Yel Kaye – Travel Blog, Writing and Photography

I am learning about polygamy through two channels: my host family, and my research. In the family, polygamy is weird in how not weird it is.

I didn’t really get the whole situation straight until recently, because it’s sort of hard to figure out who’s who in a Burkinabe family. Why? Well, in West Africa a home is a courtyard with several small houses. The small houses can be allotted to different wives, extended family or renters like me. But everyone sleeps outside, so you can’t really tell who belongs in which house. Not to mention that extra people seem to sleep in the courtyard all the time, and the gate is always wide open so everyone in the whole neighborhood is always coming and going.

Anyways, it turns out that the second wife was away visiting family in the countryside during my first week in Ouaga, so it wasn’t until this past weekend that I met her. I was introduced without flourish – the father just said “this is my second wife – you know we Africans are like that, right?” Yup. But besides this brief acknowledgement of the extra wife, I can hardly notice polygamy in the family. Life passes as normal… the kids play with each other, the women sit around chatting after the day’s chores are done, and the husband drinks tea and chats with his friends. Not much different than the (monogamous) family I once stayed with at the other end of Ouagadougou.

Of course, with my research I have to think about the topic a lot more actively. (Yes, the project is going rather badly, since I’ve only had one interview and only have a couple more lined up. But I am still thinking about my research topic a lot, and I’ve had a lot of candid conversations!) My first interview went quite well… while we deviated from the exact purpose of my study from time to time, he gave me some excellent soundbites.

A middle-aged man working as an administrative director for a large regional NGO, he told me – to my delight – that my study is completely irrelevant for Burkinabe people. Being a tradition, polygamy is something Burkinabe people don’t see. It just is. As a result, NGOs don’t notice it, don’t consider it in their planning, and certainly don’t debate it! He said that if men are happy to have more than one wife, that NGOs can only applaud them!

Here is where it gets difficult not to judge. Here is a man (who has one wife but who is currently trying to arrange a second, he confessed) who seems to mostly emphasizes that men are content with the arrangement. When he talked about voluntary, forced (when a younger brother is forced to marry his deceased older brother’s wife) and “socially obligatory” polygamy, he always framed it as a man having choice, as a man being forced.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge this gentleman. He may not have meant to explain things mostly from the man’s side. And, if things are really as he said – that people (not just men) are happy to live in polygamous relationships, that we “the intellectual and educated” (his words, not mine) should clap.

However, I still get stuck on one point – the aspect about polygamy that’s had me from the start. Two years ago, I was sitting at a quiet macquis in Po, with my Canadian friend Danielle and a few young Burkinabe men. One of the guys, a particularly opinionated and articulate fellow, told me that polygamy was the number one problem facing gender issues and development more generally in Burkina Faso. He said that as long as there was polygamy, women would be married not for love or for who they are as people, but as an additional piece of property.

Of course, the director I interviewed on Monday did not refer to women as property. To be fair, the gentleman – despite everything – works in development and seems to genuinely believe in the benefits of projects that aim to improve the lives and positions of women. However, he did describe polygamy in a way that hinted at this distasteful aspect.

A man of a certain level of prosperity and maturity will be expected to have multiple wives, he said. Why? Polygamy is good for the image of a family, having additional wife is a display of prosperity.

And me, stuck in my North American, “Western”, “Northern”, “1st-world” ways couldn’t help but think: So an extra couple women is just another sign of prosperity, like a car, a big house, or a gold watch.