Statistics about polygamy are often inconsistent, depending on the source, but a realistic estimate is that about two billion people in the world today are polygamists, not quite a third of the world’s population. The majority of these people reside in Africa and the Middle East in, perhaps, 150 countries. Paulina Chiziane’s novel, The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy, was published in 2003, in Portuguese, in Mozambique, the writer’s birth country, where the practice is still widespread, though if Chiziane’s story is an accurate reflection on the practice, women are slowly rebelling, refusing to be the second, third, fourth, or fifth wife of a man—no matter how wealthy he is and how successful he may be in supporting all those wives (and their multiple children).
Rami, the narrator of Chiziane’s burdened story, has been married for twenty years to Tony, and born him five children. She’s his first wife, and he’s become fairly invisible in recent years, visiting her only occasionally. She knows that he’s taken younger women, and when she finally gathers enough strength to confront one of them, they physically fight, and in the strange aftermath Rami discovers that she is not the only unhappy woman Tony has left for another. The second wife knows of a third wife; the third reveals a fourth; and, eventually, the fourth reveals a fifth. Even that wife knows of still another woman currently involved with Tony, who is the city’s chief of police, a position that…