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Rastafari Speaks Archive 1

Personal Accounts of Polygamous families
In Response To: Monogamy and Rastas ()

Greetings
Here are two short accounts of people being raised in polygamous households. They were not Rastafari households but still relevant.

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I come from a polygamus family, and I can definitely tell you that my experiences have not been good. My father had six wives. It was always war between us the children, including the young ones who did not understand what was going on. There was always the suspicion that one wife was going to hurt the children of another wife. Even those of us who wanted to be friends could not. After my father died, the hell started and it is still going on.

While I understand that polygamy was useful to our ancestors in the old days. The sort of society we have created today does not really allow it. There is mass poverty and more people have been educated under western standards and values. Apart from this fact, I believe that the traditional African society was more community oriented and less selfish. Today many of us are concerned with having enough to eat, and we have adopted the concept of "to each his own" to a point.

Polygamy can cause a lot of unecessary pain to families. No matter how well parents manage the family, rivalries and jealousies will always draw people apart.

Yes, western societies are hypocritical because many marriages do fall apart because of infidelities, however, they do spare their families of the pain of living and dealing with the headaches of a second, third of fourth wife.

Biola, gs01soo@panther.gsu.edu

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People, I come from a polygamous home that has carried this tradition for a number of generations. I can assure you that the average problems we encountered growing up were not very different from those monogamous home had. And it is amazing to see to date when we have matured that we still remain very close as children of the same father and mothers. We visit our aging parents without discriminating between mother and step mother. With my first hand experience I sometimes get amazed at the absurdity of the assumptions being tossed around about African Polygamy.

This is not to support its continuation though and it is not to say there are no problems of jelousy, competition, etc in such unions. But there is another aspect. What polygamy did in old Africa was to give a home to most of the women and children. Thus you found that it is men of means that practised this for they had to have the land, wealth etc for the upkeep of the large families. To date I have seen such men take young wives with children, give them land and support the children's upbringing, children who would have been homeless otherwise. This also says that polygamy is not dead but its practice is waning with the worsening economic times. Unlike days of yore, there is little land out there and the costs of raising children and keeping the extra wives is not what it was in yesteryears.

Matunda Nyancham
matunda@GAUL.CSD.UWO.CA

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