REFLECTION: Netflix’s The Polygamist confuses culture with sexual deviance

The series fails to interrogate polygamy and instead mistakes sexual pathology for culture. There is a difference between interrogating culture and butchering it. The Polygamist does the latter.

“Bad writing is like any other form of crime: most of it is unimaginative and tiresomely predictable.”

That Richard Mitchell line appeared on my Facebook memories while I was watching Netflix’s The Polygamist over three days. By the end of the series, it felt less like a literary joke and more like a diagnosis.

The main issue with The Polygamist is not melodrama. It is that the series conflates polygamy (isithembu) with sexual deviance, mistakes culture for pathology, and passes off shock as storytelling. It mistakes a family institution for a libido.

He was my half-brother in my village of eHabeni near Eshowe. He had three wives. Not three secrets. Not three victims. Not three women trapped in a man’s theatre of deception.

His first wife was his wife in the ordinary sense. The second entered the household because Bhusha’s brother had died in prison, leaving children behind. The family decided: Bhusha would ngena indlu yomfowabo. He would enter his late brother’s house, not as a sexual adventurer, but as a man carrying a family obligation.

It was a sacred tradition, however uncomfortable it may sound to modern ears. Its purpose was not pleasure. It was continuity. It was aimed at protecting children from abandonment, poverty and the slow social death that turns children into amaphara.

The third wife was, in a sense, for the first wife. She was barren. She asked her husband to take another wife who would bear children who would become hers in the family imagination, not merely the biological children of the new wife. In fact, she went around the village herself, eshela, looking for wife number three.

One may critique it. One may reject it. One may call it patriarchal. But one must first understand it. It was not random lust. It was not deception. It was not a man moving from one woman to another, like a bull in a kraal without a fence. It was a social arrangement governed by family, duty, negotiation, responsibility and cultural logic.

My late brother, uCelemba, also understood this distinction. He told anyone who cared to listen: “I will have isithembu.” Both women knew this before the first marriage. There was no secret architecture, no double life, no elaborate fraud. Both women orbited his family.

The Polygamist angered me because Jonas Gomora is portrayed not as a true polygamist, but as a man motivated by excess, deceit and emotional violence. He l