Moses Ochonu: Why Sanusi’s anti-polygamy plans might be pointless

by Moses Ochonu

In principle, I agree with the emir of Kano’s pronouncement on polygamy, procreation, and poverty. However, there is need to proceed with caution on the legislative intervention he is proposing.

I am not Muslim or Hausa so I may not be able to speak to the theological and cultural issue at stake. However, I do know that our societies in Africa are driven by patriarchy and notions of masculine pride and dignity. This culture tends to mediate how people see these things.

Like the emir, I used to display an unqualified intolerance for people who want to bring many children into this world despite lacking the means to care for them. I used to preach vehemently and somewhat haughtily against unbridled procreation among my own poor extended family.

Then I decided to scold this stubborn member of the family, a primary school teacher who insisted, as he put it, on having as many children as God would give him, despite clearly not having the means to care for them. Several people in our family had spoken to him to no avail. Because I was occasionally supporting him financially I felt that I had some leverage and sway with him and could convince him to see what every other person was seeing and get him to stop procreating.

The first time I talked to him, he listened to my long speech and politely promised to look into the matter. A couple of years and another child later, I decided to confront him again on the issue. This time he was ready for me, fuming while listening to me. Because he is older than me, I took his fuming to be a response to my tone and decided to persuade him rather than scold him.

When my sermon was over, he cleared his throat and declared that he too had something to say to me. He said essentially that as a man, a man of our ethnic group, there are two things that one aspires to possess in abundance: wealth and children. These two possessions or at least one of them, he said, made one a man. He said he didn’t have money and could never be wealthy, having become too old for wealth to happen to him. All he had left to demonstrate his masculinity in order not to be a failure in life was to have as many children as he could have and to be remembered for being blessed with children when he is gone. He said people like me who “have money” would not understand since we already had the ability to possess the two gold standards of manly success.

Folks like him, he said, will have lived unremarkable, vain lives if they did not procreate liberally when they were on this earth. With my wealth ( he saw me as wealthy) I was already guaranteed respect as a man, and regardless of how many children I have, I was assured of maximum cultural capital as a man and a legacy. Finally, he asked if I didn’t think it was mean and selfish of me to stop him from fulfilling his manly destiny the only way he could still do so, especially since I, unlike him, was in a position to control both the wealth and offspring sides of the masculine pride equation.

I was humbled. I piped down. He had successfully emotionally blackmailed me. He had turned the leverage I thought I had on him against me. But even though I still disagreed fundamentally with his rationalisation of his uncontrolled procreation, he made sense from a purely cultural perspective, the most dominant frame of reference available to him.

We agreed to disagree on the issue, and I told him that he would see my point in the future and that I hoped that he would not regret shunning my advice.

Even though we parted on a note of disagreement, I came away with a better appreciation for where he was coming from, for his masculine anxieties, and for the unspoken patriarchal cultural pressures against which he was struggling, and which were unfortunately determining his procreation decision.
I knew that he was speaking from a well established cultural script.

In my village in Benue state, a man considered successful in the old days would boast that he had money and he had many children, meaning that he was complete. I connected what he had said to this manly tradition of success and fulfilment.

I realised that as personal as this issue may seem, it is deeply interwoven with our society’s notions of masculinity and masculine pride and that unless the culture evolves, persons operating solely within it may never be persuaded to act outside of its dictates.


Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Moses E. Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2014).

One comment

  1. poverty in Nigeria is not as a result of having many children, inclusively terrorism. this happened due to the bad and self-interest leadership style in Nigeria. our politicians only care about project and holding on to power by all means. they have failed to give US good education, welfare, food. not because the country is poor. but they lack vision for the country and have vision for self and family members. this I think is the caused of poverty and terrorism. may God help our leaders to know the purpose why they are made leaders of this great country.

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