--Dear Moses:
Let me begin by saying that my lateness in commenting on your piece is due to two things: first, Kofi Annan's funeral that made Ghanaians nomadic to TV-sets for four consecutive days, and second, my involvement in preparations toward the 80th anniversary celebration of the Presbyterian Boys' Boarding Secondary School, Legon, which is my alma mater.
Thank you for indulging me with this brilliant prefatory remarks that seek to unclasp settled orthodoxy on polygamy. I wanted the apology to come with some grilled or fried millipedes, or was it centipedes, a subject that was lately discussed here. But I realized that hunting for millipedes and/or centipedes would make the apology more ponderous. I would save my curious appetite for now! And so your apology is unconditionally accepted.
Yes polygamy is imprisoned in the margins of African Studies as much as many sociocultural realities of the African landscape: for example, the subject of maid-servitude, house-help, or what we Ghanaians call maid-servant. In some respects, and I am putting my thin neck on the critics' desk, it is because the very people who should unwrap polygamy and other topics with itchy trajectories, have sanitized such "inequalities" in their privileged households. Thus due to epistemological reasons we are reluctant to dry our old, but utilizable garments on the public drying space, making some topics sacred cows, so to speak. I hazard that FGM has gained academic traction, because most of the initial systematic questions about it came from non-Africans, and about this inferring, I may be very wrong!
I offer these tentative perspectives on "polygamies" below, but like your caveats, mine are quarried from observable facts that need vigorous interrogation to unknot them. And second I do not seek to homogenize and/or Africanize "polygamies." In short, my take is just a sleepy rumination in a lazy arm-chair with palm-wine on the side.
I agree with you that the old polygamy and the new polygamy do not have gridlock seams between them. In sum, changes have occurred in the "institution of polygamy" and the way societies perceive it. Thus questions of periodization and choice are important in lensing the old polygamy and the new polygamy. Choice in the sense that genders of all classes openly accept polygamy despite the varying anathema that is associated with polygamy, or have found a way to sanitize it before the obtrusive orthodoxy of the memory bank of the public. And periodization defined by transformations in the conventional phases of African history - precolonial, colonial, postcolonial or contemporary Africa, and we may even go with Global Africa - is equally a walkway to unraveling the mirage of emergent polygamies. Here I am not equalizing either variable, but trying to fuse both agencies of change by looking for centripetal forces that launch both together as praxes of continuity and change in polygamies.
Patriarchy, whatever theoretical and empirical optics define it, may not mean that polygamy was always initiated by men. In matrilineal societies, such as the Akan of Ghana, matriarchs did put members of their families, especially their female children's daughters into polygamous marriages because a greater part of the "bride wealth" was received by the matrilineal uncle on behalf of the matriarch. The children from such marriages were legitimized by matrilineal lineage groups, not patrilineal ones. I think we need to problematize the use of "patriarchy:" it is not a static model. My observation, and I may be reading the present into the past, is that among Ghanaians, whether patrilineal or matrilineal groups, men dominate the public space where power is putative, while women control the home space with sinews of permanency. I am from a patrilineal family, where patriarchy, according to staple knowledge, must be stronger, but at home females dominate in decision-making, but leave what I would crudely call "decision-announcing" to the males in public spaces. And woe unto the men who fail to do the bidding of the women. Perhaps this is a relic of Neolithic gender division of labor in multiple if not differing sites/spaces.
Also pawnship or debt-bondage practiced by both men and women, was a factor in polygamous marriage in the pre/colonial periods. Research on pawnship, based on "European" sources, shows that men were more involved in arranging pawn-marriages as an integral part of polygamous relationships. But the use of oral history places equal weight on both genders in the arrangement of pawn marriages that led to polygamous relationships. This, in my estimation, was due to the ways that patriliny and/or matriliny contour(s) indigenous ontology, social structure, ritual performances, and social formations. There are works on Ghanaian history, mostly by non-Africans, which could have benefitted from forensic understanding of the ways that patriliny and matriliny shap(ed) labor recruitment, capital accumulation, social mobility, etc. For example, in looking at pawnship cum related topics in the Gold Coast/Ghana, a number of scholars, have excavated theories from R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (1929) and applied them to all ethnicities in Ghana. The fact of the matter is Asante (Akan) is matrilineal, while Guan, Ewe, Ga, etc. societies are patrilineal.
Additionally, females who owned slaves/pawns also planted them in polygamous marriages to receive "bride wealth" to widen the circumference of their social realms and economic span of influence. This was obviously better than selling off their slaves/pawns because of economic and social reasons. The reasons included occasional supply of "ex-slave" labor to the "ex-host family" during public events, for example, funerals. This arrangement was made possible because both the "ex-slave" and the "ex-host family" had strong needs to maintain fictive natal bonds, rather than rupturing or severing them. In this regard, the "ex-slave" could also rely on the "ex-host family" during crisis, such divorce or demise of spouse. And here I am suggesting that such ex-slave marriages offered them security and severed the notions of being a chattel in a limbo of social death. I have not stressed pawn-marriage simply because the pawn hardly suffered the uncertainties of social death the way that the slave did.
You state that polygamy in the colonial period was connected with male achievements and statuses. I suggest this has remained so today in some quarters. It may be that in similar ways, women also accepted polygamous marriages because it removed the stigma of associated with unmarried women. Not to forget that marriage was seen as an avenue of vertical mobility, legitimizing children, and a form of socioeconomic insurance. And here I think that the old and new polygamies merge. I say this because what counts for the "new polygamies," for instance, what you call "rational choice" is undoubtedly a byproduct of the stigma attached to unmarried women which perhaps was stronger in the past than today due to social change. Here in Ghana, there are prominent well-educated Christian women married to Moslem men, and allow me to hazard that this is because Islamic theology permits men to have multiple wives. In this case, religion becomes a safety-net of recognition and acceptance that underscore their rational choice.
Framing of the new polygamy is based on all the factors your raised. But I think that one should be careful in pushing gender equality and economic parity to their theoretical limits. We have come a long way, and let me reference Ghana in this context and say that gender equality and economic parity still need more work to bring them to fruition. I dont think this is is in dispute.
Just to end with an aside: there is also the verticality of single parenthood especially on the part women who are in their late childbearing years. This comes in the territory of medically induced births, especially "sperm-donor children." Concubinage that leads to women having children is also common whether in rural or urban areas. I should clarify that both may be more common among middle-class, urban-based, educated women than their opposite-other and may be due to "rational choice," economic independence and social change. I don't know whether we can delineate concubinage into old and new in this arm-chair conversations. Now let me return to my palm-wine before the foam evaporates and makes it tamed!
Kwabena
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: September 12, 2018 3:20 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Notes from the ASA-UK ConferenceKwabena,
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.
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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