Our motherless babes, Nigeria, ca. 1935

Black and white photograph showing eight small children sitting on a rug in the grounds of the Ama Achara hospital in southeast Nigeria, run by the Methodist Missionary Society (formerly the Primitive Methodist Missionary Society.) The children wear singlets or smocks. Some of the children show signs of crying. The caption to this image reads: "Our motherless babes." The hospital at Ama Achara commonly took in babies that were abandoned or without mothers. Abandonment was common in the case of twins, who were considered unlucky in traditional Nigerian culture. This photograph was pasted into one of a series of exercise book albums created by Emily Godfrey, Matron of the Ama Achara Methodist Hospital.