Now that the dust has settled and everyone has had their say, let’s address The Polygamist.
Actually, let me correct myself. I’m not entirely convinced what we witnessed was polygamy.
It looked more like entitlement masquerading as tradition, deception dressed up as culture, and infidelity seeking refuge in the language of African customs. Sprinkle in a generous dose of public humiliation, and you have what social media spent days dissecting.
But perhaps that’s precisely why the film deserves our attention. Not because it glorifies polygamy. Nor because it condemns it. Rather, because it exposes something far more uncomfortable: our remarkable ability to confuse two very different things.
For days, timelines were awash with familiar refrains. “This happens in many homes.” “Our grandfathers had many wives.” “Why is everyone acting surprised?” Almost overnight, a conversation about one man’s choices became a referendum on the institution of polygamy itself.
That is a mistake. Because before we decide whether polygamy is acceptable, outdated, oppressive or simply misunderstood, we should first agree on what it actually is.
The title, The Polygamist, invites us into that very conversation. At its core, polygamy is not merely a man having multiple partners. Anthropologists have long described it as a recognised family structure governed by social rules, responsibilities and mutual acknowledgment. Whether one agrees with it or not, traditional polygamy was never intended to thrive in secrecy. It demanded accountability. Wives knew of one another. Children were recognised. A man’s status was measured not by how many women he could seduce but by whether he could provide, protect and treat each household with fairness.
That is a far cry from what passes for polygamy in today’s world. Nowadays, a wife discovers another woman not because she was welcomed into an established family, but because secrets eventually expire. Phones are hidden. Stories don’t add up. Promises are recycled from one relationship to the next. The problem isn’t that there is more than one woman. The problem is that every woman has been led to believe she is the only one.
That isn’t polygamy. It’s deception with cultural packaging. And then there is the woman. Not the other woman. Not the side chick. The wife.
Somewhere along the way, we reduced the Proverbs 31 woman to a caricature. We stripped her of her wisdom, enterprise and strength and recast her as the patron saint of endurance. Her greatest virtue, we are told, is staying. If he strays, pray. If he lies, fast. If he humiliates you publicly, protect his image privately. Somewhere, someone will remind her that “a godly woman builds her home”, as though the burden of construction belongs only to her, while he is free to keep demolishing it.
Social media has even coined a name for her: the ‘GOAT wife’. The woman applauded for tolerating the intolerable. The woman who wins medals for surviving what should never have been normalised.
The truth is, many of these women live in a kind of purgatory. Some stay because of children. Others because of money, social standing, family expectations or the fear of starting over. None of those reasons make them foolish; they simply remind us that leaving is often far more complicated than those watching from the sidelines would like to believe.
Perhaps that is why so many people rushed to defend what they had just watched. It is easier to call it culture than to confront the possibility that we have normalised dishonesty. It is easier to tell women to pray than to tell men to be truthful. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether a man was honouring his commitments and started asking whether a woman was enduring enough.
And perhaps that is the greatest achievement of The Polygamist. It forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: Have we become so eager to defend tradition that we’ve forgotten what the tradition actually required?
Because if culture is invoked only to justify men’s privileges while conveniently discarding the duties that came with them, then it is no longer culture we are defending.
It is simply male entitlement wearing traditional attire.
