The work of African writers has often dealt with the direct and indirect impacts of colonization on the continent. Meanwhile, the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ and, much more recently, Juliana Mbengono, have focused on women and the persistence of practices such as polygamy, content that goes beyond the narrative to sting society and the ruling class.
The writer Mariama Bâ was wrong about My longest letter (1979), his most international novel. Her colleagues were much smarter than her. They wrote, wisely, about geopolitics in black Africa, centered on the dispute over the sovereignty of the people. They wrote, wisely, about the strategic use of natural resources, located in territories that since then have the names of States, consolidating the definition of the political from the confrontation between postcolonial political elites against NATO and Russia (former USSR). The Senegalese writer, unlike her male colleagues, wrote with My longest letter a democratic manifesto against polygamy. The work grants the black female body the same importance as natural resources and people’s territories, and makes it independent from the postcolonial political agenda in the hands of men.
And African literature written by black women knows how to go against the grain. It is made by gladiators. A gladiator in ancient Rome, according to the RAE, was a person who in circus games fought alone with another person or with wild animals. Bâ, born in Dakar in 1929, died 40 years ago, but the feminist and anti-polygamy fuse that she lit has been crushed by a year 2025 that brought Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a young man, to the presidency of her country. pan-africanist barely 45 years old who hangs around the offices of the most consolidated democracies in the world with two wives.
If the writer were to resurrect, she would discover that the Senegalese leader is accompanied by some dictators in the process of institutional normalization of polygamy. pan-africanists of outstanding youth. Most emerge from the military regimes of the Sahel, although others have orchestrated palace coups such as Brice Oligui Nguema, from Gabon, a country with a lot of influence in central Africa. A resurrected Mariama would know that African authors who write against polygamy face a 2026 that legitimizes more than ever My longest letter, a book-gladiator reborn with the writer Juliana Mbengono, a young 30-year-old Equatorial Guinean.
Mbengono closed 2025 with the publication of the comic daughters of the woman, a story based on a 16-year-old teenager who, unknowingly, shares a husband with her father’s sister. In line with Bâ, the Equatoguinean author denounces irresponsible parenthood and polygamy. The plot is centered on the suicide of the husband, who discovers that he shares a married life with his late brother’s two daughters, violating the incest taboo.
Juliana Mbengono denounces that “the title of my work grants women the recognition of care. The fathers exercise legal guardianship, but it is they, the mothers, the women of the families, who are in charge of effective guardianship, acting as mothers and fathers at the same time. The men are not there. The writer, who publishes her third work with Lenoy Ediciones, has a degree in Journalism and has previous titles such as mud on my feet (2018) and Things a girl should not write. Mold for imperfect women (2019). She describes polygamy with the same mastery displayed by Paulina Chiziane, Camões 2021 Prize winner, in Niketche: A History of Polygamy (2002).
It is no coincidence that in this and in My longest letter The polygamist character is not a man of humble origins. In daughters of the woman yes it is. Mbengono, in this work, becomes a gladiator. It lands in a neighborhood of Malabo inhabited by people without resources and makes visible the deep roots of polygamy. This is not the case of their references Chiziane and Bâ. The two gladiators identify polygamous men in the postcolonial political elites: in those responsible for democratizing countries. They identify polygamists in men officially on the left and pan-africanistsresponsible for descendants that number in the dozens, but who live abandoned in the name of a tradition such as polygamy, responsible, in part, for many African countries leading the lists of states with the largest HIV population in the world, according to data from institutions such as the United Nations.
