Lawful wedded wife (?)

Benneth and I sat around on the Yambio airstrip awaiting my bush plane back to Juba. The runway is of marram (red earth), which adds an element of excitement to any landing.

It would be fascinating, and time-consuming, to construct South Sudanese family trees. Multiple wives are common, as is divorce, although the term divorce I think is also used for a relationship split (a reason given was 'if they are disorganising or misunderstanding you'). Child production starts young and you'd be hard pressed to find a country with a higher average number of children born per woman.

Benneth has four surviving children, two boys and two girls, born between 1995 and 2006. He has variously told us that he himself was born in 1970, 1971, and that he is 30 years old. We are aware that mathematics/numbers/dates are not his forte.

It doesn't sound like he's had polygamous marriages but he calls his current wife his third. In the UK I think some 'wives' here would be termed common-law partners. When you live with someone and start paying the dowry to her family, which can take years, you forego a refund on it if you split after having children. If no children are produced and you decide to split, it's accepted that the dowry should be repaid to the man. If this isn't a system that perpetuates the view of women as mere babymakers, I don't know what is.

It took Benneth a while to remember the name of his first wife who was the mother of his two oldest, and who died in 1998 while they were refugees in Uganda. Benneth has also spent time as a refugee in Congo during another long period of instability.

His second wife, the mother of his two daughters, lives in his hometown of Maridi closer to the capital, and they divorced because of 'misunderstandings'. Women are also allowed to push for divorce. One of the daughters is with him in Yambio and she herself has a daughter called Winnie, born in 2010.

His oldest son who quit school to trade sugar in the market has two children with a Congolese woman. One of the children was born in late 2016 and I couldn't figure out whether Benneth couldn't remember the name of his latest grandchild, or it hadn't been given one yet. The son and the Congolese mother have very recently 'divorced' with her going back to Congo. I am told the children will visit.

His current wife of 12 years, Margaret, who he talks fondly of, is unable to have children.

On the surface there is very little to compare of the institutions of family life and marriage between the UK and South Sudan. Yet because human nature is essentially the same the world over, if social systems in the UK made flexible 'marriages' and multiple partners more acceptable, and poverty forced larger groups of family members to live together, I think we'd end up with similar setups to Benneth's.