Part One: I Grew Up in a Polygamous Home
A young man came to me recently with what he considered good evidence for taking a second wife. His evidence was from the United Nations. Or so he thought. A message circulating on WhatsApp announces with the authority of breaking news that men have become scarce commodities on planet Earth. According to a purported “UN First Quarter Demographic Report 2025,” the world’s 7.8 billion people consist of 5.6 billion women and only 2.2 billion men.
Then comes some fantastic arithmetic.
Of the supposed 2.2 billion men, one billion are already married, 130 million are in prison, 70 million are sick or mentally challenged, 56 per cent of those remaining are unemployed, 3 per cent are gay, 1 per cent Catholic priests, 10 per cent relatives and another 30 per cent above 65.
The conclusion? Ladies, please manage the few men available!
It is hilarious until a young Nigerian man presents the same article as part of his justification for marrying another wife.
Then the joke stops being funny. The report is false.
In fact, this lie is an old traveller wearing a new agbada. Essentially the same story circulated years ago and was falsely attributed to the United Nations. It was investigated and debunked. The world does not contain 5.6 billion women and 2.2 billion men. Men and women are globally close to numerical parity. Nigeria itself certainly has no dramatic shortage of men remotely resembling the WhatsApp fantasy.
The claim that 130 million men are in prison should immediately arouse suspicion. The entire global prison population, men and women combined is only a fraction of that figure. The unemployment claim is equally preposterous. Yet the message keeps travelling. Why?
Perhaps because human beings particularly enjoy statistics when the statistics confirm what they already want to believe. The young man contemplating a second wife did not manufacture those figures. He received them. But they conveniently supported something he was already considering.
His argument forced me to think. Not merely as a Christian or columnist, but as a child of polygamy.
I grew up in a polygamous home.
My father was not a poor man struggling to maintain several families. He was a successful cocoa farmer who worked in alliance with a European produce merchant. By the standards of his generation and environment, he was rich. That matters because one defence of polygamy I have heard repeatedly is that the real problem is poverty.
“Let the man have enough money.” Really?
My father had money. What money could not purchase was peace between competing centres of motherhood.
The wives and their children were perpetually (although subtly) at “war” over one hundred things. Some were substantial. Others, looking back, were probably trivial. But in a polygamous household, a small issue can quickly acquire another meaning because it is no longer simply about the issue.
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Whose mother? Whose child? Who received more? Who was preferred?
Who was ignored? Who owns what?
Who inherits what? Who did father love most? And eventually children inherit quarrels whose origins they may not even remember.
Therein lies something we rarely discuss when romanticising polygamy:
A man marries his wives one at a time. His children inherit the entire arrangement at once. My father died fifty years ago. Half a century later, we are still struggling with the partitioning of properties and old wounds that have proved remarkably resistant to time.
That is where this conversation ceases to be a theological exercise for me.
A man contemplating Wife Number Two usually calculates his present capacity. Can I feed another household? Pay school fees? Rent another apartment? Maintain both women and their children? Perhaps he is calculating the wrong things. That is if he is calculating anything at all.
He should ask: What happens when I am dead? Who controls which property? What happens when one mother’s children believe another mother’s children received more?
What happens when affection is remembered differently? What happens when an ageing patriarch can no longer maintain the delicate political federation he created?
And fifty years after his funeral, will his children be sitting around one table remembering him or sitting separately calculating his land? These are not theoretical questions to me.
Of course, someone will say: “But polygamy is African culture.” True. And not quite true. Africa is not one village. It contains thousands of peoples, histories and marriage traditions. Nevertheless, polygymy; one man marrying multiple wives, has historically been established in many African societies.
There were reasons: agriculture, labour, lineage, children, prestige, inheritance, security and political alliances. In an agrarian society, a large household could also be an economic unit. More hands could mean greater capacity to cultivate land. A successful farmer in an earlier African economy could therefore view a large family differently from a salary earner in today’s Lagos, Ota, Abeokuta or even Abuja.
But culture deserves something better than blind preservation. It deserves interrogation. Our ancestors designed institutions around the realities confronting them. If those realities change, must every institution remain frozen?
Today’s family increasingly buys what it once produced. Children who might once have contributed agricultural labour now require school fees, healthcare, technology, university education and years of parental investment.
Land has fragmented. Housing is expensive. Women are better educated, economically active and increasingly able to exercise choices unavailable to many of their grandmothers. A cultural practice can survive long after the economic ecosystem that once made it rational has disappeared.
That is not an insult to African culture. Culture itself evolves because human beings think. Nigeria’s own figures should make thinkers think. Polygamy remains substantial, but it has declined considerably over the decades. Recent demographic data also show it to be much more common among rural women than urban women, and dramatically more prevalent among women with little or no education than among women with higher education.
Correlation is not automatically causation. But surely we are entitled to ask why polygyny declines so markedly with education and urbanisation.
Could some of what we call permanent “African culture” actually have been adaptation to particular economic and social circumstances?
There is another problem with the argument that polygamy is necessary because women supposedly outnumber men. Imagine 100 marriageable men and 100 marriageable women. If everyone marries one person, 100 couples can theoretically form. Now let ten wealthy men marry three women each. Those ten men have married thirty women, leaving ninety men competing for seventy women. Who created the shortage? Not God. Not the United Nations.
Polygyny altered the marriage market.
Turn the argument upside down. Polygamy cannot easily be defended as the solution to a shortage of men when widespread polygamy can itself contribute to a shortage of women available to other men. The effect becomes even more interesting where wealthy older men marry substantially younger women who might otherwise marry men closer to their own generation.
Suddenly this is not merely about male privilege. It is also about other males.
Then Christianity enters the argument, and things become uncomfortable.
Christians often declare confidently that “the Bible condemns polygamy.” Does it? Abraham. Jacob.David. Solomon. These are hardly obscure characters. Several great figures of the Old Testament had multiple wives or concubines. If we are going to investigate this honestly, Christians cannot tear inconvenient pages out of the Bible. But defenders of polygamy should not celebrate too quickly.
The Bible may record polygamous men, but what does it record about their homes? Sarah and Hagar. Leah and Rachel. Hannah and Peninnah. David and his children. Solomon and his wives. Read those stories again. Not merely looking for theological heroes, but looking at the families. Look at jealousy. Rivalry. Competition over children. Mothers positioning sons.
Succession struggles. Bitterness.
And, in David’s household, eventually bloodshed.
Perhaps scripture is doing something more subtle than issuing a matrimonial instruction manual. The Bible allows us to meet polygamous patriarchs. It does not necessarily invite us to envy their homes. Which brings us to the more difficult question. If Abraham, Jacob and David were polygamous, where did Christian monogamy come from? Jesus? Paul? The early Church?
Or, as some Africans insist, was monogamy essentially European culture dressed in Christian clothing and subsequently imposed upon Africa by missionaries?
That question deserves an answer.
Because if African culture is going into the witness box, intellectual honesty demands that Christianity must enter the same box. Next week: Did God command monogamy or did Europe?
