attention? 
The import of it is that my uncle Mambongi, a village head with 11 wives and has to make do with his women’s continued squabbling.
They even arrange new wives for him as a way of getting favours from him.
For the first time, uncle Mambongi told this villager how he managed to marry a buffet of 11 wives. His is a trailblazing marriage, full of drama, twists and turns.
For starters, Mambongi brags never to have taken any woman to bed, against her will, even among his 11 wives.
Of course, he admits taking concoctions of sex enhancing herbs, for, do they not say there is no pond, which the sun cannot dry up, yet the rains can refill. The concoctions, stir the loins, he remarked, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth and exposing his tobacco stained teeth.
“It is my duty to satisfy them all and I do just that. I have a strong back, but most of these wives were arranged for me by my senior wives.”
A poor man’s main tool is his tongue with which he defends himself and for Mambongi, that is being a man. Do village elders not say that it is the norm for every man to brag about the size of his manhood, no matter how tiny? Is man’s libido not nine-tenths testos­terone?
When he goes beer-drinking Mambongi always prefers drags from the bottom of the calabash, for, they make the back strong.
For the benefit of those who might have missed an earlier instalment on Mambongi, he has a central bed­room and each of the wives is given a weeklong conju­gal rights duty and so, it takes 10 weeks before duty revisits each woman.
This villager is no good mathematician, but counting up to 10 is easy because it is not beyond the number of his fingers.
The bedroom is an unassuming one room whose grass totters with age. Its mud-and-pole wall leans backwards, with a little door that is always firmly closed.
The room has kept many secrets. This room knows every wife, but never says a word.
It knows many family secrets, the gossip. It has listened to many quarrels between Mambongi and his wives. The bedroom antics and indeed, the scandals too! But it remains quiet. In its belly, most if not all, of Mambongi’s children were manufactured.
Last weekend, we sat on stools polished by years of use under a huge Msasa tree and one-by-one, we looked at how he got each wife, until they became 11.
Muchaneta is the first wife. In the village the lead cow gets the most stoning and whipping from herd­boys. She has seen it all.
Her trademark is yellow undisciplined teeth, a wide forehead spotted with dead pimples, a bushy face, unkempt thickly matted hair and big eyes that are usu­ally shouting, white. She is gifted with understanding but not with smartness.
When Mambongi took home his second wife Magumbo, Muchaneta was inexperienced and jealousy. Magumbo was onion-shaped, but not beautiful by vil­lage standards. She had wide eyes that bulged slightly, that at the end it she looked alertly stupid.
This villager was offended by her discourtesy and setting the compound alive through telling impious and indecent stories. The stories left many chaperoned. She was a master of mixing cow dung and soil for the floors of the huts. Her floors reflected like mirrors.
One night while on bedroom duty — that time it was a week of conjugal rights duty each, since they were only two wives — she told her husband she had found him a third wife, her 20-year-old, cousin Chipo.
Mambongi quickly bought the idea and thanked her with a goat. Chipo came on board as the third and lat­est. Juicy! Young. Energetic. Demanding!
She was a dark woman with a straight narrow face and European-shaped nose. Her eyes were deep set and had a hard glint, maybe from years of seeing too many-trouble as she came from an extremely poor family. Mambongi calls her by the sobriquet “The Sweet One” and only him knows why.
Her arrival changed the conjugal duty matrix to three-week stands and agitated by Chipo’s arrival, Magumbo brought in her young sister Netsai into the compound and arranged a date with Mambongi. Magumbo was witty and artistic.
When her conjugal  duty came, she sent Netsai to entertain Mambongi in the bedroom for hours on end, pretending to be busy.
Netsai was bright with light yellow eyes. Her cheeks looked drawn in and her lips were cracked. She looked a skeletal figure or hypochondriac.
But her face was stuffed always with joy yet her appearance was strange.
She had protuberant eyes, other women laughed at her, but Mambongi’s blood got hot and as for what hap­pened, your guess is as good as mine. The marriage was set. Magumbo later took on her duty, satisfied she had added one to her number.
It turned out Magumbo had failed to conceive and arranging that marriage was meant to bring back life to the cooking stones in the kitchen. Thereafter, it became a game of numbers, each faction bringing in more until he came to 11. He is expecting a 12th one. For him the sky is the limit, he could still go up to 20.  
History has it that when more and more women joined Mambongi’s life, the time between duties increased and Netsai was the one of the sex starved ones who devised the method of pricking a child with a thorn to make her cry in the middle of the night.
That made Mambongi jump from his bed to come and inquire about the problem. But as soon as he entered the house, he found her naked and ready for him. You know what would happen. Others learnt of the trick and more and more tricks were used by off duty wives to trick Mambongi into their beds.
His has forever become a busy schedule. The man never rests, but he is not giving up.   
Today, Mambongi walks with a stoop and despite always wearing a dust-caked former T-shirt, now tat­tered into a web of strings tied on loose end with reef knots, he is still in charge.
In the village, the soothsayer, the ageless autochthon of knowledge and wisdom says no matter how emaci­ated an elephant is, it is still bigger than the strongest buffalo.
For all the men in the world, do not follow footprints into the water!
In these days of HIV and Aids do not trust polygamy in as much as you can trust neither the sky dur­ing the rainy season nor a baby’s bottom.

 

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