When Zimbabwean author Sue Nyathi self-published her debut novel The Polygamist in 2012 after a string of rejections from publishers, she couldn’t have known she was writing a story for a different era. Fourteen years later, Netflix’s adaptation of the book has become a huge global hit, introducing audiences around the world to the dramatic lives of the wealthy banking magnate and womanizer Jonasi Gomora, his wives, and the children caught in the crossfire.
For an African-language series, The Polygamist’s popularity has been remarkable. The show is performed predominantly in the isiZulu language – spoken by about 13 million South African – and peaked at No. 2 on Netflix’s U.S. chart last month, and made the top 10 in 63 countries.
The series’ success rests on Nyathi’s rich source material, sharp writing and a well-cast ensemble. But its global resonance owes just as much to its timing. The Polygamist has arrived at a moment when women around the world are questioning what heterosexual partnership, and marriage in particular, actually asks of them. As well as what it offers in return.
Millennial and Gen Z women are marrying later, having fewer children, or opting out of marriage altogether. Conversations about “decentering men” are trending on social media, while essays such as Vogue’s viral “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing?” scrutinize heterosexual romantic relationships with a candor that wasn’t as mainstream ten years ago.
This is the audience The Polygamist was written for.
Where the Netflix series shines is in relocating Nyathi’s Zimbabwean story to South Africa, and capturing what the global reckoning with marriage looks like there. Here, women are questioning not only marriage itself, but the role African culture plays in shaping it. As more Black South African women gain financial independence and social autonomy, many are asking difficult questions about the traditions that have long defined marriage and womanhood.
How do we honor our cultural inheritance while rejecting patriarchy? Which customs continue to enrich our lives? Which have evolved alongside us? And which are oppressive vehicles for preserving patriarchy?
Joyce Gomora, Jonasi’s common-law wife, embodies this dilemma. When she initially refuses Jonasi’s request for a divorce — though it would free her from years of humiliation and betrayal — many South African women saw more in her refusal than a socialite keeping up appearances. We understood her fear of abantu bazothini (“What will people say?”) as a product of how we are raised and socialized to be good women — how we are taught ukubekezela: to be patient, to persevere, to forgive our husbands’ shortcomings for the sake of lasting marriages.
Joyce’s mother’s advice for saving her union — keep herself looking attractive around the house and compete with Jonasi’s mistress for his attention — shows how ukubekezela is passed from one generation of women to the next. What’s noteworthy in The Polygamist is that the mother-daughter conversation takes place not in a rural homestead or impoverished township, but in a sprawling Johannesburg mansion. Joyce is not the stereotypical downtrodden African woman, hemmed in by few options and financial dependence. She is educated, glamorous, successful, and influential. The forces keeping her stuck in her marriage are more quietly suffocating. They’re tied to her identity as a woman and a wife, and how the failure of her marriage will reflect on her competence and worth.
Jonasi is not the stereotypical African patriarch either. When we talk about South Africa’s status as the rape and gender-based violence capital of the world, it’s rightfully linked to other social ills such as high unemployment and poverty. But through Jonasi Gomora we meet another kind of perpetrator. He’s not the unemployed father who gets drunk and violent after a night at the township drinking spot. He’s not the rapist in the dark downtown alley. He’s the high-status provider whose authority is reinforced by both money and culture.
For Jonasi, African culture is not an ethical guide but a shield from the consequences of his choices. He uses polygamy to obscure and legitimize his infidelity. When Jonasi’s children confront him about the pain he is causing his family, he invokes his authority as their father to demand respect and compliance. In one of the scenes that stayed with me most, Jonasi’s daughter Mpume reads her father a heartfelt letter explaining how his behavior has affected her emotionally. But Jonasi ignores her. Mpume is being raised with access to the kind of education and opportunities intended to make her confident and articulate. Her family celebrates her academic brilliance and ambition. Yet when she uses those same qualities to question her parents, she hits up against the boundaries of her empowerment. Jonasi appears to want an accomplished daughter out in the world, but at home he expects the unquestioning obedience traditionally demanded by African patriarchs.
I recognized the painful contradiction Mpume struggles with: being raised to think critically, express yourself and question the world, only to discover that those qualities are less welcome at home. We are empowered women in the world, yet punished for refusing to remain compliant daughters at home.
My parents afforded me the kind of life in which I have felt empowered to choose not to marry or have children. But I have not been exempted from certain domestic roles and expectations. Before we negotiate these expectations as wives and mothers, we first encounter them as daughters.
The Gomoras’ approach to polygamy reflects to another tension within South Africa’s post-apartheid Black middle and upper classes: how and when to adapt cultural beliefs and practices for modern, urban, affluent life.
Again and again, The Polygamist asks whether culture is being honored or simply deployed to insulate men from accountability.
Like Joyce, Jonasi’s other wives and lovers resist easy categorization. They are victims of his manipulation and abuse, but they are not passive. They relentlessly pursue status and proximity to power, competing for Jonasi’s affection, even as their choices deepen their own suffering.
That is why I found Joyce’s mid-season declaration that she is finally going to start “choosing herself” so revealing. Throughout the series, she repeatedly chooses what she wants: to preserve her marriage and the lifestyle attached to it, despite her husband’s rejection and her children begging her to leave him. The people she actually struggles to choose are her children, and they bear the emotional cost of her fixation on maintaining the status quo.
It is a fixation on winning a game with no true victors. The Polygamist’s bleakest insight is that in the end, the only force that can stop a man like Jonasi is his own mortality.
Financial empowerment and professional success have transformed the lives of many Black South African women, but the cultural and social structures that enable men have proved far more resistant to change.
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