Civil-law antecedents of the regulation of polygyny in South African law

Abstract

In South Africa, the preference for monogamy is founded on the South African legal system’s civil-law tradition. Attitudes that potentially polygynous African customary and Muslim marriages were contra bonos mores and uncivilised should not merely be ascribed to colonial policies and political ideology, often based on Christian doctrine. The rejection of polygyny in Roman society was continued in Roman-Dutch law and reflected in the comments of the Roman-Dutch institutional writers. In this article I trace the historical antecedents of the rejection of polygyny in the civil-law foundations of South African law.