Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this community

https://hdl.handle.net/10530/1

Browse

Browsing Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences by Author "Addison, C."

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Attitudes towards polygamy in select African fiction
    (University of Zululand, 2013) Ndabayakhe, Vuyiswa; Addison, C.
    Polygamy is widely practised in African communities. The African social-realist novel, especially when it is woman-authored, shows female characters as having to play docile, subservient roles and accept demeaning positions in polygamous marriages. Although it has been claimed that traditional African marriage creates a satisfactory situation for women, mainly by means of the security it offers and the bonds that it forges between co-wives, the narrators of African realist novels almost always expose only evils associated with polygamy. In most of the texts, co-wives experience conflict with one another, not bonds. Men are portrayed as egocentric beings that greedily satisfy their sexual impulses at the expense of women. Encouraged by their families, they inflict irreparable emotional damage not only on their accumulated wives but often also on their offspring. While blinded by their desires, these men engender many unplanned children for whom they usually take little fatherly responsibility. Consequently, children too are objects of pity in many of the books. This dissertation, by means of close analysis of select African narratives, reveals that, despite all the struggles for liberation and democracy, values highly regarded in modern societies, polygamy is a prevailing sign of male dominance in African communities today. The dissertation shows that even such male-authored novels as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Onuora Nzekwu’s High Life For Lizards fail to recommend a polygamous life to women, while Mariama Bâ ’s So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Kehinde, Es’kia Mphahlele’s Chirundu, Lazarus Miti’s The Prodigal Husband, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes, Sue Nyathi’s The Polygamist,SembeneOusmane’s Xala, Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Rebecca HourwichReyher’s Zulu Woman, Miriam KWere’s The Eighth Wife, T.M. Aluko’s One Man One Wife and Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’Strike all use polygamy to highlight the incongruence between the ideals of democracy and the facts of life as experienced by African women. These texts reflect real social problems. They cast light on the inequalities that prevail in polygamous relationships and imply that the principle of equality cannot be achieved as long as polygamy exists.
University of Zululand