Every Saturday in communities across Rwanda there will be a familiar, almost ubiquitous spectacle: the joyous wedding procession. At midday churches will be full, with happy newlyweds receiving spiritual blessings for their union. Afterwards convoys of vehicles, the ones in front carrying the bride and groom and bedecked in flowers, will proceed to a venue – from grand settings, say Kigali’s five-star hotels, to more humble ones like the MTN roundabout – where photographs of the event are taken. There, the proceedings will be recorded for posterity. Family, close relatives, friends and so on will be there in honour of the couple’s happiest day. These outwardly publicly rituals of societal regeneration usually cause a little smile whenever one comes across one. However, even as the couple make their vows, to be faithful, to love and cherish each other until death; to stick with each other for better or worse, for richer or poorer, I can’t help but wonder. How did ideas like these, which are so contrary to human nature itself, come to be uttered with such conviction. It’s curious how someone who’s been married, divorced, and possibly remarried multiple times can still recite those vows with unwavering conviction. My point here isn’t to judge anyone. It is that a lot of ideas that religion – meaning that of the white man’s bible – introduced to our societies; including the idea that one person can be faithful to only one partner throughout life, just are not compatible with the very nature of humanity itself. Let me be more explicit: a man or woman will be married to each other, but it is very unlikely that the only sexual partner they will have throughout life will be each other, whatever the religious texts say. Please, I am not attacking religion, or the teachings of the Bible, or anything like that. I am only stating simple, scientific facts; many verified by centuries of research in what makes us human. The thing is, we are by nature polygamous. Again, don’t shoot me; I am just the messenger of science... Also neither am I advocating we go back to polygamy. Fact is, however, males were, and have been prone to polygamy, back into the mists of time. That is when modern humans emerged in the Ethiopian Rift Valley region (according to painstaking research by palaeontologists who’ve studied bone fossils there) as homo sapiens, over three hundred years ago. These are our forebears, who struggled for survival against all kinds of ferocious beasts, insects, creepy crawlies, hunting herbivorous animals for food. They survived the savannas and jungles through superior brain power, and slowly spread to populate the rest of the world. (Yes, humans have different skin colours, body types, and complexions, but we are exactly the same. Evolutionary processes account for the superficial differences). One theory of researchers in human evolution – going back to Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, whose findings and ideas were refined by others that came after, most remarkably Darwin’s countryman Ronald Fisher – is that survival was so precarious in the earliest days of humanity it triggered the males to be disposed to passing on their seed, and reproduce, at any opportune time. This thinking, illustrated with evidence, was that the male (and his fellows) out on the plains hunting animals to provide meat to his female, and children, had vanishingly few chances of surviving through his young adulthood. He was likely to get entangled with fierce, man-eating creatures – lions and leopards, to name only two. Or dangerous snakes, mambas, puff adders, spitting cobras, would be slithering in shrubs, any of them very likely to bury their fangs into their leg, not to mention poisonous spiders, plants, and more hazards. It only makes sense that these earliest ancestors of ours developed the trait to try to procreate with any female they could befriend (or take by force, unfortunately). It then became hardwired into us, into our DNA. On their part, human females, in a process of “natural selection” became susceptible to offering their partnership, sexual favours to the guy most likely to survive the hunt. That is who they became hardwired to procreate with. It meant, sub-consciously or not, the ladies were on the lookout for the fastest, strongest, tallest guy in their tribe. If you are some small fellow that happens to be standing next to an athlete, you will tell me who the ladies will be focusing their attention on (put a laugh emoji here). But you not-so-big or athletic types, take heart. The ladies didn’t evolve to favour only brawn and physique. Any male that proved capable to provide, to deliver the beef or pork (in today’s terms, financial security) got themselves a good partner, and procreated, to pass on their lineage. There is a whole body of scientific work out there on this topic. I am sharing this after I saw a couple of wedding processions last weekend, but at the same time remembered that divorce rates, according to the Rwanda Judiciary Report, have been going (steeply) up in our society. It probably is a reflection of the fact women are now more empowered than ever before – which is a great thing – having the ability to get out of unhappy marriages. According to reports, marital infidelity and domestic violence are the leading cause of divorce. One can even deduce that most incidents of domestic violence most likely are a result of confrontations resulting from marital infidelity. Men driven by their (atavistic) proclivities to polygamy end up on the wrong side of the law. Women whose men fall on hard times and can no longer provide the beef, i.e. financial security, only to find themselves in relations with other men, end up on the wrong side of the law. Our traits, from the earliest times of homo sapiens, are failing us.
