South Africa's leading TV soap opera, Generations the Legacy, is currently exploring the topic of polyandry with one if its main characters.
A polyandrous marriage is when a woman is married to more than one man at the same time. It’s like polygamy only this time the women are calling the shots.
In the soapie (as we call such shows here), the character, Karabo Moroka, is a successful married businesswoman and socialite who has been having an affair with her college sweetheart, Zola Radebe, who is now a widower. He also happens to be a family friend and a business associate of Karabo and her estranged husband Tau Mogale.
Karabo’s problem is that she does not want to leave her husband and their blended family, but she also wants to be with her old love Zola. For the time being both men appear horrified at the thought. However, Karabo is adamant and argues that South African law, which allows cultural marriages as well as same-sex marriages, does not specifically ban polyandry.
Along with the 4,919,000 South Africans who watch the show (according to available Prime Time TV viewing figures), I am waiting with bated breath to see how the story develops and already it has tongues wagging on social media and elsewhere.
Of course I wouldn’t be surprised if the writers of Generations hadn’t been spurred to bring up the polyandry angle by the 2013 news story from Kenya where famously two Kenyan men signed an agreement to 'marry' the same woman.
If memory serves me right, the woman in that story had been splitting her affections between the two fellows for a number of years, and when asked to choose one over the other she had refused and argued she didn’t see why she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too.
In the end they came up with what seemed like a workable solution for all the parties involved. Actually, I wonder how that’s going.
I was thinking about all this the other day when I saw on Facebook someone had reposted the 2014 story of the signing of the Kenyan law allowing for legal polygamy and allowing men to take one extra wives without needing to consult current wives.
As I said in my reaction to that post, the smelly stuff will hit the fan when women start agitation for the right to more than one husband.
Let’s face it, if we are talking complete equality of the sexes all the way then polyandry should be just as acceptable and unremarkable as polygamy is, at least across the African continent.
Meanwhile, people who justify polygamy as being cultural should be careful of such an argument as polyandry was also a part of certain cultures – not just in Africa but around the world.
I read somewhere that “traditionally in African societies where polyandry was practised, it was borne out of socioeconomic necessity. For instance, a woman may have needed more than one man in order to handle all the duties around the home such as farming, cattle-rearing, shepherding, and so on".
Of course in the 21st century urban African setting, if extra help is needed around the house, people tend to employ domestic staff and the wealthier you are the more servants (even if you insist on calling them house helps) you can have around the home.
That said, however, African middle class is slowly coming around to the ownership of gadgetry to take over some of the roles played by house staff. So eventually more homes will acquire washing machines and dishwashers and inevitably domestic staff will be as rare here in Africa as they are in the more advanced economies of the West and Asia.
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