Marriage and Children

We have polygamy here in Benin. I guess I shouldn't include myself, since I haven't yet taken advantage of this marital loophole, but nonetheless, polygamy is practiced here in Benin. Apparently it's not technically legal, but it's so ingrained in the local traditions, that the government's laws prohibiting it haven't done anything to decrease its occurrence. Men will simply marry one woman officially and then have other "unofficial" wives. You'd think the women would be jealous, receving only a fraction of their husband's attention, but the women often don't seem to mind. Maybe they're just happy that their husbands are honest about the other women. Sometimes people will ask me,
"In your country, can a man have several wives?"
"No," I'll respond. "In my country, when a married man wants to lust after another woman, he has to go behind his wife's back to do it. We call them affairs."
"Oh," they'll say, and you can see their desire to go to America vanishing. After all, who would want to live in such a repressive country?
So the men here stick to having several wives. When they see a woman they like, they just kind of tack her on to the group. Now, this is certainly not the case throughout the country. In fact, many of my friends have only one wife. It's just not something that is considered taboo here. In addition, the many wives have many children.

This is another aspect of life here that strikes me as somewhat funny. Nearly every girl and woman large enough to be carrying a baby on her back is doing so, to the point where I'd imagine it's embarrasing to not have a baby on her back. One volunteer told me about a friend of hers here. This friend has a baby, and takes the baby to her husband's mistress' house. It's as if she's saying, "You may be sleeping with my husband, but I've got the baby." So all the women have babies, and there are many more small children running around the city. And so it's funny to hear American and European development officials lauding the progress made by their programs that teach HIV/AIDS prevention and population control. These programs are centered around a clever, little educational tool--the ABC's of safe sex. A stands for abstinence, B stands for Be Faithful, and C stands for Condoms. Call me insensitive or politically incorrect, but I find it comically ironic that we've chosen to use the ABC's to teach safe sex to a largely illiterate people. In any case, given the number of wives some men have, and the number of children each woman has, I'd venture to say that A,B, and C are being dutifully ignored and people are skipping straight to D, which evidently stands for "Do it."

People will often ask why I myself am not married, or if I have a wife back in the States. This is fun for me, because I can sometimes make up an imaginary wife back in the States, if I feel like it. I can tell them I have 14 kids. I can tell them my wife doesn't actually live in the States, she lives at the North Pole. But I mostly just tell them the truth, which is the most shocking out of all of these. As a man here in Benin, I most definitely should not be living alone, shopping at the market, cooking for myself. Some men have felt sorry for me and offered to bring me a young girl that I can have, which I respectfully declined. Sometimes it's hard to explain this to them, and they feel hurt when you refuse their generous offers, but overall I think it's good for me. Because I'm looking at the big picture. When I'm married, I can tell my wife, "I could have had several wives in Benin, who would shop, cook for me, do my laundry, bear me many children, but I chose you instead." I think she'll have to love me more for that. But probably she'll just slap me. So, no wives for me yet, which means I'll have just another simple plate of spaghetti tonight.