Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4650-5448
Date of Award
8-31-2026
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Global Inclusion and Social Development
First Advisor
Dr. Nada Ali
Second Advisor
Dr. Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
Third Advisor
Dr. Dolly Daftary, Dr. Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and Dr. James Kantiok
Abstract
In Southern Kaduna, Northern Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, Bajju women navigate intersecting precarities and psychosocial stressors: state-level violence and banditry activities in their communities, and the intergenerational trauma of Domestic Violence (DV) at home. Despite enduring this continuum of violence—compounded by the lingering shadows of colonialism and Christianization—Bajju women’s resistance and healing strategies remain largely undocumented in global health research, which heavily favors Euro-American psychological paradigms. This dissertation is grounded in an Intersectional Qualitative-Transdisciplinary Africana Feminisms (IQ-TAF) framework and investigates how Bajju women use indigenous self-care and healing technologies to address psychosocial stress arising from DV.
This study also utilizes a decolonial methodology informed by the newly conceptualized B-LIST framework: Believe (Bajju) women, Listen to (Bajju) women, Invest in (Bajju) women, Support (Bajju) women, and Trust (Bajju) women. Research methods I used include Focused Life Stories (FLS), Key Informant Interviews (KII), and Talking Circles (TCs) with Bajju women. A life-course analysis reveals the Patriarchal Tax extracted from Bajju women across girlhood, wifehood, and widowhood through a matrix of domination (P. H. Collins, 2022). Consequently, the violence and precarity Bajju women currently navigate are understood as the enduring manifestations of colonial afterlives—legacies that are sustained and enforced daily through the Patriarchal Tax. In response, findings illustrate that Bajju women use self-care as a subversive, political act of survival through ecologies of care, community, and healing. Women use indigenous spiritual technologies (such as Dikan root medicine) to navigate the cognitive dissonance of the Christian-Bajju Paradox and utilize Othermothering and radical kinship networks to address psychosocial stressors. These networks, specifically Bakumbvon Baranzan (Daughters-in-law of Baranzan), also transform communal obligations into sites of intergenerational wealth redistribution and into spaces of leadership, care, agency, and power for Bajju women.
Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to translate these empirical findings into transnational praxis, offering policy recommendations for reforming and operationalizing Nigeria’s National Mental Health Act (2021), including through the implementation of the Self-care for Black Women in Leadership (SCBWL) program. This study also provides a blueprint for community-led mental health interventions for Black women globally by centering African cosmologies of healing, care, and community.
Recommended Citation
Dauda, Deborah Omowunmi Chat, "Self-Care Practices and Healing Strategies of Bajju Women With Experiences Of Domestic Violence (DV) In Southern Kaduna, Nigeria" (2026). Graduate Doctoral Dissertations. 1170.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/doctoral_dissertations/1170
Included in
African Studies Commons, Alternative and Complementary Medicine Commons, Community-Based Research Commons, Community Health Commons, Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Global Studies Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Medicine and Health Commons, Other International and Area Studies Commons, Other Mental and Social Health Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Rural Health Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social Justice Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Sociology of Religion Commons, Women's Health Commons
Comments
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