<![CDATA[The ethics of care, developed by feminist philosophers such as Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, has made a powerful case for recognising care as a fundamental moral practice that has been systematically devalued in patriarchal and capitalist societies. However, the ethics of care literature has focused primarily on care relations in Western contexts, with less attention to the specific forms that care takes in African societies. This paper examines the ethics of maternal care in contemporary Nigeria, arguing that the political economy of motherhood in Nigeria reveals both the universal dimensions of care ethics and its specific cultural inflections. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Nigerian mothers and on Nigerian feminist scholarship, the paper analyses the moral dilemmas that mothers face in contexts of economic precarity, inadequate state support, and patriarchal family structures. It argues that the Nigerian case challenges the implicit universalism of Western care ethics and enriches the tradition by demonstrating how care is practised and valued in contexts where the boundaries between family, market, and state are configured differently. The paper proposes a contextualised ethics of care that is attentive to the specific political, economic, and cultural conditions under which care is given and received.]]>
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