A Polygamous family (from http://emeagwali.com)
My people are called Baluba. We are the Luba people. Muluba is what I am; mu- is singular, ba- plural. We are known to be proud, hard working, confident, stubborn and very much disliked by the Belgian colonizers who could not quite control us.
But when it comes to genealogy, the most important characteristic of the Baluba is that Baluba men are polygamous; they love to have several wives and even more children. I have a cousin-in-law, whose father has 45 wives (not children, wives! I haven’t started adding them to our family tree yet. I hope the software won’t crash).
We are proud of our large families, except when it comes to creating a genealogy tree.
“Our grand-father had 12 children. He was a strong Muluba,” the interviewee says with pride and laughter. Our grand-father had three different wives. I quickly jot down the kids who belong to which wife. Later on, as I enter the information on my iPad, a cousin sits down next to me and says I shouldn’t enter the name of the different wives.
“Why not?” I ask, surprised.
“Because that will separate the family,” my cousin replies.
“Separate the family?!”
Here is the issue, she explains. Our grand-mother was the first wife and so the most important one and maybe her children as a result have more “social family status.” By listing the children of the two other wives separately seems, in my cousin’s opinion, to divide the children in three factions.
But then what would be the point of doing a family tree? Since men boast of having several wives, it’s public knowledge. Everyone knows it; my writing it down won’t make any difference.
Now to avoid hurting anyone’s feeling (such as writing down their real mother’s name), I am supposed to go and ask permission to every second wife’s kid, third wife’s kid, and so on, to write their mother’s name down in the family tree.
That’s insane!
If people in the family are ashamed of their mother, they should declare themselves orphan or something. I am not going to write down a fake mother’s name instead.