₦airaland Forum

THE EPIGENETICS OF POLYGAMY

After reading the many comments on my earlier critique of the modern marriage system, which is visibly cracking under the weight of its own contradictions, I decided to pause and think more deeply.

Why is it that so many modern men who loudly proclaim monogamy, often in the language of religion and civilization, still find themselves secretly practicing polygamy?

Why is it that even men who take celibacy vows as Catholic priests, pastors, monks, or other religious figures so often struggle, not because they are not willing, but because ordination, cassocks, and church doctrines do not rewrite the biology of ancestral inheritance?

Last night, as I put together these reflections, the comic wisdom of late Mr. Udo Uyor from Ndi Ukpabi, Aba, Isu came to me.

He used to say, one wife is not good; it is better when a man steps out and wives surround him - igurube.”

Maka Chi eeeeh, this is more than an old man’s joke; it is an ancestral logic distilled into a single sentence.

My parents are products of a polygamous marriage, like many Igbo families of their generation.

In their world, polygamy was not scandal; it was social structure. And truth be told, in my observation, those who abandoned polygamy under modern religious and legal pressure have not necessarily built better families, they have built more hidden ones.

Most polygamous men of old did not have children outside marriage; many modern monogamous men do.

What has changed is not desire or behavior.

What has changed is visibility.

To understand why this is happening, we must speak with scientific honesty. So, I think epigenetics plays a role.

Epigenetics refers to heritable changes in gene expression that do not alter the DNA sequence itself, but determine which genes are “on” or “off.”

It’s like software instructions layered over the hardware of DNA.

Environmental conditions, social systems, cultural habits, and stress patterns can alter these instructions and pass them down through generations.

The most famous example is the , when famine during WWII in the Netherlands left lasting metabolic changes in the children and grandchildren of survivors. Trauma, diet, reproductive patterns, sexual structures, and social organization can leave similar marks.

Shey you get?

For thousands of years, Igbo and many other African societies were structured around polygyny, one man, two or more wives, because it made sense culturally, spiritually, and economically.

That was not a short episode.

It was a long evolutionary environment.

In anthropology and population genetics, when a structure persists for centuries, it does not just shape culture; it shapes gene–culture coevolution.

Across human history, genome studies show that more women reproduced than men, meaning a smaller pool of men fathered most of the offspring (if we have more women than men, why do this same women not support polygamy to bring their fellow gender in?)

That is classic evidence of polygynous mating systems.

Such systems favor epigenetic patterns that influence bonding hormones (like oxytocin and vasopressin), jealousy thresholds, reproductive timing, sexual drive cycles, and patterns of attachment.

In short, many lineages have been shaped under polygamy for so long that switching to strict monogamy by colonial law or church decree does not erase the biological and epigenetic inheritance.

Culture can change in a generation but biology often lags behind.

Nowhere is this contradiction sharper than in religious institutions.

In Igboland, before the arrival of missionaries, men who were dibia, ozo title holders, or shrine custodians or those who chose strong spirituality had spiritual purity codes.

Sexual abstinence before rituals, sleeping in separate quarters, and menstrual taboos (mgbe nwanyị nọ na nso) shaped household organization. When a wife was menstruating, she could not cook for her husband or approach sacred spaces.

This was not hatred of women; it was part of a cosmology that treated blood and fertility as spiritual voltage.

In practical terms, a man who had only one wife would have his domestic, sexual, and ritual rhythms interrupted.

So many men married additional wives to balance the cycle, maintain ritual purity, and keep the household running smoothly.

This wasn’t just personal preference, it was spiritual engineering.

A dibia’s bedroom was his temple, his body was an instrument of ritual, and household management was structured accordingly.

Over time, this rhythm, spiritual abstention, multiple partners, regulated cycles, became interwoven with economic life. More wives meant more children, more labor, stronger extended lineages, and stable production systems.

This infact was the operating system under which many Igbo families ran for centuries.

Now, enter modernity.

Colonial administrators and Christian missionaries imposed monogamy as law and doctrine.

Churches, particularly the Catholic Church, went a step further, requiring some men (priests) to embrace celibacy altogether.

But here lies the biological tension: priestly ordination does not switch off the hypothalamus.

Vows do not silence the hormonal axis.

Celibacy is a spiritual discipline, not a genetic mutation.

A man whose lineage evolved over generations of polygamy still carries the hormonal, epigenetic, and psychological architecture of a mating animal, not an angel. And so many struggle silently.

This is why cases of secret relationships among clergy are not anomalies; they are inevitable frictions between inherited biology and institutional ideals.

The same is true for the laity.

When a society that has lived with polygamy for centuries suddenly says “from now on, everyone must be monogamous,” the law changes, the hymns change, the wedding format changes, but the body does not.

The ancestral software is still running.

This is why in many Igbo communities today, you see public monogamy but private polygamy: a church wedding at the front, a secret partner or children at the back. Baby mamas become unofficial co-wives. Polygamy goes underground, losing its structure and communal regulation, turning into secrecy, betrayal, and moral confusion.

In traditional Igbo society, polygyny was transparent, regulated, and spiritually anchored.

The ụmụnna enforced fairness among wives, protected inheritance lines, and maintained compound order. It had its injustices, yes, but it was visible.

Today, modern monogamy pretends the instinct is gone, yet the evidence of secret families, multiple hidden children, and broken homes says otherwise. The hypocrisy itself becomes a disease.

And at the heart of this crisis is epigenetic dissonance, when inherited behavioral tendencies no longer align with the social structures trying to contain them.

You cannot simply instruct genes by sermon. You cannot delete ancestral reproductive patterns with vows.

You can only acknowledge, negotiate, or repress them. And repressed systems have consequences.

Consider again the priest.

A man who grows up in a lineage where, for centuries, male reproductive strategy was polygynous, now swears celibacy.

The hormonal cycle remains.

The neural pathways for bonding and sexual desire remain.

The epigenetic instructions remain.

Some may succeed in sublimating these drives through discipline, prayer, and calling.

Many others break in silence, because ordination does not alter genetic expression.

Society then mocks their failure as moral weakness, forgetting it was asking a biological organism to act like a sexless spirit.

The same pattern is repeated in secular homes.

A man stands before the altar, vows monogamy, and perhaps means it.

But deep in his hormonal circuits lies an ancestral rhythm tuned to multiple attachments, high fertility, and shared household labor.

Without a strong and honest system to help navigate this dissonance, many quietly build parallel families.

Some rationalize it.

Some hide it until their funerals reveal the real kinship map.

Women also live with the fallout: fractured trust, secret children, contested inheritance.

We can deny this forever, but it won’t disappear.

Epigenetics is not a moral argument. It is a reality argument. It explains why certain social shifts stick quickly, and others drag ancestral shadows for centuries.

This doesn’t mean PEOPLE ARE “DESTINED” TO BE POLYGAMOUS.

Epigenetic tendencies are not handcuffs.

They are pressures.

They create tensions that must either be consciously managed, structurally absorbed, or hypocritically denied.

What Africa did was move from a regulated polygamous structure into a rigid monogamous ideal without building new structures to address the ancestral load.

The result is what we see now, a marriage system stretched between what we say we are and what our inherited biology is still whispering beneath the surface.

And this is why I say: the crisis is not polygamy. The crisis is pretending the ancestral architecture does not exist.

Our ancestors built systems that matched their cosmology and biology.

Modernity imported systems that ignore that history.

That’s why public morality says monogamy, private behavior says otherwise, and society sinks into quiet hypocrisy. It affects everyone - priests, pastors, educated men, market men, kings, politicians.

It is not a sin issue alone; it is a civilizational mismatch between biological inheritance and institutional design.

Maybe the question we need to ask is not “Why can’t Africans stay monogamous?” but “Why are we pretending ancestral epigenetic architectures can be erased by legal decrees or religious vows?”

Until we begin to face this tension with intellectual honesty, we will keep punishing individuals for collective historical inheritances. We will keep calling priests hypocrites, husbands liars, and wives promiscuous, while the deeper engine runs untouched.

Written by Ósìnákáchī Àkùmà Kálū

Source:
https://www.facebook.com/share/1BYrSZ1FFL/

Monogamy is not the problem, and polygamy is not the solution.

1.
Men are not the only ones having children outside wedlock. What about women who commit paternity fraud these days? Doesn't that mean having children outside wedlock? Did women who avoided paternity fraud in the olden days marry many husbands?

2.
What about women becoming single mothersbefore their first marriage and the men responsible for the pregnancies had not even taken their first wives?

3.
During the time that polygamy was widely accepted, many men who had many wives were unfaithful to the many wives. So, what exactly is your point?

4.
We now have married women dating single men. Some married women are dating their married ex. Most of the women who found themselves in polygamous homes in those days got married as virgins and never had any ex before getting married. On average, ladies of these days have numerous ex and high body count before getting married. How is polygamy the solution?

5.
When polygamy was widely accepted, a man could easily afford to take good care of his many wives and many children. But now, a man finds it difficult to take good care of his one wife and a few children.

One man, one wife is a delusion to the African man.
Polygamous marriage makes an household bouyant, firm, and active. Just like an organisation.

In the past, it was a treasure.

In reality now, many things affected it.

Let me just say this era is a season of one man, one woman.

immortalcrown:
If monogamy is the issue, how can polygamy solve the following problems?

1.
Men are not the only ones having children outside wedlock. What about women who commit paternity fraud these days? Doesn't that mean having children outside wedlock? Did women who avoided paternity fraud in the olden days marry many husbands?

2.
What about women becoming single mothersbefore their first marriage and the men responsible for the pregnancies had not even taken their first wives?

3.
During the time that polygamy was widely accepted, many men who had many wives were unfaithful to the many wives. So, what exactly is your point?

4.
We now have married women dating single men. Some married women are dating their married ex. How is polygamy the solution?

5.
When polygamy was widely accepted, a man could easily afford to take good care of his many wives and many children. But now, a man finds it difficult to take good care of his one wife and a few children.

To add to your point, does the writer implies that men from western world where open polygamy was never practiced in the past are not engaging in "secrete polygamy" today?. Di