The Polygamist is a Netflix series that has soared up the streaming platform’s charts and triggered a global conversation about men who cheat in relationships.
It tracks the fatal ruptures in what seems like a successful upper class family, the Gomoras. Although the story plays out in South Africa, the series is adapted from Zimbabwean author Sue Nyathi’s self-published novella.
It opens at the funeral of Jonasi Gomora, a self-made man and charismatic banking executive. Flashbacks reveal how his respectable and carefully constructed life falls apart when his social influencer wife Joyce finds out about his secret second wife, his mistress, and several other relationships.
On the surface, The Polygamist shows how the insatiable drive for power and pleasure destroys the hopes of Black success that are meant to be the fruits of democracy, education and class advancement in South Africa after apartheid formally ended in 1994.
I am a sociologist who studies intimacy in Black communities. In a recent book I edited, I analysed how themes like the ones explored in The Polygamist – money, social class and intimacy – often create conflict between traditional values and modern notions introduced by colonial systems.
For me, the series adds much-needed complexity to discussions about polygamy (the custom of marriage to multiple wives). It shows the hangover of colonialism and how Black South Africans continue to struggle with “multiple consciousness” (conflicting identities and fragmented cultural realities in a new society).
In this article I discuss four of what I regard as the most interesting themes emerging from the series. They’re also some of the reasons why many African viewers are so taken with it and having deeper conversations about it.
1. Hidden histories
The Polygamist brilliantly highlights the hidden histories of polygamy. Like South Africa, many sub-Saharan African countries, from Senegal to Zimbabwe, have long, complex histories of polygamy. This value system was not about hetero patriarchy (men in charge of everything), but the protection and maintenance of African families.
In precolonial African contexts, men took multiple wives for economic and political reasons, as well as the maintenance of values around caring for widows and orphans. From the 1800s, encounters with colonial European thinking eroded polygamy as a value system. In its place came Christian values, Dutch law and urbanisation.
Europeans valued monogamy (a relationship with one partner) while polygamy was regarded as harmful and immoral, a system for heathens. The customary system was gradually polluted with secrecy, loss, misuse of power, displacement of children and violence against women.
Even though polygamy is protected under South African law, it never really survived the onslaught of capitalism and coloniality. In The Polygamist, this is made visible in how Jonasi navigates his relationship with his childhood sweetheart and second wife Essie.
He marries her without the first wife’s knowledge and consensus. This is clearly abuse of power. The rules governing traditional polygamy foreground respect, communication and accountability. By leaving Joyce out of the decision, he takes away her power and makes it his own.
2. Conceding to polygamy
On finding out about the full circumstances of Jonasi’s affair with a younger woman called Matipa, Joyce is forced to make a decision if she is to protect her marriage, her access to the legacy she helped build and her children’s inheritance.
A decision to concede to polygamy is not an easy one. Joyce is aware of its contradictions, how weak it makes her look, how it might not end with a second wife and might lead to more wives.
Even though this dilemma is taxing on Joyce’s psyche and public image, it does open up the possibility of one of the traditional intentions of polygamy: the safeguarding of children’s well-being.
3. The trap of being ‘civilised’
Thirdly, the series shows how Jonasi’s hiding of the truth as a way of life could be read as a personal struggle with what South African sociologist Mosa Phadi calls “multiple consciousness”.
The colonial project to ‘civilise’ Africans with western ideas of society has lingered. It demands that Jonasi stay monogamous, even if he’s only pretending to. His civilised world knows him as the successful, university educated CEO with his perfect nuclear family. He and Joyce are the embodiment of what it means to be successful in democratic South Africa. Connections, sophistication, suburban life and power.
Jonasi’s story shows the struggles of navigating what Phadi calls “contradictory aspects of blackness”. This trap of civilisation comes up several times in the series.
Matipa’s mom comments how un-Christian polygamy is. The double standard here is noted by Matipa, who calls her out on how culture and tradition is only brought up when it suits her.
It is reflected by Jonasi when Joyce and Matipa confront him. He responds with, “Let us talk like civilised people.”
So, as much as Jonasi wants this idea of “civilised” success, he also wants to honour his customary commitments to Essie. He wants the Soweto life and nightlife but also a happy wife. He wants the respect of his children, yet he fails to set an example for them what that looks like. He wants the stability of a family but fails dismally to build it. As a result, Jonasi is not fully at home anywhere.
The series presents us with these important contradictions. The theory of multiple consciousness begins to offer answers. His struggles with a fragmented identity ultimately unravels his success. His money can no longer solve his problems.
The series does a good job of showing how social structure shaped him – his early poverty, his challenges with being nurtured, his father’s drinking, his mother’s absence. What it doesn’t show us is his agency. Nowhere in the series do we see him reflect on or regret his choices. Life was not just happening to him, he was making it happen.
4. Money complicates things
Finally, the series shows us how money (in a capitalist society) complicates relationships. Research on money and social relationships shows us that how we use it and whom we spend it on reinforces and conceals what we value as well as the power dynamics in these relations.
Money gives Jonasi the ability to wield power to gain status and success. But he is unravelled when it is no longer able to mask his pain, his inability to confront the truths of his history, his failures as a husband and father, his feelings of worthlessness.
Read more:
Sex, intimacy and black middle-class Christianity in South Africa – a difficult history
This unmasking undoes the façade of his power. When his money stops controlling others, he turns to inherited violences of the past, still present in contemporary intimate relationships.
The wretchedness that it is to be Black in a system where violence and self-hate is real unravels him in the end. Ultimately he risks alienating his children, which may start them on a similar path of pain, violence, secrecy and shame, continuing the cycle.
It’s the complexity in this story that resonates so powerfully with African Netflix viewers. They’re what kept me on the couch, gripped, for the whole of its launch weekend, bingeing until it was finished.
Grace Khunou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Nessie
Thanks for this post – I have had a great time visiting your site and find myself now wanting to physically visit South Africa. Well Done!
Houston Rocket
Israel: You have two cows. You expand their farmland every year.