REFLECTION: Netflix’s The Polygamist confuses culture with sexual deviance

“Bad writing is like any other form of crime: most of it is unimaginative and tiresomely predictable.”

That Richard Mitchell line appeared on my Facebook memories while I was watching Netflix’s The Polygamist over three days. By the end of the series, it felt less like a literary joke and more like a diagnosis.

The main issue with The Polygamist is not melodrama. It is that the series conflates polygamy ( isithembu ) with sexual deviance, mistakes culture for pathology, and passes off shock as storytelling. It mistakes a family institution for a libido.

Most South Africans do not know Bhusha. I knew him.

He was my half-brother in my village of eHabeni near Eshowe. He had three wives. Not three secrets. Not three victims. Not three women trapped in a man’s theatre of deception.

His first wife was his wife in the ordinary sense. The second entered the household because Bhusha’s brother had died in prison, leaving children behind. The family decided: Bhusha would ngena indlu yomfowabo . He would enter his late brother’s house, not as a sexual adventurer, but as a man carrying a family obligation.

It was a sacred tradition, however uncomfortable it may sound to modern ears. Its purpose was not pleasure. It was continuity. It was aimed at protecting children from abandonment, poverty and the slow social death that turns children into amaphara .

The third wife was, in a sense, for the first wife. She was barren. She asked her husband to take another wife who would bear children who would become hers in the family imagination, not merely the biological children of the new wife. In fact, she went around the village herself, eshela , looking for wife number three.

That was polygamy.

One may critique it. One may reject it. One may call it patriarchal. But one must first understand it. It was not random lust. It was not deception. It was not a man moving from one woman to another, like a bull in a kraal without a fence. It was a social arrangement governed by family, duty, negotiation, responsibility and cultural logic.

My late brother, uCelemba, also understood this distinction. He told anyone who cared to listen: “I will have isithembu .” Both women knew this before the first marriage. There was no secret architecture, no double life, no elaborate fraud. Both women orbited his family.

The Polygamist angered me because Jonas Gomora is portrayed not as a true polygamist, but as a man motivated by excess, deceit and emotional violence. He lies, manipulates, hides women, abuses power and causes harm – all of which distort the reality of polygamy.

That is not polygamy. That is sexual misconduct.

This distinction is crucial. Stories shape society’s understanding of itself. Misrepresenting culture in storytelling misleads the public about that culture.

The Booker Prize-winning Nigerian novelist Ben Okri once said: “To poison a nation, poison its stories.” This idea echoed throughout The Polygamist. The series fails to interrogate polygamy and instead mistakes sexual pathology for culture.

In the series, culture becomes costume. The story appears to believe that if a man has multiple women, the word “polygamy” will do. It will not. A man with an excessive sexual appetite, prone to psychological abuse, deceit and manipulation, can hardly serve as a poster boy for a sacred institution.

One reflects personal sexual misconduct, while the other is a longstanding social practice with defined cultural norms, obligations and consequences.

The portrayal of women is equally troubling. For a series that seems eager to speak in the language of female suffering, it gives its women very little agency. Joyce is warned repeatedly, yet remains trapped in reaction. Matipa begins with promise, then collapses into weakness. Essie fights back through another form of dysfunction. Lindani’s story is unforgivable: a young woman drawn into a web of sex, violence and violation ends the series sleeping with Menzi, episodes after she slept with his father.

If feminism is about dignity, capacity for self-determination and respect for women, what exactly is feminist about reducing Black women to victims, rivals, dependents, influencers, mistresses and emotional debris?

Kanti intoni i-feminism?

A woman gets a job through her boyfriend’s brother’s company. Another character’s professional life seems to revolve around influencing bath products. Black women are far more than this. They are intellectuals, workers, organisers, mothers, leaders, healers, professionals and builders of families. Yet across 22 episodes, the series repeatedly narrows them into stereotypes.

Sdumo Mtshali as Jonasi Gomora in The Polygamist. (Image: Courtesy of Netflix) The men are not much better served. Menzi has little agency. Magesh drifts through implausible emotional entanglements. Jonas dominates the story, but not because he is complex. He dominates because the plot keeps feeding him women, secrets, violence and scandal.

That is not artistic mastery. It is spectacle in search…