Polygamy and witchcraft

The HBO series "Big Love" and the president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, have both contributed to bringing polygamy back into the news. Zuma was asked while in England recently about his polygamous marriage, and he attributed Westerners' discomfort with the practice to a disconnect in cultural understanding between the West and Africa.

We were at dinner last night with a South African woman, so we asked her opinion. She seemed to feel that, Biblical prohibitions notwithstanding, there are worse things in the world than polygamy. She wondered which was worse, the frank polygamy practiced in parts of Africa or the de facto serial polygamy of divorcing one wife to move on to the next. Interestingly, she observed that the greatest evil that she had seen resulting from polygamy was its connection, without exception in her experience, with witchcraft. Wives will call on witchdoctors to improve their standing with the husband and also to harm the children of the other wives.

People's attempts to access an evil supernatural realm causes very real harm. In today's newspaper there was an article about children in Congo who are accused of being witches by their families. They are cast out of the family and sometimes even killed. In Uganda, children are still killed for body parts, especially internal organs, to be used in witchcraft rituals. People want to become rich or they want someone to blame for misfortune, and they blame witches. The minister at our church lives on a hilltop where animals are sacrificed and has described going and talking with the people to try to dissuade them from the practice (I didn't get the impression he'd been successful).

Karen