23 March 2007

New York, New York

The recent tragic fire in the Bronx, is shining a light on a previously hidden social issue in the African immigrant community... the prevalence of polygamous marriage.
-- The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors.

“I know a lady who lives with her husband and another woman in one room, a two-bedroom, with 11 kids,” she said. “I tell her, she has to move — it’s not a life.”

And her own husband? His second wife is 23 now, with three children. And recently, Ms. Kante said, he married a third.
If, as in Canada, the courts are willing to throw out the "one man, one woman" definition of marriage, how on earth can you deal with culturally entrenched polygamy?

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