A relative recently explained to me how much more sex he’s been having since getting married. When I congratulated him for disproving the stereotype of the post-marital sexual drought, he admitted without wincing that his supply was “extracurricular”. In modern-day, majority Christian Ghana, the polygamy our ancestors accepted is no longer common, but to say that Ghana celebrates monogamy is not quite true either.
Despite my cousin’s cheating, his marriage makes him a respectable member of Ghanaian society. I, in my late 30s and still unwed, am in comparison selfish, the assumption being that I want to shirk responsibility and have fun. My family urge me not to be so scared of divorce. Others try to get me to see reason: monogamy expects too much from just one woman, they argue.
Polygamy once made a certain kind of sense. Manhood was in part defined by one’s ability to provide, in turn reflected by the size of a man’s household. Education gave boys the best chance to be better providers. Girls, on the other hand, were raised to marry and mother children for men who could provide, whether they were his first wife or his fifth.
Times are changing and with them the role of girls. In 2005 the government scrapped school fees, addressing the poverty that is a barrier to access for many girls. Education, the monogamy preached by the Bible and the rising costs of Ghanaian life mean that polygamy has fallen from favour. Despite these changes, traditional gender roles are hard to shake and so modern Ghanaian men and women settle for what I call “fauxnogamy”.
Cheating on one’s partner happens in every society, but in a fauxnogamous system, having a little something on the side is de rigueur and sanctions for cheating are scarce. Polygamy came with an obligation to provide for all your wives, but fauxnogamy presents male self-discipline and even loyalty as myth, encouraging us to sleep with several women without taking responsibility for any of them. All we have to do is make enough money to make it worth their while.
Class, income and educational level don’t explain fauxnogamy’s rise in Ghana. Wesley Girls’ high school consistently tops league tables yet the young women who graduated from this venerated institution are stereotyped as “unmarriageable”.
Marriage is our society’s ideal. To be in an unhappy marriage is better than not being married at all. As one popular Ghanaian evangelist, Archbishop Nicholas Duncan Williams, famously put it: “Until a man proposes to you, you are going to stay beautiful, pretty, intelligent, nice ... and rotten.”
The ideological gymnastics required to be both submissive and independent tire out Ghana’s young women and confuse our boys. As a lecturer at a university that seeks to be a progressive voice on gender equality, I see young men annoyed by feminism. Many think “ladies’ night” at clubs and a few more women in government mean gender equality has been achieved. Their grumblings and insecurities are muttered in the university’s halls but shared unabashed on Twitter. A Ghanaian feminist who tweets as @obaa_boni has become the target of attacks from both men and women. Ideological arguments all too often are soon replaced by personal insults or vague threats of sexual violence.
For a society that is becoming richer and better educated, we still focus too heavily on how we raise our girls when there is a problem with how we raise our boys. Everything in our society still puts pressure on men to bear the burden of providing. Our fear (as men) of economic cuckolding is so real that we sing about it: from the highlife classic Kyenkyen Bi Adi Mawu to hiplife’s Azingele, both songs mourning men who have been left behind by opportunistic women for far wealthier men.
The fact is Ghanaian girls are not getting any less educated. In 2005-06 alone, enrolment in nursery school went up 67% from the previous year. For junior secondary school, the increase was from 32% to 42%.
We must prepare our boys for the change that comes from having to compete with girls in school and in the workplace, then we must help them redefine manhood. It can no longer be simply about external validation (from one’s peers, income, or number of wives) but must be about internal certainty of one’s masculinity. This is a process and we must also allow ourselves the time to get it right.