Sex-War Sociology
The Fon and his Hundred Wives. By Rebecca Reyher. (Gollancz.
16s.) THE FON or Bncom, who would daily sit on his mountain-top throne outside his village of Laakom, was (and perhaps still is) a very old man with too many wives. Fifty or sixty of them had run away and many of those who stayed behind to till his fields and eat his food bred children that were not his own. All he wanted was to be left to die in peace. A man you would think to be pitied, but there is little compassion in the hard hearts of journalists and social reformers, especially when those hearts are female and there is a skirmish in the sex-war to be fought. The Fon was not to die in peace : he ran up against the inflexible moral righteousness of Anglo-American women.
A nun of English stock, reared in a Chicago convent, hammed to be working in a mission near by. She wrote a story telling 1' the Fon and his six hundred wives. Some Englishwomen saw the story and demanded that the United Nations Organisation should investigate this flagrant breach of human rights. The Fon was front page news. The Colonial Office investigated. In the Trustee- ship Council a bachelor from Iraq called Awni Khalidi thought the Fon was to be pitied rather than censured, but the Russian, Mexican and Filipino delegates would have none of this flippancy. The Fon was investigated by a Commission of Inquiry which went up the mountainside, decided that the Fon's private life was his own affair, and returned to Lake Success with an excellent story for the dinner table. But meanwhile Mrs. Reyher, assiduous American journalist and grandmother, wary of official and masculine opinion and with a nose for a story that could be smelt a mile away, sailed out of Brook- lyn harbour for the British Cameroons. The General in Lagos told her : " Give the old Fon a bottle of gin, he'll fix you up in a hut, and you'll be fine. The old boy says he's over a hundred, eighty-odd is more like it. Every time one of his wives has a baby, he is damned proud of it and asks no questions. Keeps the compound growing." The bishop said : "That poor little sister, she did not mean to do any harm. She wrote a story out of her imagination, her fantasy. She had never even been there." The merry-eyed father down from the bush said : "Poly- gamy is the curse of the country. Everybody knows it, but they are afraid to do anything about it. Not sure where their changes might
lead." And everyone, from the Resident down, told Mrs. Reyher What the Fon himself had to say about the fuss : "Why don't they let me alone. I am an old man and I only want to die in peace." li.ut America was interested, and Mrs. Reyher wanted to know How did it feel to be one of the Fon's wives ? What did the wives really want ? " So with curiosity rampant, nostrils flared, and aPurred on by her social conscience, she toiled up the mountainside to Laakom and stayed as the Fon's guest for a fortnight. She Painted his fingernails with red varnish and the Fon said he would get rid of all his wives if she would marry him.
Polygamy is as good a subject as any other for scientific study : and there is no reason why suffragettes and the United Nations and religious missions should not seek to improve the lot of downtrodden Women in Africa. But you cannot be both serious and funny about the Fon of Bikom and his hundred wives. Mrs. Reyher is not very sure whether her story is to be one big joke or a blow in the fight for female emancipation. The joke falls flat after the first few pages, and the blow never lands. But we are left with the makings of an enter- taining and informative book with some pleasantly drawn character Sketches. Mrs. Reyher is &journalist who should stick to journalism
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