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.
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