Monogamy Kills African Man

 

By Dele Omojuyigbe

I just checked, and I perceived the evil embedded in monogamy. It is a virulent killer! A humongous foe introduced to us in Africa through religion. 

Those who introduced it pretended to love us. Not exactly so! They had their own agenda. Now some of us know better via reflection. It wasn't love they expressed. It was an undeclared intention. They sinned against us. They took away our liberty as African men to choose, using religion, incognito, and frightening us with punishment in the fiery furnace if we dare recalcitrance. 

How can polygamy lead to hell fire? Who said it? I can't see it in my Bible. Jesus Christ didn't proclaim it. And Moses, whose laws were confirmed by Christ, didn't declare it. Those who did, did it for themselves. 

God listens to all genuine petitions, including widowed men's. Deep, sobering thoughts disturbing the soul! Single-wife widowers know better. They are shattered and billowed, left with grace to trudge on when their wife left them. Our forefathers in Africa were less worried when they lost a wife. They had wives.

Monogamy preachers deflated our cultural pride to propel their selfish agenda. They drenched themselves with radical religious beliefs and zealotry ignored by the scripture. They made an unsubstantiated  proclamation on monogamy. The pillar of their confident, authoritative command drools. Except for the episcopacy, and, to a lesser degree, the clergy, monogamy isn't commanded.

Why is it not declared? Whatever God commands and is obeyed blesses man. Monogamy doesn't bless man. It kills man. So, it couldn't have been Divine. A man loses his only wife and dies by half. The pain cuts across all strata of his life. He loses his bearing and staggers like a drunk. 

But a woman loses her husband and regains composure after a while. She sits comfortably with her children in their various homes for life. Even in another marriage, the woman's children are in control. They order her and tell her what to do. She obeys. A woman has many husbands in the number of children she has. Only sexual activity is denied, and that may not mean much to her in old age. All her sons and daughters are her husbands. Not so with men! They are different. They don't have that privilege.

At a certain age, the wife pays more attention to her children than to her spouse. The man is beginning to feel lonely even while the wife is alive. He is left out in some discussions while the wife travels when any of the children has a new baby, leaving the husband alone at home. Who takes care of him? No one asks. Nobody cares. The man is for himself. He paces up and down alone at home like a cub lost in the jungle. He becomes a shadow of himself and lives at the mercy of the wife who now takes charge.

The situation becomes precarious if the only wife dies. How does the man again make the right choice of a new wife in his afternoon? Getting a wife is not a problem. It can be much easier than when he was a boy. But what about compatibility, easier discovered as a youth than in replacement after a loss, often dressed in pretences of piety and generosity! Polygamy solves such riddles. Unfortunately, every African value has been shamed by religion and reduced to idolatory or disobedience to God's injunction. 

Some issues are better left undiscussed except by people with experience. In 2008, while I was HOD General Studies at NIJ, Lagos, a lady reporter/line- editor at Sunday Mirror newspaper came to interview me on the Invasion of the Nigerian Media by Moneybags. After the discussion was over, the reporter told me that she would publish the long interview unedited, and also use its extract in her column called "Matrimony" or something like that. 'Oh, really! Are you married?' I queried. "No!", she replied. 'Don't you think you are not qualified to write about matrimony?' She didn't like that. She wasn't pleased with my comment. Her visage showed it. But I was only being sincere. He who feels it knows it.

Monogamy is anti-men in Africa. I know it. It kills faster than any known sickness. I have beheld it with guarded introspection. I have seen instances. It is an infliction on the African man. It's a spell cast upon him by strangers while asleep. They make him see polygamy as evil and anti-christianity. 

It may be so in the western world. Their system takes care of old men. But in Africa, who cares, except the surviving wife or wives in a polygamy. In monogamy, the man is left alone. It takes time before he gathers himself and begins to see life differently.

Conversely, it protects African women from the attacks of callous in-laws, somehow. It can't be more than that. Connecting it to men's commitment to their faith is a ruse.

How more christianly are monogamous men than polygamists? How genuine is their monogamy? Isn't it more  notional than practical? Haven't we seen anti-faith behaviours in the fold? Isn't drawing economic sense from one man, one wife, more appealing than giving it religious connotation? It is. And that should be by choice.