– Agriculturally is easier to have a big family to cultivate the land then, is one of the reasons for polygamy in Africa. To conclude, there are many good reasons why polygamy is a fantastic practice, but because of time and space, only ten reasons have been proffered. Before I dive into it, I want readers to understand why I am covering this topic: this evolutionary perspective doesn’t just inform how we eat, how we run, or how we sleep. One of the reasons why this has happened is because the African societies have managed to see that children were a form of wealth and this way a family with more children was considered to be more powerful. Polygamy still exists as either being recognized or unrecognized by the state. There are many reasons why Africans practised polygamy but here are the common reasons given through the years: – A man’s wealth is measured by the number of wives and children he has – The more wives a man has, the more political alliances he makes. Such a practice was not considered evil or immoral/sinful until the Christian missionaries arrived in Africa. Generally in rural areas with growing populations, the higher the incidence of polygyny, the greater the delay of first marriage for young men. Polygamy and poverty are both widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. Incidence. It is one of the factors that holds many countries back economically. I’ve been reading the 335-page legal decision upholding Canada’s laws against polygamy, and boy is it juicy. There are many reasons why Africans practiced and valued polygamy: 1. Polygamy was widely practiced in Africa and it often formed the backbone of the traditional African family patterns. It informs things as fundamental as how we date, how we marry, and how we organize society. The desire to marry many wives among the Igbo’s for instance, is to ensure that many children are born in the famil y. Proponents of the Social School explained that at the time polygyny was established as the legal form of marriage, the ratio of women to men in Africa was about 10 to 1. These wives were married according to local custom and they were all legal in the understanding of the local world-view. FACTORS ON POLYGAMY 295 The organization of the remaining part of the paper is as follows. In Senegal, for example, nearly 47 per cent of marriages are said to feature multiple women. Under these circumstances the polygamy in Africa was considered to be part of the way you could build an empire. Our The polygamous family, consisting of a man, his wives (more than one wife), and their children, is the ideal for most Africans [2].Studies conducted from the 1930s to 1950s indicate that polygamy was common virtually in all regions of Africa. Polygamy is very common in the animist and Muslim communities of West Africa. 1 Several arguments have been made suggesting this correlation is causal. However, the rationale given for the practice of polygyny in Africa is provided by two schools of thought - the Social and Economic. Some scholars see the slave trade's impact on the male-to-female sex ratio as a key factor in the emergence and fortification of polygynous practices in regions of Africa. The selection of our samples from DHS data and a description of the statistical method are presented in Section III. Today, polygyny is more widespread in Africa than in any other continent. The polygamy in Africa in many places is a traditional tribal practice and the way it is done varies widely in different areas and countries, although I'm sure there is Islamic polygamy as well. We present a brief review of the intrinsic nature of polygamy in the historical and cultural con-text of sub-Saharan Africa in Section II. 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