The bitter truth about polygamy

On the sidelines of a Korean Studies Conference held at the University of Nairobi last week, two colleagues and I found ourselves discussing the ever popular subject of polygamy, given the seeming predictability with which the issue is thrown into public debates in Kenya when we lose some of our political leaders.

Specifically, our little discussion was on why men, some because of, while others in spite of their education, wealth or power, would engage in (sometimes secret) polygamy.

I found the debate interesting because of the seeming resilience of this model of marriage that continues to survive despite the many death warrants written by western modernity and its strong ally in the teachings of the New Testament.

Since ideas of western civilization, its modernity and Christian theology of the New Testament made monogamy the dominant model of familial organisation, and gave it the authority of common sense, we have been unable to look at polygamy but as a stigmatised, old fashioned institution favoured by generations gone-by, which did not have the benefits of western education and Christian salvation.

CRITICAL RESPONSES

The stigma attached to polygamy is to such a scale that another equally topical issue surrounding marriage — divorce, separation, estrangement and their variants — are made to appear much better than polygamy, at least in the eyes of many scholars and advocates of feminism, who reject aspects of religion and traditional culture that okay polygamy.

In fact, that seems to be the issue around which Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter is structured, and is an important sub-text in Sembene Ousmane’s Xala.

Of course, these two may not be the best texts to discuss the agonies of polygamy given that they are situated within Islamic African cultures that provide for polygamous marriages.

But, perhaps paradoxically, they remain the few texts on which scholars have engaged the issues of polygamy and its implications to the (dis)empowerment of women, their liberation or objectification, and on the question of choice as a marker of women’s independence.

Reading critical responses to other texts, there seems to be a conspiracy of silence, where the issues of polygamy are naturally and consistently subordinated to other ‘more important’ concerns, be they political or cultural.

How many critiques of Ngugi’s and Achebe’s early writings, for instance, discuss polygamy as an institution on and of itself on which a less deceitful society may be founded, or even salvage the current one where even men of the collar can no longer keep up appearances of monogamy?

In Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, Ngotho’s family was polygamous and happy with it, just as in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God polygamy was accepted as a way of reinforcing the tyranny of numbers against harsh and unforgiving nature on the one hand, and war-like neighbour communities on the other.

Yet when reading critical responses to these works, you encounter grand ideas about language use, proverbs, land tenure, political philosophy and so on: little on polygamy and how it can ensure desirable social order.

Instead, we seem to have been knocked silent by a barrage of feminist critiques that see the bogeyman of patriarchy everywhere, with some scholars even suggesting that the mere words ‘marriage’, ‘husband’, ‘wife’, and ‘Mrs’, let alone ‘polygamy’, perpetuate the patriarchal dominance  that everyone in the world should be struggling against. Can’t one fight patriarchal excesses and be polygamous simultaneously?

LECHEROUS LIVING

The silence, to me is explained by a coalition of forces including western modernity, New Testament doctrines that we have so overwhelmingly embraced, and our recent affected love for political correctness, that have all worked to scare those who may want to experiment with, while muting those who would wish to discuss alternative models of sustaining the family and society that are now threatened with disintegration.

Of course, our writers now and earlier may not have invited such debates. Casually looking at the African novel, for instance, one notices two trajectories in the corpus.

One, the earlier Ngugi and Achebe, for instance, portrayed polygamy as emotionally and otherwise unproblematic, thereby disinteresting critics who wanted to deal with bigger issues of decolonisation.

Later Achebe would, in A Man of the People, show how power politics rely, for some players, on rampant sexuality for validation and performance of the same power.

This seems to have been the trend in Africa generally, to the extent that scholars like Cameroonian Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony has focused on the symbolic significance of sexual potency among African strongmen of the independence generation to the 90s, who ‘had a marked taste for lecherous living’, whose acquired idioms revolved around ‘the mouth, the belly, and the phallus.’

African literature of the Achebe and Ngugi generation would extensively use such idioms to construct subversive jokes and laughter, through characters known for their grotesque, protuberant appearances that captured, at the physical level, their dehumanisation and instinctive existence.

Another, second trajectory in the African novel, is what we vaguely call contemporary writers; these do not seem to see polygamy as an issue worth thematising in their writings, but have found sleazy sexual lives and other indulgences fair game.

I think that this approach, with all its uses, is responsible for the continued association of polygamy with immorality, and with Africans, which in turn may explain the tendency, even among our leaders, to conceal their polygamous status, only for entire families to emerge from the shadows when the leaders are at home in Lee.

When this happens, we have ephemeral discussions of the ‘scandal’, the shame and humiliation of those who outlive the real culprit. The discussions, in tabloids and talk shows, are neither sustainable nor particularly illuminating, given that the subject itself is enduring.

Indeed, the resilience of polygamy amused me the other day when, flipping through a 2007 copy of The New York Times, a sarcastic title titillated me: ‘In Secret, Polygamy Follows Africans to N.Y.’, capturing not just the personification of polygamy, but grafting it on Africans for the ultimate connotative effects.

Purporting to draw data from immigrant Americans and the Mormons, the author regretted that the specific case of a Ghanaian watchman who decided to actualise by marrying a second wife, was not the only one, and that they were not being prosecuted after all.

___________

Seemingly in the United States, as in Kenya, the subject of polygamy still excites the attention of the media, but the fleeting reportage in the US and the daily ‘debates’ in breakfast shows in Kenya’s FM stations do not help much, given that the shrill, emotional involvement of the discussants and the raucous laughter of hosts hardly allow for concerted and reflective engagement of the usability of polygamy and its variants.

Nor can we tell, from the goings-on in these breakfast shows, that polygamy must be understood as different from the rampant sexuality of some men, including some political leaders.

Is it time, therefore, for us to rethink our western socialization and have honest, heart-to-heart talk on the usable aspects of polygamy?  Can we be less judgmental of those ladies, highly educated or not, who choose to be second wives? Can we be more empathetic to men, including politicians who, for good reasons, are unable to walk the long and narrow path of monogamy?

With utmost respect to everyone, does monogamy predispose men to infidelity? Should we continue to traumatise all those men, women and children who suffer social insecurities just because they were born ‘out of wedlock’?

Or of second and subsequent wives?