Polygamy in Modern Africa

The spread of Islam through many parts of Africa established a societal pattern of polygamy which has lasted for several centuries. In 2014 in Kenya, a country in which Muslims are less than 50% of the population, the government passed laws declaring polygamy legal. The Muslim minority had persuaded a few non-Muslim legislators to vote for the bill, which then passed.

The traditional versions of Sharia law which shape Islam in Africa allow a man to have more than one wife, but a woman, according to this law, may have only one husband. Kenyan journalist Moses Wasamu writes:

Kenyans have many approaches to marriage, and in March their government consolidated types under one law that went into effect this week. One change has drawn the lion's share of attention: legalizing polygamy for men — even if the first wife protests.

Africa has a so-called "polygamy belt" that stretches from Senegal to Tanzania. A 2009 government survey indicated that 13 percent of Kenyan women were in polygamous relationships.

The passage of the law has caused concerns among non-Muslims in Kenya. Wasamu reports that non-Muslims predict that

the law will erode recent gains against HIV, and lead to more divorces and court fights over inheritances.

While the Muslims are a minority in Kenya, they hold significant political power there. In some other African nation-states, Muslims are in the majority, and encounter little significant resistance to polygamy laws. While Kenyan Muslims celebrate the polygamy law as a victory for Islam, others still see hope for Kenya:

James Fenske, an Oxford economist who studies African polygamy, thinks church leaders needn't worry. The law will have little effect since polygamy has been declining in Kenya for decades, he said. "I see no reason to expect this trend to reverse."

Barack Obama, Sr. spent most of his life in Kenya, with only a brief stay in the United States. It was during that stay that he married Ann Dunham and became the father of Barack Obama, Jr. - who would later be President of the United States.

When he married Ann Dunham, he was already married to a woman in Kenya. Before his death, he would marry several more women. Barack Obama, Sr., was a practicing polygamist, being married to more than one woman at the same time.

His son, Barack Obama, Jr., the President of the United States, is, however, a monogamist.

A Brief Moment of Hope: the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring has a clear beginning point in time: 17 December 2010. An unemployed Tunisian committed suicide by setting himself on fire, an apparent protest against the bureaucratic regulations which prevented him from trying to earn a living by selling fruit at a roadside stand. Brian Short writes:

The Arab Spring — which began in December 2010 and included Arab, African, and Iranian populations — started in Tunisia. The month before, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi had doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest police abuse. Bouazizi had been bullied and beaten by Tunisian police for years. They harassed him constantly about not having a vendor’s permit and demanded bribes to let him continue his daily work.

The wide-scale movement triggered by his death, however, was not about the need for fewer regulations or the benefits which a free-market economy would bring to the residents of the Middle East. The Arab Spring would be a broader response to tyranny.

In quick succession, tyrants in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt resigned or were removed from office.

Although its starting point is precise, there is no precise point at which the Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter - the point at which the hope for freedom was dashed and at which one set of tyrants simply replaced another set. Like the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Spring Revolutions of 1848, the Arab Spring was crushed.

The details of the uprisings during the Arab Spring varied slightly from country to country - Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Syria - depending on the grievances of the residents: Brian Short reports that in Turkey, protests addressed a spectrum of topics, "censorship, police abuse,"

an unpopular ban on alcohol sales and consumption, and what many protestors saw as the creeping de-secularization of Turkish society.

The Justice and Development Party's influence on Turkey seemed to be in opposition to the modernizations introduced by Mustafa Kemal, known popularly as "Ataturk" and the leader who brought Turkey into contemporary world. The Turks of the Arab Spring were protesting an Islamist political trend that seems to be dragging them several centuries backward.

Present at the start of the Arab Spring was at least one of the causes of its failure: lack of a cohesive vision for what might replace the toppled dictators. An unharmonized mixture of views held by the protestors was

one of the problems that has kept many people's hopes for the Arab Spring from being realized: protestors' inability to cooperate with each once the revolution is over.

Sadly, the Arab Winter slowly emerged as the reality that would replace the Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood replaced several fallen dictators, imposing versions of Sharia law as harsh, or harsher, than the regimes which it replaced.

The new autocrats, some of whom grabbed power via seemingly democratic elections held in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary chaos, and the Muslim Brotherhood as their political organization, have quickly sapped hope from many who had taken to the streets during the Arab Spring.

The attempted revolutions lacked not only a unified political vision for what would be instituted after the overthrow, but lacked also an attempt to address the cultural and societal deficits which have prevented the Middle East from establishing civil liberties. The traditions of this civilization are not a welcoming environment for the establishment of a republic with freely elected representatives.

Until foundational understandings - the value of each human life, personal freedom and individual liberty, the protection of the dignity of each man and woman - are introduced and take root, it will be difficult to establish the types of government the protestors desired. The governments are the symptoms; the deeper cultural values are the causes.

Is Democracy the Answer?

Well-known is Woodrow Wilson's slogan that America's entry into WWI would make the world "safe for democracy." While effective at rousing the emotions, President Wilson's slogan raises more questions than it answers. In hindsight, the USA's involvement in WWI was perhaps more about creating opportunities for Wilson to implement his domestic policies; the war gave him the excuse to operate in a heavy-handed manner as he intervened into the private matters of citizens.

Among the questions raised by Wilson's slogan are these: if making the world safe for democracy is a good thing, what are the anticipated benefits of this democracy? will democracy alone generate these benefits, or are other factors necessary? if so, what are those factors? if not, should we anticipate these benefits in any and every instance of democracy?

Historian and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy can be, and has been, overrated. Expectations that democracy, by itself, will produce a wide variety of benefits are expectations likely to be disappointed. Concrete evidence is as recent as the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, but Hoppe points to the First World War:

World War I marks one of the great watersheds of modern history. With its end the transformation of the entire Western world from monarchical rule and sovereign kings to democratic-republican rule and sovereign people that began with the French Revolution was completed. Until 1914, only three republics had existed in Europe - France, Switzerland and after 1911, Portugal; and of all major European monarchies only the United Kingdom could be classified as a parliamentary system, i. e., one in which supreme power was vested in an elected parliament. Only four years later, after the United States had entered the European war and decisively determined its outcome, monarchies all but disappeared, and Europe along with the entire world entered the age of democratic republicanism.

So it would seem that Woodrow Wilson's plan to make the world safe for democracy yielded fruit. But which type of fruit was it? Readers educated in the western world are trained to answer that this was progress, that democracy was spread, and that dignity was granted to millions. Many readers will take it as axiomatic that democracy is good, and if a nation embraces, or is embraced by, a democratic system, then this is an improvement.

There are some facts which might cause us to pause and consider more carefully these assumptions about democracy.

In the specific case of WWI, America's entry into the war may have prolonged it and increased the death count. Naturally, dealing with counterfactual hypotheses, e.g. what would have happened if the United States hadn't entered the war, is imprecise speculation and not rigorous history. But there is plausible and persuasive evidence to suggest that the stalemate situation of mid-1917 would have led to ceasefires and negotiations, if the USA had convincingly declared itself neutral and had refused to engage in the war effort, and that such ceasefires could have occurred well before November 1918.

Democracy, then, might be responsible for millions of battlefield deaths.

Some might argue that the regrettable loss of life was, however, in the service of attaining more democracy in the world. The net increase in democracy, as a blessing to the human race, might ensure that those deaths were not in vain.

Yet that assertion is far from self-evident, viewing the course of events after 1918.

If we look at the United States, which Wilson alleged to be the font of such blessings, we see that the century after WWI has yielded persistent economic problems: periods of stagnant or falling wages, massive public-sector debt, problematic private-sector debt, unpaid and unpayable future obligations in the forms of entitlements, and others. Also present are non-economic problems: high or rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and a strangling bureaucratic regulatory culture. Tensions exist along racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious lines.

Those nations which followed the path of American democracy have experienced similar outcomes - in some cases milder, in other cases worse. Ethnic disintegration struck Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Economic decay hobbled Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

Western democracy cannot be defended by comparing it to the USSR, as Hoppe notes:

Further, the collapse of the Soviet Empire represented not so much a triumph of democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it also contained an indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic - rather than dictatorial - socialism.

None of this, let us be clear, is meant to say that democracy is evil. There are real benefits which are made possible by democracy. Let us entertain this thesis: democracy by itself is insufficient.

The mere fact that one has instituted, within the territorial borders of some given nation-state, a republic with freely elected representatives, does not guarantee civil bliss and political justice and economic prosperity. On the contrary, democracy unaccompanied by other factors may merely place into the hands of people the ability to dismantle the beneficial aspects of their civilization.

The question which remains, then, is this: if democracy by itself is not sufficient to guarantee those anticipated benefits, what is necessary in addition to democracy?