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Love is a battlefield
TRACEY ULLMAN , 1989

I think serial monogamy says it all.

What is the natural human mating system? Are we monogamous, polygynous, polyandrous or even promiscuous beings? People are all of these things, some of the time, but there is no one-size-fits-all human mating system. Mating systems also change societies. I consider the frightening social consequences that occur when powerful and wealthy men are unfettered in their ability to marry or otherwise monopolise the reproduction of several women. >

J AC O B Z U M A , P R E S I D E N T O F S O U T H

Africa, comes from the humblest

beginnings. Zuma has only five years of formal education, but a lifetime of experience hard-won in the trade union movement, the antiapartheid struggle, and as a prisoner on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. Whereas his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, always radiated cool statesman-like dignity in finely tailored suits, Zuma can still sometimes be seen in traditional Zulu leopard-skin outfits belting out the antiapartheid rallying song Lethu Mshini Wami (translation: Bring Me my Machine Gun). Zuma is a controversial and enigmatic figure; he rose

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to the presidency as a populist, stoking the ambitions of those who feel they are little better off now than when apartheid ended, but in office he is finding out just how difficult it is to govern. Since 2004 Zuma has been tainted by a massive corruption scandal over an arms deal, yet he somehow survived and out-manoeuvred Mbeki to oust him as President. Zuma governs a country that is as rife with contradictions as he is. The dismantling of apartheid, and Nelson Mandelas 1994 election as President, were nothing short of miraculous, yet South Africa remains a country of stubbornly persistent inequality and endemic violence. It had the modern infrastructure and organisational know-how to flawlessly host the 2010 FIFA World Cup, yet traditional and often anachronistic customs of dozens of ethnic groups are sacrosanct. It has some of the most progressive gender-equity legislation on the planet and a high representation of women in Parliament, yet sexism is rampant, the rape statistics terrifying and more than 5 million people are infected with HIV. Zuma put South Africas HIV/AIDS policy on the right track after years of denial and dithering by Mbeki, yet in his private life Zuma embodies ignorance. He was acquitted of the 2005 rape of an acquaintance who was known to be HIV positive, with the judge accepting his defence that the sex was consensual. Zuma admitted that rather than wearing a condom, he showered after sex in order to reduce the chance of HIV infection. In addition to his much-publicised extra-marital promiscuity, Jacob Zuma has been married five times. But unlike celebrity serial monogamists like Elizabeth Taylor, whose many consecutive marriages titillated Western gossip mags, Zuma is a polygynist with three current wives. His second wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, herself a senior government minister, divorced him in 1998. Zumas third wife committed suicide in 2000. Yet the President does not look like stopping his marrying ways. He has paid lobola, the traditional bride-price that signifies engagement, to the families of two more women. By his wives, fiances and at least four other women, Zuma has allegedly sired at least 22 children.

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In evolutionary terms, polygyny and extramarital vigour are delivering Zuma high fitness. But his polygyny is controversial. When Zuma made his first state visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, soon after his fifth marriage, most of the press coverage centred on his polygyny. But why should the Brits or anybody else care about the exotic domestic arrangements of a foreign head of state? Are they, as Zumas supporters allege, just petty cultural imperialists intent on imposing their own bourgeois values on other cultures?

Love in the natural way

Mating arrangements and marriage customs vary enormously among societies, from strict life-long monogamy, to shorter monogamous unions lasting a handful of years, to polygyny in which some men marry two or more women, to polyandrous marriages in which a woman takes two or more men often brothers as husbands. But what is the natural human mating system? Some anthropologists and sex researchers point at our capacity for deep and profound pair bonds, and claim that humans are naturally monogamous. Helen Fisher, one of the most influential popular writers on human sex, asks, Is monogamy natural? Her answer is, Yes among human beings polygyny and polyandry seem to be optional opportunistic exceptions; monogamy is the rule. This message resonates with conservatives and fundamentalists, many of whom would have problems saying the word evolution without choking on their own bile, yet who cheerily assert that life-long monogamy is the natural state of affairs. Those who stray from the path of one-womanone-man righteousness are not only sinners, according to the ancient gospels, but they also defile the order of nature. But the evidence is just as strong that we are naturally polygynous and that men can love and bond with many wives, whereas women tend

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to bond with just one husband. This position is understandably popular with polygynous men and those men who aspire to emulate them. More than four out of every five societies allow one man to be married to more than one woman at a time. It might appear then that polygyny is pretty much the norm. Yet, only a minority of men in polygynous societies have more than one wife. Many small polygynous tribes of a few hundred souls inflate the number of societies that permit polygyny. Indonesia, with 250 million people, is the most populous nation where polygynous marriage is generally allowed, but most people alive today live in larger societies that do not legally permit polygyny. To add to the confusion, good evidence also indicates that people are naturally promiscuous. In their refreshing recent book, Sex at Dawn, psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jeth point out that while we fall in love and form pair bonds, we also relish plenty of sexual variety. Marriages in many of the remaining hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies tend to last only a few years. Many married men and women in modern societies entangle themselves in several sexual relationships at once, and Ryan and Jeth argue that our ancestors did the same, at least until the very recent advent of agriculture allowed men to accumulate property and wealth. Not only do humans sometimes love and mate with many partners in a short time, we also have a finetuned interest in whos doing whom, and a murderously acute capacity to detect infidelity. In my opinion there really is no such thing as a single natural mating system for humans. Mating systems such as monogamy, polygyny and polyandry are mere pigeonholes that help us organise the mind-boggling variability we see in the world. Evolution shapes the repertoires of behaviours that individual men and women are capable of, and especially how men and women use and adjust those behaviours to suit their circumstances. As environmental circumstances like the abundance of food or the ratio of men to women change, so individuals will adjust their behaviour. As a result, the aggregated effects of modest shifts by

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