Among populations that value high fertility, marital practices often play important roles in regulating fertility. This article interprets ethnographic and demographic data to examine changes in contemporary African marriage. It shows that female education exacerbates inequities between de facto polygynous women who previously would have lived together, shared household resources, and acknowledged each other as cowives. These new forms of polygyny, however, hold an important key to explaining why polygyny and high fertility still proliferate. Men sustain the costs of polygyny and of high fertility in large part by marginalizing low-status women, usually those with the least education, as outside wives and their children as outside children.
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References
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1. One reason why fertility remains valued in Africa is that many people take responsibility for, and can demand benefits from, children. For example, fostering children out temporarily to be raised or trained adjusts family size and composition socially and takes economic pressure off parents without limiting their biological fertility. See Caroline Bledsoe, “The Politics of Children: Fosterage and the Social Management of Fertility among the Mende of Sierra Leone,” in Births and Power: The Politics of Reproduction, ed. W. Penn Handwerker (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 81-100.
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2. Louis Henry, “Some Data on Natural Fertility,”Eugenics Quarterly, 8(2):81-91 (1961).
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3. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and Other Essays in Social Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1965).
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the contributions to Transformations of African Marriage, ed. David Parkin and Davin Nyamwaya (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
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5. See especially John L. Comaroff and Simon Roberts, “Marriage and Extra-Marital Sexuality: The Dialectics of Legal Change among the Kgatla,”Journal of African Law, 21:97-123 (1977).
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6. See, for example, Etienne van de Walle and Dominique Meekers, “Marriage Drinks and Kola Nuts” (Paper delivered at the IUSSP Seminar on Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current Changes and Impact on Fertility, Paris, 1988).
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7. Jane I. Guyer, “Changing Nuptiality in a Nigerian Community: Observations from the Field” (Paper delivered at the IUSSP Seminar on Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current Changes and Impact on Fertility, Paris, 1988).
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8. Such strategies obviously become riskier in the era of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Yet condoms, because they block fertility, face an uphill battle for acceptance in Africa because they undermine the core of stable heterosexual relations.
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9. Philip Burnham, “Changing Themes in the Analysis of African Marriage,” in Transformations of African Marriage, ed. Parkin and Nyamwaya, p. 50.
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Noreen Goldman and Anne Pebley, “The Demography of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Reproduction and Social Organization in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Ron Lesthaeghe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 212-237.
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11. Anastasia Brandon and Caroline Bledsoe, “The Effects of Education and Social Stratification on Marriage and the Transition to Parenthood in Greater Freetown, Sierra Leone” (Paper delivered at the IUSSP Seminar on Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current Changes and Impact on Fertility, Paris, 1988).
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Very elite urban men, however, may disregard these proscriptions and openly acknowledge multiple wives. See, for example, Remi Clignet, Many Wives, Many Powers: Authority and Power in Polygynous Families (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
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13. Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
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14. Data from a recent historical ethnography document findings for a Portuguese village that bear striking parallels to contemporary African trends. They show that illegitimacy has provided a key source of cheap labor for the wealthy and the landed without posing threats to local patrimonies. See Brian J. O'Neill, Social Inequality in a Portuguese Hamlet: Land, Late Marriage, and Bastardy, 1870-1978 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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15. This is suggested by the findings in John Caldwell and Pat Caldwell, “Marital Status and Abortion in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Paper delivered at the IUSSP Seminar on Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current Changes and Impact on Fertility, Paris, 1988).
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Caroline Bledsoe , “Differential Care of Children of Previous Unions within Mende Households in Sierra Leone” (Paper delivered at the Health Transition Workshop, “Cultural, Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health: What Is the Evidence?”Canberra, Australia, 1989).
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Dominique Meekers , “Consequences of Marriage and Premarital Childbearing in Côte d'Ivoire” (Manuscript, University of Pennsylvania, 1989).
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18. See also Harrell-Bond, Modern Marriage in Sierra Leone, p. 134.
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Other practices in various parts of the world that effectively reduce the costs of fertility include the neglect of girls, high-order siblings, fostered children, and deformed children. For a review of these issues, see Caroline Bledsoe and H. Kimball Hirschman, “Case Studies of Mortality: Anthropological Contributions” (Paper delivered at the Twenty-First General Conference of the IUSSP, New Delhi, 1989).
