Can your wives have many husbands?

My local dance hall has a severe imbalance between men and women. Sometimes the pick-up lines get desperate. One day during that time when Jacob Zuma was becoming famous, I came there with three other woman friends. This guy decides to dream big and opens with a broad-based pickup line. "Hi, I'm Bafana," he says. "I'm a Zulu man. I can have FIVE wives." He moves his arm expansively to include us all.
Unfortunately for Bafana, those amongst us four who don't mind sharing don't intend to marry. My own morality does not begin with the number of partners. I have one question for Bafana: “Can your wives have many husbands?”
I know there are hundreds of different ways of arranging marriages and relationships in human history, and I know that oppressive forms of marriage might be polygamous or monogamous. Who can really say whether sharing your husband is worse or better than being isolated at home doing housework all day?
Anyway, personally I rather fancy the idea of loving Sipho on Sundays, Themba on
Tuesdays and myself on Mondays.
On the other hand I know that, even today, very many women do not enter marriages freely but as a resource, or to secure resources. That's why my morality begins with equality and ends with safe sex. In brief, I'm willing to share a man but only if he is prepared to share me and faka lo gumboot, because now there's a lot of lives involved.
But Bafana does not hesitate to answer: "No, that's not our tradition."
Bafana's appeal to tradition is really very strange. To begin with, this thing Bafana calls tradition is something that people create and recreate again and again. I doubt that the dream Bafana is calling up when he makes that inclusive sweep of the arm has much in common with the way things were in Shaka's time.
When you talk about the full range of polygamous relations in Jozi, you could be
talking about many things. You could be talking about someone with a traditional marriage in the rural area and vat en sit here in the city. You could be talking about the women and men who discretely "work around" their lovers' girlfriends
and boyfriends. Who knows, you might even be referring to your friend's serial fatherhood, paying 'damages' here and there, or your other friend's second baby by a another guy.
Traditions adapt. Lobola is no longer always a down payment. Wives of richer polygamists, like the Swazi king and Jacob Zuma, live in completely independent households rather than one homestead, and the wives in the poorest polygamous marriages live in a single house instead of separate huts.
In other words 'tradition' is constantly forced into new shapes by new circumstances. So why should Bafana's tradition not adapt to equality?
Anyway, if Bafana could afford five wives in the old way, he wouldn't be frequenting a dance hall in the ghetto. In Shaka's time, we four women would have been snapped up by the elites. Even today the big men are the big players in this game. In a number of central African countries where polygamy was widely accepted, only one third of married men actually had two wives or more, according to 1966/1970 figures. Less than 2 out of 20 had as many as four.
If it was our fathers and brothers and maternal uncles and their income deciding, instead of ourselves, Bafana would not stand a chance with us four. We're all hardworking and earning, and older than Bafana thinks which makes us highly experienced. To afford us, therefore, Bafana would have to win the lotto and then set one of us to work for the next one's lobola. I might agree to that if I was stuck on the farm, longing for someone to talk to and an extra pair of hands. But in my current life, I don't see why the four of us would then need Bafana after paying each other's bride price.
We four are lucky that we we're financially independent and therefore free to declare ourselves priceless. That is lucky also for Bafana because he could
never 'afford' any one of us unless we invent a new tradition where
we give ourselves freely to whom we choose.
It's not only women and men who became unequal in the tradition Bafana calls upon. It's also a tradition of inequality amongst men.
If it's only men who can have many spouses, then either there is a big shortage of men, or many men are excluded from marriage.
Now as I understand things in Shaka's time, a man of Bafana's age and status would be a long, long way from getting any wives. Marriage for men was delayed until some
time in their thirties. Younger men were conscripted to Shaka's iImpi and before
that they had to serve their fathers.
Zulu women were married at a younger age to older men who survived the wars. Lobola took the form of cattle, a key store of Zulu wealth, and therefore women's marriages were not free but determined by their families' needs. Their relations with their husbands were also unlikely to be free, because their work and their children
were now their husband's source of wealth (and indirectly, Shaka's source of tribute and warriors).
Only a very few women in such societies might gain some power of their own, as the mother of a powerful man or as his first wife who co-ordinates the work of all his
wives.
Marriage here was not purely about creating a home but also about creating a homestead, which was a unit of production. The connection between women and work in one-man manywives polygamy is clear in a 1976 survey of Ghana's Temne people. Out of
36 rural men who wanted another wife, 20 gave the reason "help with work". Out of 42 rural women who wanted their husband to take a co-wife, 33 gave this reason. Perhaps this explains why oneman many-wives polygamy is more common in the (very short) written history of Africa than forms of polygamy such as practiced by the Irigwe, where both women and men were expected to take many husbands and wives.
It is likely that many-wives polygamy developed gradually, and power in the homestead was probably balanced between men and women for a long time even so. Surely women's submission would not have come quick and easy. The Temne case study discusses how wives sometimes gang up against a husband who is treating one wife unfairly. I can't imagine me and my three friends meekly taking orders from just one man if we're the ones putting food on the table. For all we know, manywives
polygamy could have begun with women banding together to farm and deciding to share a man amongst themselves.
But when some people start to get wealth from the work of others, there develops a pressure to control labour, which turns into controlling women. As class societies develop and mature in Africa, so do attempts to control women and childbearing, and so marriage rules become distorted more and more to suit the interests of a ruling minority. In our part of the world, it's possible that cattle-herding helped to weaken women's power, which was often based on gardening.
In any case, Bafana's tradition was laid down in the midst of entrenching inequality
Life has moved on since then. In the most rural corners of KwaZulu Natal and far-flung Venda, there are still places where polygamy survives because people depend on family labour. But in most of South Africa today, work has moved outside the home
and families are now units of consumption and survival. The meaning of modern polygamy has changed because people form relationships or marry mainly for personal fulfillment - for example love and enjoyment - and for financial security.
A common reason for modern polygamy is migrancy. Unlike the old forms of polygamy, this is purely about building a fulfilling home, it's just that the migrant wants that home in both places. This still happens as people move to towns and cities searching for jobs.
Then there is a lot of spaza-monogamy, where men or women have additional secret girlfriends/boyfriends, sometimes long-term, outside of their main relationship.
My problem with this is when it is done without the other partners' knowledge or permission, because people then cannot explain why they want to use condoms and
these relations then become a major means of spreading Aids.
Then there are forms of polygamy which call on tradition to legitimate what would simply be called sleeping around e-lokshun. This is all about powerful men proving
their wealth, status, and manliness through attracting many women and perhaps producing a string of remotecontrol children. There's a lot of ordinary guys who have the same definition of manliness, but few can afford to support so many separate households.
This is also a thoroughly modern aspect of polygamy today, because in Shaka's time the really big-wigs would have increased production, not just expenses, with each extra wife.
What I find objectionable here is, first, that these guys would never accept
that a woman could also want more partners. Second is the implied definition
of what it means to be a man or a woman - for example, that manliness is just about impregnation and then handing over some money, while day to day hands-on parenting is only women's work.
Sexism persists in modern capitalism and, while a woman like myself has gained more independence through work, there are still many women who enter unequal relations for material reasons.
A man who thinks love relations are about proving his power will think nothing of becoming a sugar daddy to a string of poorer girls much younger than him. That's not to say that all polygamists are sugar daddies or that no sugar-daddies are 'monogamous', but that aspects of this particular concept of polygamy transfer easily from one to the other. And women who think that personal progress means marrying up may enter polygamous marriages with a powerful man to get a better
standard of living.
I'm looking forward to and fighting for that world where people can offer themselves
freely and honestly to each other, always as equals, without the intrusion of sexism, material deprivation or ruling class interference.

From Socialism from Below 64, March 2008