Taking a second wife? Here's what it will actually cost you

A burial in Nyamira went viral last week for reasons unrelated to grief. A daughter was fuming over the behaviour of her father’s relatives, then there was a family going to great lengths to defend itself, and thousands of people on social media making it their business to take sides. By the time it was over, a family's private pain had gone viral.

But underneath all that noise is a much older question, one that has nothing to do with the people at the centre of it. Polygamy, which is not new to us! A man built two families; I am not sure whether he ever truly planned for either.

Polygamy forms part of customary and, for some, religious practice, and it is also deemed legal. Under the Marriage Act 2014, Christian, Hindu and civil marriages are monogamous by definition, while a marriage contracted under customary or Islamic law is presumed to be polygamous or potentially polygamous. A man cannot convert an existing Christian or civil marriage into a polygamous one; the law only allows conversion the other way, from a potentially polygamous marriage to a monogamous one, and even then, only while he has just one wife. What the law does not do is state how a polygamous household is to work once it exists. Families are left to sort that out mostly at the time of crises, like the death of the patriarch.

Also read: No polygamy for Kenya's ‘free men’

It worked, more or less, for our forefathers, who lived by different rules: bigger homesteads, clearer roles and elders close by to arbitrate when things went wrong. That world has largely gone. A man who chooses this route today is choosing it without most of that support system, and he needs to be ready for everything that comes with it.

A marriage, to one wife or several, is only a beginning. What follows is years of huge demands the husband has to brace for: school fees split across households, time divided between children who share a father but rarely a childhood, and attention that somehow has to reach two homes without making one feel sidelined. For the few men who actually manage this arrangement with real thought, that responsibility is the marriage itself.

The lack of planning rears its ugly head in old age, when a man can no longer provide, and his household must support him instead. Someone has to nurse him and pay for the bills that come with a failing body. That burden usually lands on one family, often the one he leaned on least during the good years. It's that same family, the one that showed up when he could no longer walk, feed himself or pay his own bills, whose account of him becomes the accepted one after he's gone. Not because they loved him more, but because people remember who was in the room at the end, more than who was around when things were easy.

Also read: The rise of ‘the other woman’: Is she wrecking or redefining marriage?

Funny thing is, everyone knows it’s coming, but when it does, almost nobody’s ready. Few men write wills while they are still strong enough to think clearly about death. They don’t really talk about who’ll look after them in old age; it only arises once illness comes knocking. And children, from the different mothers, often grow up as near strangers, sharing a surname and little else, simply because nobody, least of all their father, made the effort to bring them together while he still could.

The harder question in a story like this isn't really about the wives but the children, the ones who now have to work out, during the burial and in front of strangers, what "family" was even supposed to mean.

That is the cost of unplanned polygamy. It has nothing to do with a man choosing to build two homes. It comes from assuming that love, time, and money will just stretch to cover two homes on their own. They don't. Somebody has to actually sit down, the man and his wives together, and work out how it will be done. The point isn’t whether polygamy should exist; it does. The real issue is responsibility. That means planning finances so every child is protected, and letting wives speak openly about their roles instead of competing in silence. And fathers need to make the effort to raise their children as siblings long before a funeral forces them to meet as strangers.

Culture gave men the room to build more than one family. It never let them off the hook for building it properly. And that's where this conversation starts, not with who behaved badly at one funeral, but with how many other families are quietly headed towards the same reckoning, still unprepared.

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