More about polygamy

written Thursday, 19 April 2007


Today for Mandinka class we went to visit one of my classmates' host families, to practice Mandinka with them. After getting through the greetings and talking about where we're from and our families, the conversation got a little stuck. So the Mandinka woman we were talking to decided to get it un-stuck and spice up the conversation a little bit.

"So," she says, "I'm a third wife. My husband has two other wives. What do you think of that?"

So we had an interesting conversation about polygamy, in which she and my Mandinka teacher explained to us that according to Islam, if a man is married and he wants to have sex with a woman who is not his wife, it is better for him to marry her than to be sneaking around behind the first wife's back and sinning.

In America, they said, when a married man falls in love with someone new he has to get divorced in order to marry her. So it ends up with everyone getting divorced and remarried all the time. This is no good.

We told them that in America there are lots of couples that don't get divorced, just as in Senegal there are many non-polygamous marriages. But in any case, I told them, if my husband wanted to marry someone else, I would prefer to divorce him rather than continue to be married to him while he is also married to someone else.

I think they thought I was crazy.