Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Notes from the ASA-UK Conference

Kwabena,

An apology is in order and I tender it unreservedly. As I'm in violation of African ethos of hospitality, I will now think of how to perform the propitiatory rites you outlined. I should have written to brief you on the outcome of my visit but I came back and our semester was starting and I just got lost in the craziness of the semester's beginning.

I'll offer a preliminary, necessarily abbreviated explanation of what I mean by "new polygamy." But first let me delineate the old polygamy. All of these categories of course homogenize a complex landscape with multiple polygamous arrangements. The appropriate terms should be "old polygamies" and "new polygamies." Nonetheless, we can explain the old polygamy as the one that predated colonialism and missionary Christianity, and outlived them. Its features are that, 1) it was largely formal, though the spread of Christianity introduced much informality to the practice among African converts; 2) it was rooted in notions of labor--more children means more labor on the farm; 3) it was connected to patriarchal notions of male achievement and status; 4) it was connected to notions of building wealth in people, with this wealth of course being, for the most part, subject to patriarchal considerations; it was almost always initiated by men.

Now, the new polygamy. It is not always initiated by men. Women are active, rational, strategic participants and initiators of it. Women who go into it defies our stereotype of unlettered rural women who are coopted by patriarchy because they have no economic pathways outside male support and authority. The women who are going into this new polygamy are often well educated, professional, highly accomplished women who are financially independent and often out-earn their husbands. The new polygamy takes many informal forms, with concubinage, which ranges from patriarchal dependences to egalitarian partnerships, being a growing form of this informal polygamy. The new polygamy is both urban and rural in its manifestation. 

The new polygamy, or certain arrangements in that rubric are consistent with principles of gender equality and notions of rights that were allegedly missing from the old polygamy. The new polygamy, especially the formalized iterations of it, afford women formal legal protections, which is an incentive as concubines do not have statutory protections. The new polygamy is partly a response to the growing phenomenon of out-of-wedlock childbearing by some women, who may then seek out polygamous arrangements to obtain economic and social stability for themselves and their children and also to escape the ostracism and stigma imposed by society. 

The new polygamy is partly driven by the rise in women's control over and rational choice in their marital affairs. The new polygamy among Christians involves male Christian practitioners skirting the Christian condemnation of polygamy by either ignoring it or maintaining a formal, public posture of monogamy while sustaining an informal polygamous arrangement. Increasingly, the new polygamy is founded on separate housing, sometimes in different cities, for the multiple wives, minimizing conflicts and tensions that are associated with the old polygamy, in which, for the most part, wives would live in physical proximity to one another.

There may be other defining features of the new polygamy, but I'll stop here.

Cheers.

On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 5:10 AM Kwabena Akurang-Parry <kaparry@hotmail.com> wrote:

Greetings Moses.  First, you owe me two sheep and a pot of palmwine. Didn't hear from again. Hope your visit to Ghana was fruitful.  Second and more important, could you please throw more light on the "new polygamy"?  For instance, how different it is from the "old polygamy," characteristics of the "new polygamy," etc. 

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: September 11, 2018 11:44 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Notes from the ASA-UK Conference

 

Great day at the ASA-UK conference. Excellent, thought provoking keynote by literary scholar, Professor Grace Musila. After her keynote, she took the unusual step of taking questions. 

Because her talk had focused in part on Ex-South African President Jacob Zuma's polygamy, I had to ask her about her take on polygamy. 

I truly believe that polygamy is one of the great remaining taboos of African studies. And yet it haunts the field because millions of Africans practice it, and the practice and institution of polygamy have persisted in spite of the paradigmatic sway of Western modernity (or perhaps because of it). How many studies on polygamy do Africanists produce and how many of these attempt a sincere, sympathetic understanding of the logics underpinning polygamy on the continent?

For reasons of economics, social change, African feminist redefinition of feminism to include individual rational marital choice, the desire for stable romantic partnerships, among others, a new form of polygamy has appeared in Africa, one that is not easily caricatured or rendered incapable of coexisting with modernity. 

This new polygamy is quite different from the polygamy of our fathers and grandfather, which, while rooted in economic and social logics, were casually dismissed as un-Christian and retrogressive by missionary Christianity. 

This new form of polygamy cannot be similarly dismissed, for it is practiced formally or informally by educated, accomplished middle class Africans, men and women. Today, there is a new debate on polygamy among Africa's educated class, who were previously assumed to have left the practice behind. I have personally encountered this in my small circle and I have a very pragmatic disposition towards it.

Africanists need to engage this reality. As the scholarly axiom goes, we do not study the world as it ought to be or as we wish it to be but as it is. The stubborn persistence of polygamy, especially in Christian and traditionalist societies in Africa, needs to be researched, understood, and theorized. 

Behind the new polygamy are clear socioeconomic logics and desires that can be traced to women as well as men, a mutuality of evolving interests that has intersected with rapid social changes to revive a practice thought to be outmoded outside Islamic Africa. 

A controversial subject no doubt, but someone had to raise it, and that person was me. And the keynote speaker actually handled it pretty well, arguing that we should not be seduced by anti-polygamy discourses that invoke bad polygamists such as former president Zuma to do a blanket rejection of the practice, or buy into the simplistic claim that polygamy is inherently good while monogamy is inherently bad. 

Professor Muslila's zinger was, "monogamy is not a feminist ideal or prescription," as many people erroneously believe, and monogamy should not be fetishized to critique certain polygamy. 

She also conceded that certain forms of polygamy may be consistent with ideals of equality, and that polygamy should not automatically be assumed to violate equality and other ideals cherished by feminists and rights advocates. Brilliant, thought provoking keynote.

Let the debate continue.

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