Beyond cheating: The deeper message behind Netflix's 'The Polygamist'

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.

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, such as 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, which is the custom of marriage to multiple wives.

It shows the hangover of colonialism and how Black South Africans continue to struggle with multiple consciousness, referencing 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 are having deeper conversations about it.

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, where men are 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, defined as 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.

Young Jonasi, played by Ntobeko Mathebula, features with Young Essie, played by Sibusisiwe Shangase, in the Netflix production. 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 the way 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 an 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.

On finding out about the full circumstances of Jonasi's affair with a younger woman called Matipa, Joyce is forced to decide 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.

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, connecting sophistication, suburban life and power.