After polygamy, launch of the polygamous green paper: exploring the "kaleidoscope" of Marriage in South Africa

The Pokap region of Cape Town, South Africa, is famous for its colourful houses and cobblestone streets, and South Africa is also known as the "Rainbow Nation" for its multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism. (Pei Yan/Photo)

South Africa is known as the "Rainbow Country" and is one of the most diverse marriage institutions in the world. The Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, passed in 1998, began allowing polygamy, while the Civil Union Act in 2006 recognized same-sex marriages. Now, the South African government is once again contemplating the recognition of the legitimacy of polygamy.

<h3>"It will destroy African culture"</h3>

The Reform of The Legalization of Polygamy, promoted by the South African government, began in April 2021 when a marriage reform bill drafted by the Home Ministry proposed the right for women to have multiple husbands at the same time.

"The decision to legalize polygamy was made after careful consideration of gender equality between men and women. Under current South African law, where a man could take multiple wives, women should be accorded similar rights in accordance with the principle of equality between men and women in matters of marriage. The Green Paper issued by south Africa's Home Office proposes that the current marriage law has sexist overtones and that legalizing polygamy will make marriage "more inclusive."

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, this amendment bill will be south Africa's biggest change to marriage regulations. The green paper's current deadline for public comment has ended. Judging from the feedback from all sides, the legalization of polygamy in South Africa is facing great controversy.

"This [legalization of polygamy] is a gift for those who are happy to practice non-monogamy." South African social activist Muvumbi Ndzalama argues that the legalization of polygamy helps to combat patriarchy and that "polyandry is legally recognized as a form of marriage, which is a step forward in gender equality".

In the arguments of supporters such as Ndezarrama, polygamy is not merely "pleasure-seeking", but a symbolic means of challenging patriarchal social structures, reversing patriarchal preference, and domestic violence.

However, the proposal for polygamy has generated more opposition in South African society. Ganief Hendricks, the leader of the Islamist party Al-Jamah, believes polygamy will "destroy the social order." He asked rhetorically: Isn't it ridiculous that when a child is born, a DNA test is needed to confirm who the father is?

"One day, one of the husbands would protest to his wife, 'How come you're always with him instead of with me'. Then, the two men would fight. The Afro-Christian Democrats (ACDP) leader and a member of the South African National Assembly, the Adv. Kenneth Meshoe, is concerned about possible rivalries among men within polygamous families.

The fiercest opponent of polygamy was the businessman Musa Mseleku. He is a South African reality TV star, especially known for having four wives.

"Our gods, our Creators, make sure we are created in this way. This idea (polygamy) is completely foreign and it will destroy African culture. Mselleku said in an interview with the BBC.

As a practitioner of polygamy, Mselleku also appealed on social media: Let us defend our culture, traditions and customs together, and let us directly oppose polygamy. Will women pay a bride price (lobola) for a man? Would a man be willing to be given his wife's last name? Does polyandry bring about family harmony?

In a reality show called True Love and Polygamy, Mselleku once showed his happy and harmonious life with 4 wives and 10 children. At the same time, he forbade his wife to go out after 17:00, and his wife's consent to play with friends must also be obtained, and these house rules have also caused widespread controversy in South African society.

By practicing polygamy but opposing polygamy, Mselleku's reality show has been ridiculed as a "double standard live" because of this.

In South African society, discussions on the legalization of polygamy are also polarizing. A poll on a news site showed that about 44 percent of netizens supported the legalization of polygamy, but 39 percent opposed it, and 17 percent said "it's all 2021, and this issue is not worth arguing about at all."

<h3>Three marriage bills are parallel</h3>

Polyandry has quietly emerged in South African society, and its organizational form is close to that of swarms. According to the Cape Times, a woman invited nine men to join the family as a "queen bee", and men could choose to contribute to the family with money or labor. If the wife believes that one of the husbands has broken the harmonious relationship with the other men, she has the right to "suspend the husband".

In South Africa, polyandry is still a rare phenomenon, and the phenomenon of polygamy in the country is of greater concern. In 1998, South Africa passed the Customary Marriage Recognition Act, which allows men to marry multiple women, i.e. polygamy, with the consent of the spouses. At present, the South African Government does not publish exact statistics on polygamous families. According to the Cape Times, there are about thousands of polygamous families, most of which are concentrated in the countryside.

The reality show True Love and Polygamy reveals the inside story of this particular family life. The popular show was filmed in the mansion of real estate developer Mselecku in Durban, where his four wives each have a building. Most of the time, he said, the four wives live in harmony like sisters.

"The biggest conflict is time." "Sometimes we have to go out, but it's frustrating when everyone is ready and we have to wait for another wife," Mselleku said. ”

Polygamy is more common in the Zulu-inhabited province of KwaZulu-Natal. Among them, Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa from the Zulu ethnic group, married a total of 6 wives.

"Does polygamy symbolize a regression in civilization and reflect inequality between men and women?" At a Davos conference in the summer of 2010, a Western journalist asked Zuma questions live.

Zuma replied, without commenting, that polygamy is a South African cultural tradition, but that it does not conflict with his political beliefs and does not change his insistence on equality between men and women. When asked if his wives could receive "equal love," Zuma replied without hesitation that "there is no doubt, absolute equality."

This caused a burst of laughter at the scene, and many people present shook their heads and smiled bitterly.

Currently, both Zulu and Ngunis in South Africa recognize polygamy. According to David Coplan, a professor of anthropology at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, polygamy originated in the era of tribal patriarchy, when "men needed women as laborers in the family, and they needed to farm, raise children and take care of the whole family." Men were responsible for the care of livestock, fighting wars and politics. ”

From the mid-to-late 17th century onwards, South Africa became a colony of the Netherlands, Britain and other countries. During this time, Western missionaries tried to persuade the locals to abandon polygamy, but this tradition continues to this day.

Various elements of tribal tradition and colonial rule led to the parallel emergence of three marriage bills in South Africa. Among them, the Marriage Act of 1961 applies to the majority of south Africans, the Customary Marriage Recognition Act, adopted in 1998, which is mainly aimed at Indigenous tribes, recognizes polygamy, while the Partnership Act of 2006 legalizes same-sex marriage.

The three marriage laws complement each other, and the public is free to choose one of the three laws and marry in accordance with the provisions of the bill. Today, South Africa has become a kaleidoscope of marriage forms, including civil marriage, civil union and customary marriage, which are legally recognized forms of marriage, as well as special forms such as religious marriage.

The form of pluralistic marriage is also nothing more than a microcosm of South Africa's pluralistic social and legal landscape. In the process of colonialism, South Africa was deeply influenced by Western religious law and the two major European legal systems, which led to the formation of a pluralistic legal pattern in which traditional customary law and modern statutory law, English common law and Roman-Dutch law coexisted.

<h3>Rising bride price and divorce rates</h3>

In South Africa, complex forms of marriage and a pluralistic legal system not only did not break the barriers of interracial marriage, but also exacerbated social problems such as divorce rates and rising bride price.

"In the era of apartheid, South African law did not allow intermarriage between blacks and whites. Today, after the abolition of apartheid, South African marriages rarely appear 'black and white'. Shen Jianfei, a Chinese who has lived in Cape Town for more than two decades, "still has a gap between blacks and whites, and interracial marriages are difficult to be favored by friends and family."

According to the South African National Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, the country's black population was 47.4 million, accounting for about 81% of South Africa's total population, and the white population was 4.7 million, but there were only more than 3,000 cases of intermarriage between the two major ethnic groups. Moreover, such interracial marriages usually involve poor white women marrying relatively wealthy black men.

This phenomenon is called "Social Status Exchange" by sociologists, that is, the acquisition of each other's material wealth, social status, and personal development space through marriage.

A transnational marriage has been caused by differences in marriage customs. In May 2018, Andile Ramaphosa, the eldest son of South African President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, paid a fine after delivering a dowry of five cows and five goats to his Ugandan bride's family.

Before the marriage, Andil and the bride had a daughter. Non-marital childbearing is not uncommon in South African society, but it is taboo for some traditional tribes in Uganda.

In South African society, the price of the bride price has also increased in recent years. According to Shen Jianfei, around 2000, the bride price of ordinary families in South Africa was usually to give the woman's parents a cow, which was called "lobola" by the locals. Today, lobola's standard has risen to 3 cows or the equivalent of 3 cows in cash. In the South African market, the price of a cow is about 3,000 rand, which is equivalent to about 1,300 yuan.

Compared with the per capita income reported by the South African National Office of Statistics, the burden of the bride price is not heavy. In February 2021, the country's per capita monthly real wage was 15,821 rand (about 6,900 yuan). However, the income gap between all races and classes is large, and the average monthly real income of ordinary blacks is usually only about 1,000 rand, so it is difficult for most blacks to bear expensive dowries.

However, a "dowry on credit" method has quietly become popular. If there is no money to marry a daughter-in-law for a while, the man can agree on the period of payment of the dowry, first live with the woman he loves, and may also have children. Formal marriage cannot be formally married until a bride price is delivered to the woman's parents. If lobola is not delivered as agreed, the "fiancée" is likely to be taken back to her mother's house by her parents.

"Lobola offers women a complex range of benefits and responsibilities. Although women generally value the social status and respect provided by lobola, they also lament that lobola restricts their freedom to pursue education and autonomy in marriage. After interviewing 43 women aged 18-55 in rural South Africa, sociological researcher Christie Sennott called for marriage modernization in South African society.

Due to the lobola phenomenon, women are also often regarded as "purchased property" in marriage. In South Africa, divorce also does not apply the basic principle of "half of the marital common property", as in most countries. In the black-populated countryside and tribes, many women get almost nothing after divorce.

Globally, South Africa already has one of the highest divorce rates. In 2014, the country accounted for only 37.8% of couples and 62.2% of single-parent families, and almost every two marriages at least one ended in failure.

Some sociologists attribute the high divorce rate to the simplicity of the divorce process. In some religious believer groups, "mobile phone divorce" is even popular, where a man edits a divorce text message and sends it to his wife, as long as the other party confirms that the divorce is established after receiving it. Alternatively, three calls with "talak" in Arabic, divorce can also take effect.

"In some black tribal groups, there is often a kind of divorce without resignation, which is too irresponsible and too hasty." Shen Jianfei, a Chinese, said that after some black men left their hometowns to work in the city, they played "missing" and their children were raised by their wives. If the wife remarries, the children are raised by the elderly such as their grandparents.

<h3>AIDS, anti-intellectualism and "underground marriages."</h3>

The diversity of marriage forms and a more open social climate have also exacerbated the spread of AIDS in South Africa. Since 2001, an average of more than 100,000 South Africans have died of AIDS each year. At present, there are more than 7 million people living with HIV in South Africa, close to 14% of the total population.

South Africa has thus been given the indecent title of "AIDS Power". As a result of AIDS, life expectancy in the country fell from 64.1 years to 53.2 years between 1995 and 1998. Among them, the life expectancy of whites is 71 years, and blacks are only 48 years. AIDS patients also account for about 40 per cent of beds in public hospitals.

"Most locals have an average of 5 sexual partners in their lifetime." Quarraisha Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist at the South African AIDS Research Centre (CAPRISA), led a team to investigate the spread of AIDS in the KwaZulu region.

Traditional social practices and government failures have contributed to the AIDS outbreak. In the late 1980s, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, the white government claimed that only the black community had a high incidence of AIDS, and that white people rarely got the disease.

Later, beginning with the two ANC-led governments of Mandela and Mbeki, AIDS was seen as a sensitive issue to "vilify blacks."

"Westerners are convinced that we are nothing more than a carrier of germs that are born to have promiscuous sex and are unique in the world. They also declare that our continent is doomed to inevitable death and demise because we irrepressibly dedicate ourselves to sinful lusts. In 2001, then-President Mbeki publicly stated that the high incidence of AIDS among black people was "the result of racial oppression and the impoverishment of black people."

Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, appointed by Mbeki, also believes that AIDS is a "racist scourge brought by Westerners." The alcohol-addicted health minister also highly praised an "anti-AIDS drug" formulated from garlic, beetroot, olive oil, etc., and claimed that its efficacy was superior to the anti-cancer drug ARV recommended by the international medical community.

It was not until 2006 that the South African government acknowledged that the "anti-AIDS drugs" recommended by the former minister of health were ineffective and announced that they would stop using them.

Some South African politicians, mired in anti-intellectualism, tend to blame AIDS for apartheid policies, but rarely equate it with ethical and legal issues such as marriage, family and sex education. In 2001, then-Vice President Zuma even publicly claimed that he had a meeting with a woman infected with HIV, but that bathing in shower gel afterwards would not be infected.

South Africa is just one microcosm of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. According to the data released by the World Health Organization in 2020, the HIV infection rate in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other countries is more than 15%, and these countries also allow multiple forms of marriage such as polyandry. In Gabon, where polyandry is legally recognized, the rate of HIV infection also exceeds 20 per cent.

Excessive sexual partners are considered an important cause of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Countries such as Botswana and Zimbabwe provide for monogamy, but polygamy is still prevalent in many tribes. Factors such as the chaos of private life and economic poverty have led to the AIDS infection rate in the two countries reaching 39.47 per cent and 33.09 per cent, respectively.

"Polyandry has long been reviled by society and is not allowed by law, so it can only go underground." In Zimbabwe, Collis Machoko, a sociologist who has studied marriage institutions in Africa for many years, still successfully interviewed dozens of people who secretly practice polygamous marriages, including 20 women and 45 men, which is known as "underground marriages."

Southern Weekend contributed to Pei Yan