The Weight of Two: Twin Infanticide and the Grandmother I Never Met

Ibironke Babalola 30 September 2026 00:01 0

Twins are now venerated in many African cultures but it was not always so (Image: Luis Arias. Unsplash)

This article is part of the Feelnubia series: Taboo – an account of uncomplimentary cultural practices in ancient Africa

My great-grandmother buried twins she was not allowed to raise. Then, when it happened again, her community did not just take the children; they cast her out of the only home she knew. I never met her. But her story lives in the silences of my family’s history, in the way certain conversations trail off, in the questions the elders answer only halfway. This is one of those questions, answered as fully as I can manage: why, in Ekiti and across other parts of Yoruba land and beyond, was the birth of twins once treated not as a blessing, but as a death sentence?

A Continent-Wide Fear

Twin infanticide was not peculiar to the Ekiti people, of the Yoruba ethnic group. Across pre-colonial Africa, multiple births disturbed a worldview built on the idea of one soul, one body, one birth at a time. Among the Igbo and Efik peoples of southeastern Nigeria (where the Scottish missionary Mary Slessor became famous for rescuing abandoned twins) the birth of twins was widely believed to be an omen of catastrophe. Infants were thought to have spiritual powers that were blamed on evil spirits, and mothers were sometimes accused of grave sin simply for having conceived more than one child at once. Twin babies in these communities were frequently left in forests set aside for exactly this purpose: dense, unvisited groves that took on a reputation as sites of dread.

Similar fears surfaced among various Bantu-speaking peoples in Central and Southern Africa, where twin births could be read as a bad omen requiring the death of one or both infants, or the banishment of the mother. Belief systems varied by region and era, and not every group treated twins this way (some traditions held twins in reverence from the start) but the pattern of fear-driven infanticide, followed later by suppression and reversal, repeats across the continent.

Ekiti and the Yoruba Paradox

This is where my family’s story becomes especially difficult. Today, the Yoruba are famous for the opposite instinct: twins are celebrated, given sacred names (Taiwo, “the one who tasted the world first,” and Kehinde, “the one who came after”) and honored, even after death, through carved ère ìbejì figures believed to house a departed twin’s spirit. Yoruba communities have among the highest twin birth rates in the world, and popular folktale often credit a deity, Ṣàngó, with commanding that the killing stop and that twins be treated as blessings instead.

But reverence was not always the case, and it did not arrive everywhere at once. Historical and anthropological accounts describe an earlier period across Yoruba communities (including, by family account, in Ekiti) when twin births provoked the same dread found among the Igbo and Efik: twins seen as abnormal, as a source of misfortune, as something to be rejected rather than embraced. The shift toward veneration is often placed in the eighteenth century, but shifts in belief do not move at the same pace everywhere, and they do not move evenly through every family or every generation. My great-grandmother’s experience suggests that whatever national or cultural turning point historians point to, it had not yet reached her, or her particular circumstances did not spare her from what came before.

There was an added layer to this story that I’ve only recently come to understand. My great-grandfather was a warrior. In that context, twins were feared for more than misfortune in the abstract. They were believed to carry a power capable of weakening a warrior’s strength. A wife who delivered twins more than once was not just unlucky in the eyes of her community; she became a walking liability to her husband’s standing and abilities, proof, as they saw it, of something working against him from within his own household. Her body had, in their eyes, become a repeated site of threat.

She did not lose her twins once. She lost them more than once, and each time reinforced whatever verdict her community had already reached about her. Eventually, it was not enough for the children to be taken. She herself was made to leave. This is also a documented pattern in twin-fearing traditions across Africa: it was often not only the infants who were treated as tainted, but the mother who bore them, as though the birth itself was evidence against her; and in her case, evidence of ill-will against her husband too.

What the Record Doesn’t Say

Academic and colonial-era accounts of twin infanticide tend to be written from the outside: missionaries, ethnographers, and later scholars working from limited samples, often decades or centuries after the fact. What they rarely capture is what it meant to be the mother left behind: not a data point in a study of “historical twin infanticide,” but a woman who lost to banishment, who carried grief that had nowhere sanctioned to go, whose name may not appear in any of these accounts at all.

That absence is why this story needs to be told. My great-grandmother’s story will never be a citation in a journal article. But it is real, and it happened in Ekiti, within a Yoruba world that would later come to celebrate the very thing that once cost her everything. Telling it is not an indictment of Yoruba culture, which has produced one of the most elaborate and loving twin-veneration traditions anywhere in the world. It is a reminder that cultures are not fixed, that reverence and rejection can exist in the same community only a generation or two apart, and that the people who lived through the harder version of that history deserve to be remembered as more than a footnote in the story of how things changed.

I did not know her. But I carry her forward anyway, by telling her story.