That may well be but the counterpart affliction which strikes the young and the old people who never mature is the belief that change always improves matters.
Here's an example of how a changed social practice can have profound effects on
how society is run:
There are two reasons 11-year-old Chikumbutso Zuze never sees his three sisters, why he seldom has a full belly, why he sleeps packed sardinelike with six cousins on the dirt floor of his aunt's thatched mud hut.
One is AIDS, which claimed his father in 2000 and his mother in 2001. The other is his father's nephew, a tall, light-complexioned man whom Chikumbutso knows only as Mr. Sululu.
It was Mr. Sululu who came to his village five years ago, after his father died, and commandeered all of the family's belongings -- mattresses, chairs and, most important, the family's green Toyota pickup, an almost unimaginable luxury in this, one of the poorest nations on earth. And it was Mr. Sululu who rejected the pleas of the boy's mother, herself dying of AIDS, to leave the truck so that her children would have an inheritance to sustain them after her death. . . . .
Actually, the answer is simple: custom. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the death of a father automatically entitles his side of the family to claim most, if not all, of the property he leaves behind, even if it leaves his survivors destitute. . . .
By the time his father, Jonas, died, Chikumbutso Zuze recalled, his mother was to sick even to cook for him and his three sisters in their three-room house in the village of Bvumbwe in southern Malawi. Still, he said, she tried in vain to defy her husband's nephew when, with Dickensian callousness, he showed up after the funeral demanding the keys to the family truck. He also demanded the beds and any other possessions they had not already sold off to pay for medicine and food.
Chikumbutso now lives on the charity of his maternal aunt and uncle, who say they struggle daily to feed their own six school-age children. To raise money for food, the boy carries buckets of water, hauls sand from the river and solicits other chores from the neighbor.
WHY? Why and how did that custom come to be? WHY don't a man's children inherit his estate? Well, the social custom in many parts of Africa is for men and women, even when married, to engage in parallel relationships. We see clear consequences of this practice with the HETEROSEXUAL AIDS crisis sweeping Africa. A monogamous couple is on a safe island in a stormy sea of AIDS, but as soon as each partner also has multiple partners the infection vectors explode.
So it's not the end of the world, even with AIDS exploding, if people choose to maintain simultaneous sexual and personal relationships during their marriage. Life goes on. However, there are social consequences which work to shape society. One of those social consequences is that a man has a very low level of paternal certainty with respect to the children born into his marriage while he has 100% certainty that the children born to his sister are related to him. He has 100% certainty that his siblings born to his mother are related to him.This changes inheritance laws. Notice who is now caring for the boy, the mother's aunt. Notice who took the possession's, the father's nephew. Blood ties are assured.
A social custom arises because it makes sense in the context of how life in lived. When a father doesn't know that his children are his, then this doesn't just affect inheritance customs, it also affects behavior and investment into children while the father is alive. It simply doesn't make much sense to invest in a kid fathered by another man. These changes ripple out and touch many aspects of life.
So the expectation that polygamy will simply be a personal lifestyle choice and that society won't be influenced by it is naive. The question should be which choice produces the best social outcomes for the group, for society at large. In my example here the choice is between monogamous marriages or parallel open marriages. What follows from men having paternal certainty in their marriages? Is Western inheritance law leading to better social outcomes or does inheritance law patterned on this African custom produces better social outcomes?
