A question that comes up surprisingly often among Africans in the West, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar, Barack Obama Sr., John Updike’s dictator character in The Coup, and my friend J. from Cameroon is whether or not early marriages really count?
For example, Barack Obama Sr. (1934-1982), the late father of the former President, married his first wife Kezia in 1954 in an elaborate traditional Luo ceremony that was recognized under Kenyan law as legitimate (and polygamous).
Barack Sr. then bigamously married Miss Stanley Ann Dunham under American law in Hawaii in February 1961.
He told U.S. immigration officials he had divorced his first wife, but Kezia always laughed at that after he took up with her again when he returned to Kenya. He was divorced by Stanley in 1964 and married American schoolteacher Ruth Baker in Kenya in late 1964 in a Kenyan civil ceremony, which does not recognize polygamous marriages, so, arguably, that may have been bigamous too since he was still married to Kezia.
Similarly, Rep. Ilhan Omar married her first husband Ahmed Hirsi, the good-looking, masculine father of her three children, in an Islamic ceremony in Hennepin County, MN in 2002. The couple say they had applied for a marriage license, which would have made her next marriage, to her brother Ahmed Elmi, not just incestuous but bigamous. But no researchers has ever been able to find a completed marriage license on file for the first time they got married, so she is probably off the hook for bigamy.
Similarly, in Updike’s 1978 bestseller The Coup, the memoirs of the dictator of a fictitious Sahelian country, Colonel Ellelou, a devout Muslim and Marxist, has four wives. The first is a girl from his village he married when young. He then went to college in Wisconsin in the 1950s, where he married a middle class white girl much like Obama’s mother and much like Obama’s Sr.’s third wife. The future dictator would occasionally mention that he had another wife back in Africa, but she never believed him. (Late in life, Updike would point out that his novel is remarkably similar to the Obama family, but by then The Coup had been memoryholed: the notion of a white genius writing a comic novel in the voice of a black dictator was no longer respectable.)
Finally, my Cameroonian friend J. at UCLA had yet another story along these lines. He’d gotten married as a teenager back home and had a son. But he’d now been in the United States pursuing his academic career for quite a few years. He hadn’t seen his wife and child for years, and, frankly, thought less and less about them each year.
But one day about a year before I met J., his wife had suddenly showed up unannounced in West Los Angeles, declaring that she too had been admitted to UCLA. (She’d left their son in Cameroon with relatives.)
He wasn’t so sure what he thought about the idea of suddenly being married again after all these years apart.
But his wife immediately began to cook him delicious Cameroonian meals, clean and decorate his apartment, and enthusiastically perform all other wifely duties. By the time I got to know them, they appeared highly happy together.
But that didn’t convince J. that monogamy was the only way to go.
He explained to me that he intended to add another wife every decade (what’s known to anthropologists as “gerontocratic polygamy”). But he wasn’t an extremist about it: he felt that a limit of four wives was reasonable. He wasn’t a Muslim, but he felt you had to give the Prophet credit for coming up with a sensible compromise that accommodated the surplus number of females in the human population (J. was convinced that far more baby girls than baby boys were born), while not excessively taxing the husband’s energies with too many demanding wives.
Another point of commonality among Africans in America (at least in the past) is how many have links they often have back home to the power structure (or to a former power structure). For example, nice white Minnesotans tended to look upon Ilhan Omar as an impoverished refugee from irrational genocidal hatred.
But, her late father was not a “teacher” like she says, but …
Paywall here.
