Women support for polygamy is injury to equality

By Charles Kanjama

A few weeks ago, a female colleague remarked that the women’s movement is comfortable with polygamy. I reacted with stubborn disbelief: "It cannot be! How can women activists support polygamy and it clearly entrenches inequality?"

These past weeks I have received more surprising input along these lines. Apparently, so the theory goes, many women are happy being second and third wives, so they favour polygamy otherwise they might not get husbands.

And that several first wives would rather remain officially married, even though neglected in favour of second wives than be disowned. Let’s be clear that the debate is not about whether to dissolve polygamous relationships.

The debate is really about a simple issue: Should we tolerate future polygamy as a society, and even sanctify it through law, despite the provisions of Kenya’s new Constitution? One century ago, the feminist movement was campaigning for women’s suffrage.

At the time, that was a progressive issue. Most of society, men and women, held views that would be considered chauvinist today, but which were culturally acceptable then. For example that women did not need to vote, because their fathers and husbands were voting anyway. That it was unseemly for women to engage in politics.

And other views are more distressing to a person of modern sensibilities.

So one rejoinder to the women’s suffragists was simply this: "If the suffragists are serious, let them accept a referendum on whether they should have the right to vote." The suffragists rejected this argument out of hand.

First, they argued that the right to vote was not negotiable or based on the majority view. Secondly, they really did fear that even women would vote against suffrage. This is one of the little explored but embarrassing facts of history – women against suffrage, slaves against abolition, and colonised supporters of colonialism.

Psychologists would recognise it as a variation of the Stockholm syndrome, which leaves captives attached to their captors and unwilling to escape. It is simply the natural attachment to the familiar, taken beyond the point of reason. The great French thinker Blaise Pascal captured this dynamic when he observed, "the heart has its reasons for which reason knows nothing."

Ultimately, the response of history’s great reformers to the Stockholm Syndrome was to ignore it or to sweep it aside with the force of oratory and conviction. So when William Wilberforce in 1787 set out to campaign for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, he ignored the slaves who were content with their deplorable condition.

Likewise, Kenya’s independence fighters assumed that we all wanted independence here and now. And President Kenyatta cleverly concurred, stating: "All Kenyans fought for independence." The truth is that there are women who support polygamy, some strongly.

They may be many or they may be few. They likely would be found in largely similar proportions to those of Kenyan men who support polygamy. But for any campaigner against polygamy, that is a totally irrelevant point.

The injury to equality, the harm to children and the wound to family integrity are real shortcomings of polygamy. They constitute sufficient cause for a campaign against entrenching polygamy in our new legal dispensation. Kenya needs genuine committed reformers to lead this campaign.

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The forceful evictions and demolitions in Syokimau and other areas in Nairobi have raised quite a storm. Predictably the Government has come out smelling badly. It is inexcusable that some officials have ignored individual rights or the general public interest.

It is insupportable that due process has been ignored in some demolitions. But the natural outrage against impunity should not turn into a general objection to demolitions, which are precisely government’s attempt to fight impunity. The idea that once you squat or build on land you are immune to eviction is the biggest cause of impunity on land law today.

The author is an Advocate of the High Court