Since 2 April 2024, polygamy, long claimed as the fiercest and most hopeless way of being Senegalese, authentic but marginalised in the Republic, has crossed the Rubicon.

Until then, before the Bassirou Diomaye Faye era, polygamy stopped at the gates of the Palace: from Senghor to Macky Sall, nothing but monogamists, including the happy husbands of two Frenchwomen, sorry, two « Senegalese women of Toubab ethnicity » as Viviane Wade specified, just to confirm her legitimacy as mistress of the house for twelve years in her pied-à-terre on the Leopold Sédar Senghor Avenue.

At the Palace of the Republic, as if in deference to an unspoken rule, for sixty-four years monogamy has taken up its quarters, making it an impregnable bastion of tête-à-tête love, a fortress of the couple, a temple to the love life of two, while elsewhere on the continent, and even beyond, presidential palaces are not too shy about increasing the number of marriages or maintaining barely clandestine favourites by multiplying the number of bastards…

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Strangely enough, Senegal does not give away any sordid secrets in this respect. Of course, wild rumours, never proven, have been the stuff of concierge gossip since the dawn of time, but they are more akin to the collective fantasy that the ravishing socialites of the jet-set inspire in bad sleepers.

It takes everything to make a Republic, especially gossip.

In feminist circles, the outposts of Senegalese women’s emancipation, the battle has so far been against informality. Polygamy certainly existed long before the penetration of Islam, while the local kinglets, maintained harems that were mainly pacts of alliances between warrior families.

Among the badolos, who cultivate the land and raise their livestock when they are not fishing in the open sea, arms are needed as much as possible, preferably vigorous ones. Multiplying marriages is almost an obligation to survive poverty, because it’s all about multiplying yourself as much as you want.

The useful and the pleasurable: isn’t that a way of having several strings to your bow?

When the Toubab arrived on the coast and started building towns, cohabiting with the locals didn’t stop anything: the country folk arrived in the city with their redneck ways and their barnyard. A few crossed the tolerated limits and became urbanised. They lived not far from the Toubab neighbourhoods, assimilating their codes and urbanities to the point where they set up households with café-au-lait kids.

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To my right, these constipated monogamists and, to my left, these dissipated polygamists…

In the hierarchy of what was to become the French colony of West Africa, if you want to climb the ladder, you might as well do as the Toubabs do… Of course there were some who resisted: these overly virile gentlemen did frequent the circles of colonial high society and enjoyed its privileges, but as soon as things get below the belt, they remain Negroes, as genuine as they are susceptible, hypersensitive to provocation.

Hands off my polygamy…

Especially as the status was covered by Islam, the religion that was all the rage in vernacular circles at the time, swallowing up paganism after borrowing its nauseating concoctions, surrealist amulets and appalling myths. It’s a divine recommendation, they tell the Toubabs and their henchmen – in other words, those treacherous assimilated Negroes who renounce their culture, marry white women and even allow themselves to be apostasised in the name of Progress and sacrosanct Civilisation!

Et puis, surtout, quelle est cette lubie de croire que les femmes sont les égales des hommes alors que même les Toubabs qui en parlent n’en croient pas un traître mot ? Quand l’Occident nous ramène cette question sur la table, on lui crache à la figure qu’il ne sait plus reconnaître ce qu’est un homme ou une femme : les gays, les transsexuels, et toute la gamme des frustrés de la quéquette et du clito vous saluent bien bas.

And then, above all, what is this fad of believing that women are the equals of men when even the Toubabs who talk about it don’t believe a word of it? When the West brings up this issue, we spit in its face that it no longer knows what a man or a woman is: gays, transsexuals and the whole range of frustrated men and women salute you.

In short, to this day, the debate will never be decided in the end.

Except that Senghor would never have dared bring back to the Palace a Negress whom he would present to Madame Colette Hubert as a little sister available for thankless domestic tasks. The art of getting his ageing wife to swallow this kind of nonsense is certainly genuine Senegalese, but the newcomer, who has been so kindly given an assistant, would have to have a rusty understanding.

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Neither did Abdou Diouf. He may have posed for Tabaski with a slightly tanned First Lady, but this second wife thing is never going to happen, not even in your dreams: the protocol headed by Bruno Diatta is absolutely vigilant. The IMF and the World Bank, which at the time paid all the country’s salaries, tended to favour downsizing the civil service and firing troublesome staff. So how do you explain to these fussy backers that there’s an extra woman to maintain, at great expense to the public purse, while we’re in the midst of structural adjustment?

If anything, they tended to encourage celibacy, those thrifty financiers…

Father Wade? He was a child of the colonial era, despite his Cayorian kaw-kaw ways, who had the good taste to register in Saint-Louis to embark on the galley of citizenship, progress, modernity and Senghorian cross-breeding. The instructions at the time? One man, one woman, and preferably milk-coloured skin… He had the choice, didn’t he: what was to stop him in those fierce times from becoming a rough peasant, but a happy polygamist?

A flash of hope strikes through the populace when Macky Sall, born after independence, arrives with a First Lady from our country: Marième Faye, who does her pakargni steps in public, flaunts her devotions and her natural hair, and doesn’t watch her figure. At last, we’re back to our authentic selves… Except there’s a catch: unlike real Negroes who dare to do anything, Macky Sall is clearly afraid of his wife.

That which is not very Senegalese. 

The election of Bassirou Diomaye Faye is a revolution, not just because he is the first opponent to win a presidential election in the first round. He is the one who resembles us most, in majority, and confirms our collective imaginary: the Senegalese woman does not have the same status as the Senegalese man.

The burning question: at what point will the Republic seriously ask itself why one half of the population does not have the same rights as the other?

I’m not talking about apartheid, but polygamy…

By Ibou FALL 

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH