More is not merrier: The four Ndi Wamba widows (top) with a friend, Lucienne (second from right), who is the first of 20 wives of their village chief. Without their husband, the widows can’t support their large family. (Alexis Grant)
In modern Cameroon polygamy doesn’t pay
When life is more complex than just fields to tend, a passel of wives is more a financial strain than a status symbol.
By Alexis Grant | Contributor / November 13, 2008 edition
Fongo-Ndeng, Cameroon
Fongo-Ndeng, Cameroon
Benoit Ndi Wamba didn’t know exactly how many children were in his family. Like most Cameroonians born into large polygamous families, he never had a reason to count.
But with money tight after the death of his father, the 23-year-old was partly responsible for finding money to pay this year’s public school fees for his siblings. So he ticked off their names, one by one. There was lanky Jean, 21. Sylvain, 18, a top student. Janvier, an 11-year-old who wears, in this French-speaking province, a T-shirt that reads “Fabulous.” And Mr. Ndi Wamba himself was entering his first year of university.
Those were just his mother’s children. Then there were his other brothers and sisters, born to his late father’s other three wives. A handful of grandchildren and cousins also lived with the family, complicating the count. All referred to one another as brother and sister, explaining only after much prodding who, as Cameroonians say, has the “same mother, same father.”
Yet one thing was clear: With more than a dozen children who hoped to attend school this year, the Ndi Wamba family faced a pile of fees.
It was a problem Ndi Wamba swore his own children would never face; he would marry just one woman, he said, and have significantly fewer children than his father.
“If it was just my three brothers and me, we would not be having this problem,” Ndi Wamba said sternly, a folder of university enrollment forms tucked under his arm.
An increasing number of men in this central African nation are coming to the same conclusion, rejecting the polygamous lifestyles of their fathers and opting for monogamy instead. With the rising costs of school, healthcare, and food, it’s simply too expensive to have a large family, they say.
• • •
I met the Ndi Wamba family six years ago, when I was a college student studying polygamy. They were supposed to serve as a case study, but instead became my second family during the three weeks I lived with them in the village of Fongo-Ndeng, in western Cameroon.
When I returned this September for a visit, their lives had much changed. Nearly a year after the death of their 78-year-old husband, the four wives still donned all black, mourning not only his spirit but also the loss of his government pension. With the help of friends and family back home, I paid tuition for the women’s children and others who live on the compound, 18 in all.
Again I chatted with the women as they cooked over open fires on the ground in their kitches, alternating among the four dirt-floor houses that, along with their husband’s empty house, created a semicircle around an often-muddy yard. When he was alive, the husband, too, split his time among his wives, spending one night with one woman, the next with another.
Traditionally, polygamy has been a symbol of wealth and status, particularly in rural areas. Village chiefs until recently married as many as 25 women, while other men typically wed between two and eight wives.
The lifestyle has its advantages, mainly the production of a labor force to cultivate fields of corn, beans, and root crops like manioc. But modernity has taken its toll, even on families like the Ndi Wambas who have shunned other changes such as electricity and running water. Crops can feed many mouths, but only hard currency pays school fees, which start in secondary school around the equivalent of $45 annually and mount for higher grades.
“Before, maybe polygamy was good,” explains Charlotte Nguimfack, who has four children with her monogamous husband. “Life wasn’t difficult like it is now.”
While those economic difficulties are driving polygamy’s decline, other factors also are at play, including the spread of Christianity, which prohibits polygamy. And as more women become college-educated, some have begun to demand monogamy.
In the early 1990s, a quarter of married men in Cameroon had more than one wife, according to the country’s National Institute of Statistics. By 2004, just 11 percent were polygamous.
Likewise, the percentage of women who had at least one co-wife dropped to 30 percent in 2004 compared with 39 percent in 1991, institute data show.
Similar decreases are occurring in other countries across central and western Africa, says Savage Njikam, who oversees the University of Douala’s anthropology department.
“The more educated people are, the less likely they are to have the same household as their grandfather,” says Mrs. Njikam, a social anthropologist. “But you still will find educated women who will accept being second wives.”
Monogamous men and women cite another reason to avoid polygamy, one their polygamous counterparts are reluctant to discuss. Some multiwife households suffer from jealousy and conflict.
Sallahou Aboubakar, who grew up in Cameroon’s Muslim north in a two-wife home, says his mother’s disputes with her co-wife influenced him to choose monogamy.
“The wives don’t stay peaceful,” says Mr.. Aboubakar, who lives with his wife and their newborn baby in Yaounde, the capital. “It always causes problems.”
His wife’s aunt, Adamou Patou, overhearing the conversation speaks up to illustrate the point, telling a tale that has her family, all sitting on mats on the floor, roaring with laughter.
When her husband was alive, she says, she and her co-wife fought endlessly, mostly over where the husband would sleep. One morning, after the husband had spent too many nights with Patou, her co-wife entered the bedroom to find the husband freshly showered and back in bed. She threw a bucket of charcoal dust into the room, covering the bed and her husband in gray powder.
Despite such stories, some young Cameroonians continue to keep polygamy alive. Bertrand Folepe, who married his girlfriend when she became pregnant six years ago, took a second wife two years later at the urging of his parents. His father, who had eight wives, wanted him to marry a woman from his village.
Mr. Folepe didn’t protest; he is proud to carry on the tradition. On display in his family’s sitting room, which he shares with both wives, are portraits of each couple, side by side.
“If in the future I have a lot of money, I’ll take more [wives],” says Folepe, who makes a living selling small livestock.
Folepe, who lives with his wives and seven children in the small city of Dschang, has urbanized the polygamous lifestyle. Instead of dwelling in separate, adjacent homes like his family in the village where he grew up, his entire family shares one house. Each wife has her own bedroom, but the two share an outdoor kitchen, swapping cooking duties each week.
Other city-dwelling men have modernized polygamy differently, by creating separate households of independent families that share a father.
Even as traditional polygamy declines, it’s still common for men and women to have multiple partners, by either going outside their marriage or divorcing one spouse before marrying another.
Martha Ngum, head of the sociology and anthropology department at the University of Buea in southwest Cameroon, calls the latter trend “serial monogamy.” Women are driving the shift, she says, because they now attend university, work outside the home and are financially independent more than ever before.
But outside Cameroon’s cities, it’s still a man’s decision whether to take more than one wife and a woman’s responsibility to accept his choice.
Decades after accepting their husband’s decision to engage in polygamy, the Ndi Wamba wives now face another duty: providing for their many children without his financial support.
On the few days when the women aren’t cultivating the fields, they earn petty cash selling snacks at local markets. The wives hope their eldest sons, like Benoit, contribute small income. They also look to relatives for help; several of the children already have left the village compound to live with an uncle or grandmother.
For this family, the years ahead will not be easy. But as the Ndi Wamba women often say, “We must endure.”
2. MsE | 11.13.08
And not to mention the Africans (many illegals) that have migrated to the United States have to work 4 and 5 jobs to send money back home to Africa so that they help the villages due to so many children being born by the 6 and 7 or more African wives of one African husband. It is a shame that they prefer dire and deadly poverty and not to mention the horrible living conditions to birth control/self control. How can you endure the poverty (for Long) that they endure, and with the ways of thinking that most polygamous Africans think, it is no wonder they have to live the way that they live.
4. Thelma Williams | 11.13.08
I see that some are still hard to learn. I don’t believe that polygamy was intended for the poor to start with.Having lived in Nigeria where I saw polygamy first hand, it was and is a problem for most.I once saw a father that had 60 children and did not even know the names of all of them.Enrolling them in school was a nightmare as he did not have the enrollment fee for all of them.The school’s Principal was always having to go home to stop his wives from fighting.Maybe one day it will return to one husband to one wife as I believe it was distenied to be. It really is an unhealth and a preverted way to live.I don’t believe that those that are involved in ploygamy understand or can know the true meaning of love.There is no way that a person can love to people as one should love another when you take them on as a wife or husband.
5. Wondering | 11.13.08
Interesting article, but what do women think besides “driving the shift”. What about women’s hardships, likes and dislikes of the polygamy?
6. cyrus howell | 11.14.08
Traditionally, polygamy has been a symbol of wealth and status, particularly in rural areas. Village chiefs until recently married as many as 25 women, while other men typically wed between two and eight wives.
I guess this leaves the rest of the bachelors to contract aides from the only other availble women left over such as prostittes and the promiscuous.
7. Nelson Robison | 11.14.08
It has always been traditional, that once the eldest in a family went to college, that they would help to ensure the education of the younger siblings.
As traditional cultures collapse and disappear, the ideas that were inherent to them, such as polygamy, disappear along with them.
In the past, polygamy, played an important role for the family structure, it provided for the children a stable, mother figure. This mother figure could be one if not all of the women involved in the marriage. The increasing life expectancy has played a major role in the decline of polygamy, during childbirth, many women succumbed to death, so to have more than one wife, helped in the rearing of children and provided for the families’ stability.
Now with the advent of women’s rights and the availability of a college education, more and more women are choosing not to engage in the practice of polygamy. They see the polygamous marriage as a sign of the past and do not with to associate themselves with the strictures and intense familial relationship that is a polygamous union.
More and more, there will be a decline not only due to the social demands of the women of the countries that practice polygamy, but the economic roles are shifting and the woman, is becoming more and more a breadwinner in the household.
Until and unless things change on a societal level and more power is given to the woman to choose whether or not to be involved in a polygamous relationship, then we will see a much faster decline in the rates of polygamous relationships as a whole.
8. KC JACOB, MANAGER SBI | 11.14.08
Whether Camaroon or congo or kerala the ultimate sufferers are women.Dignity of women is always secondary.Perhaps everything including values and ego are relative.
9. Autumn Rain | 11.14.08
What If I wanted to contribute money to them for the children”s education.where should I send it?
10. MBA Karin | 11.19.08
Unfortunately, this article seems to imply that polygamous families experience the difficulty of paying for their children’s school in a way that monogamous families do not. I would say 90% of families have a difficult time getting the money together.
Additionally, the quote at the end ‘we must endure’ is fairly emblematic of the fatalistic Cameroonian attitude ‘on va faire comment.’ Or, the attitude that we must continue living despite material obstacles. This is not an attitude particular to plural marriage spouces (although it is placed in the article so as to illicit sympathy from the readers; it demands that we feel outrage that these widows are left with little finaces).
Demanding that Cameroonians use birth control or employ ’self control’ as a means to de-populate the country is blatantly uncaring. I cannot imagine it was the intention of the author of this article that people respond by saying that young men cannot locate women in this system and are left go ‘contract AIDES.’ Do some research. Only some 5% of Cameroonian population has AIDES and I have never heard of a young man having difficulty finding a sexual partner, a marriage partner or otherwise due to the polygamous system.
Furthermore, I personally know a polygamous family that lives not far from the family featured in this article, outside of Dschang. The second wife was taken when the first wife fell ill. In this particular case, the second wife takes care of the older wife as a sister or daughter. The chief and husband has expressed concern over the wellbeing of his people. He has five children with his two wives and is not interested in having any more (note: five children is not uncommon for a monogamous couple).
It is important that we avoid ethnocentrism in our analysis of these areas and these subjects. Bonne journee a tous!
11. jim robinson | 11.20.08
It just proves that with a little money and education we can all make this a better world!
12. Milagros Vallejo | 11.21.08
Do not want to be judgemental but instead objective however, the biggest problem here is education. The more educated this world becomes the more we’ll be aware of consequences,cause and effects..One can have 30 children but needs to be able to provide education and good environment for those children. The more educated humans are, the more productive to society they will be.
13. agendia aloysius | 12.01.08
Nice article. Polygamy may be deadly but yet, in this modern era, both in developed and developing communities, the rate of concubinage is high and, divorce among monogamous families still extremely high especially in the west. I am not polygamous but, i have n problems against it, if the plight of any party is not threatened. I think polygamy is a choice and depends on wether the man and the women all agree. There should be no coercion in it.
14. Tesla Falcon | 12.07.08
The article points to 3 distinctly different reasons for polygamy’s decline in Cameroon.
1) Money - The problem in the beginning of the article is that price of education (taxes by the government) for each child in the school system. As the child grows and graduates, the price gets gradually higher. Thus the problem for the family in question is NOT one of survival (they seem to have enough food, etc.) but one of progress. They want to increase their chances for the future for ALL of them, rather than focusing on the “most likely to succeed”. This same “problem” is smacked in my face here in the US every day considering that I and my wife have 6 children. “How do you afford them all?” Simple: we sacrifice from ourselves what such people are unwilling to.
2) Education - As “Christianity” spreads, polygamy is rejected. It noted that as the women get educated they become less willing to be a 2nd wife and their need for security in a marriage is less since they can work and earn for themselves. Oddly enough, this same thing happened in America, only instead of rejecting polygamy for monogamy, they rejected monogamy and men for lesbianism. Such “women’s studies” taught them that men are monsters, slave drivers, abusers, and sexual maniacs. Marriage was equated with slavery, children with bondage, love with lies, and men with Satan himself. Those who didn’t reject men so thoroughly instead found themselve jumping from bed to bed as wife or girlfriend, unable to form a stable, lifelong relationship. As stated in the article, the population and average family size was “the problem”. Instead of 14 or 15 per household (by a single wife), averages dropped to 4 or 5, nowadays for many marriages only 1 or 2. I’ve heard all kinds of epithets and rude remarks from even strangers about the number of children we have.
3) Conflict - It’s noted that many polygamous household suffer from fighting co-wives. I’m not surprised. Why? Because all relationships are work. The co-wives have to work at their relationships with each other as much or more than the husband has to work on his relationships with his wives. Far too many people refuse to expend the effort to care about anyone other than themselves. Please note that as polygamy is phased out, the conflict isn’t ending. Instead, divorce is rising. That’s where we’re at in America. Children of divorcees decide that marriage isn’t worth it because of all the conflict and decide to merely “shack up” or keep their sexual contacts loose and changing. Kids can always be killed (aborted) or given away to someone else since they neither want the responsibility nor have any understanding in what it takes to rear a child.
Congratulations, Cameroon! You’ve started down the same slippery slope as the US, but don’t worry, we’ll show you how to die by destroying ourselves on the inside out before you reach the bottom. Watch our example: just don’t follow it.
15. Janet | 03.06.09
Great article, lots of good information.
What happens to all the excess men in the community. The math suggests there must have been many at the height of polygamy.
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1. HiloBob | 11.13.08
People should be able to live a life of choice. If all in the family of polygamous arrangement are happy, Christians shouldn’t be in a position of making choices for them. Period.