Why hasn’t polygamous marriage died out in African cities, as experts once expected it would? Enduring Polygamy considers this question in one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities: Bamako, the capital of Mali, where one in four wives is in a polygamous marriage. Using polygamy as a lens through which to survey sweeping changes in urban life, it offers ethnographic and demographic insights into the customs, gender norms and hierarchies, kinship structures, and laws affecting marriage, and situates polygamy within structures of inequality that shape marital options, especially for young Malian women. Through an approach of cultural relativism, the book offers an open-minded but unflinching perspective on a contested form of marriage. Without shying away from questions of patriarchy and women’s oppression, it presents polygamy from the everyday vantage points of Bamako residents themselves, allowing readers to make informed judgments about it and to appreciate the full spectrum of human cultural diversity.

"In some wide regions, people deem polygamy a normal, natural option. In others, it’s spurned as an archaic, immoral form of oppression. But if monogamy may be human history’s exception, eyes and minds need opening to polygamy’s enduring pros, cons, and complexities. This collaboratively researched, empathic volume does it superbly." - author of Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa