Though Illegal, Polygamy Part of African Life

The businessman in the next seat, a stranger, announced that he was going to marry me.

“What about your wife?” I asked, rightly assuming any wealthy-looking African in his 50s had one.

“Oh, I have four,” he answered nonchalantly. “You’re going to be No. 5.”

Not possible, I countered. Islam only allows four wives.

Ah, but our African traditions impose no limits, he responded.

The exchange on the flight from New York drew in a university professor--from Cameroon like the businessman--who wanted to know where I, also an African, would find a man willing to have only one woman.

He has an American wife in the United States, where he lectures, the professor said, and another at home.

Do they know about each other?

No, no.

Was the Cameroonian wife married under traditional laws? No, he had married both wives in courts.

That made him a bigamist, which is against the law in the United States.

In June, an American court ordered Nigerian publisher Moshood Abiola, a millionaire Muslim chief, to pay $20,000 a month in child support to a woman in New Jersey. Abiola’s lawyer told the court his client was supporting four wives and 19 concubines on three continents.

Two Senegalese women joined the discussion.

Why do men with as many as four wives insist on having a “deuxieme bureau?” they asked. The French for “second office” is what West Africans call their mistresses.

The debate became lively, sometimes even angry.

“At least we look after our women,” said the businessman, who is in the import-export business, and like the bigamist academic would not give his name. “In the West, they throw them away in divorce courts.”

“Polygamy is a kindness to women” because Cameroon has three times as many women as men, he continued. Some of the women hissed.

Many Nigerians who used the same excuse were stunned by a census this year that turned up 500,000 more men than women.

An older woman said polygamy lessens a woman’s work because there are others to share it.

None of the women approved of polygamy, but one, Esther Taylor Diop, said she was a second wife.

Diop explained that she was engaged in her teens to Mansoor Diop, but he left the village without explanation. She loved him and resisted her parents’ demand that she marry another man, but finally gave in.

Nearly 20 years later, she and Diop met again. They fell in love and she divorced her husband so she could marry him.

“What could I do?” she said. “He already had a wife. So, I am a second wife, but a very happy one.”