“My income has gotten lower and lower over the years due to the rising cost of living, and my family has gotten bigger and bigger. I married one woman after another, but now it has become difficult to feed everyone.’ Musa Hasahya, a 67-year-old Ugandan, has decided to stop expanding his family after having reached the remarkable figure of 12 wives, 102 children and 568 grandchildren.
During an interview with the Sun, the British newspaper that first told his story, the man explained that he made the decision for economic reasons, further explaining that he married 12 women because «How can a man be satisfied with a woman?», and that they all live in the house with him because in this way it is easier «to monitor them and prevent them from escaping» with other men of the village where they live.
About a third of Hasayha’s 102 children, aged between 6 and 51, live with him on his farm. The youngest is six years old, the oldest is 51, 21 years older than Zulaika, his younger wife. It was the woman, mother of 11 children, who explained to the Sun: «I won’t have any more children. We are in a bad financial situation, I am now on the contraceptive pill.
However, the man’s decision to order his wives to take contraceptives is considered controversial in many parts of Africa, including Uganda, where contraceptives are often seen as a sign of transgression and promiscuity outside marriage.