Nov4 Written by:Kayle
11/4/2009 3:49 AM
One of my discipleship girls, Simangaliso, today was telling me how her father, a polygamist, was sick. Her mother, wife #1, didn’t want to go see the husband because she dislikes wife #3. What had happened for her to dislike wife #3 so much? Well, the husband married wife #2 and wife #1 and #2 loved each other dearly like sisters. These women would work very hard to help provide for the family. Meanwhile, what was the husband doing? Spending all their hard earned money on a prostitute who eventually became wife #3. So wife #1 resented wife #3 all their lives.
I asked Simangaliso how the missionaries dealt with this problem when they first came to Africa as I had read that the early missionaries had a hard time with this. She confirmed that they told these men upon conversion that they must divorce all wives except one, which left many women and children uncared for and abandoned in society. The missionaries recognized this too wasn’t the solution so instead called upon the next generation of men to only marry one wife. Simangaliso told me that some of the next generation of men were motivated to marry one wife from biblical motivations, but others wanted to work at the mission stations where they would receive education and western clothes (instead of the animal skins). Still others continued in their cultural ways and married many wives, like her father. But today she said that you’d be laughed at if you married more than one woman. Polygamy is culturally “out” but what has essentially replaced polygamy is a “small house”, whereby a man has a secretive other wife and children living somewhere else in the country. His real wife doesn’t know about it. I realized that even though polygamy may not be culturally accepted anymore, it has simply been replaced with a small house, which is more acceptable culturally. So often I wonder if Christianity is really changing the culture here or is it just forcing the culture to substitute one wrong thing for another?
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