. And that is: I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have a uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, or, in this case, lactating mammary glands, should harbour any strong opinions about what those who do have them should do with them.

According to World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, the best practice is nursing infants exclusively for the first six months before starting to introduce other foods, while continuing with breast milk up to about two years. This becomes complex when you consider that the WHO’s mates at the International Labour Organisation recommend only 14 to 18 weeks’ maternity leave for mothers. But that’s just me poking my nose into mammary gland matters despite my virtue-signalling just three sentences ago.

So, how does one know that it’s time to wean a baby off the good stuff? The American Academy of Pediatrics reckons that after the age of two the nursing can continue if it is mutually comfortable for both participants. When my four brothers and I were born between 1970 and 1981, maternity leave did not exist for my professional nursing-sister mum. With no electric fridges, breast milk expression was only a pipe dream. So I didn’t get enough of the good stuff, which explains the extent of brain damage I suffered, as evidenced by my weekly ramblings on these pages.

Yes, I was a bottled-formula fellow until just past my third birthday. I happen to remember rather vividly the day my mother returned from St Mary’s Hospital in Mariannhill with my younger brother, Mxo, in early April 1975. The transfer of formula bottles as negotiated by my two maternal aunts, Nqobile and Ndingiliza, went off significantly more amicably than the so-called peaceful 1994 transition. Not once did I exercise any dramatic brinkmanship or yelling from the rooftops about international mediation.

All I know is that the repressed memories are likely to bubble to the surface on the shrink’s couch one of these days

My firstborn, Ntobeko, wasn’t that lucky. We were visiting family friends in Dobsonville just past his second birthday. No “grown man” speaking in full sentences should be taking breaks from street football to come and ask for incence (baby milk) from his mum, they insisted. Outnumbered, I had to lie awake throughout the night listening to his desperate pleas for incence. I’m not sure who got more dehydrated courtesy of tear duct leakage between father and son during those three days of hell for the poor boy. All I know is that the repressed memories are likely to bubble to the surface on the shrink’s couch one of these days.

The optimist buried somewhere underneath the rubble of cynicism residing inside me has hopes about this week. In my best Martin Luther King vibrato, I, too, have a dream. That one day every child on the planet will enjoy milk directly from the natural factory. That no women will be forced to feed their babies under cover because of prudes complaining loudly about “public indecency”, as I witnessed on an East London flight in September of 2024. That the next time I witness anything like that, I will pluck up enough courage to confront the two rotund members of Family Suidae complaining about a baby feeding while they are busy inhaling snacks through their hog-like snouts.

Lastly, I hope that members of my lactation-deficient tribe will stop fetishising breastfeeding. The world does not need more stories such as that of Michele Oller, an Oklahoma pharmacist who attempted to sell on the internet a few gallons of excess milk she had expressed. She had to take down the advert because the only interest she got was from men asking her if they could nurse directly from the source.

And I must register my discomfort at the fact that the page I gleaned this particular story from during my research was flooded with adverts for decadent, creamy spoon cakes fetching as much as R15k a pop. I don’t know why I found this distasteful.