The series fails to interrogate polygamy and instead mistakes sexual pathology for culture. There is a difference between interrogating culture and butchering it. The Polygamist does the latter.

"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...