“I love them both”: Congolese woman in polyandrous marriage

By Hans Ngala (with additional reporting from Afrimax and Briefly.coza)

A Congolese woman in a polyandrous marriage (wherein the woman has two or more husbands) has stated that she is very much in love with both her husbands.

Francine Jisele from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) lives with two husbands: first husband Remi Murula and second one Albert Jarlace.
According to Afrimax English which first broke the story, Jisele was first married to Murula and the couple had two children together. Things were tough for them and so Murula left his wife and kids behind to search for greener pastures.
However, he was gone for three years, during which he never kept any contact with Jisele who was growing increasingly impatient waiting for him indefinitely.
So when Jarlace asked for her hand in marriage, she accepted. However, about a year into her marriage to Jarlace, Murula came back and found that the lady had re-married already.
He fought with the “new” husband Jarlace and asked him to leave but he too already had one child with Jisele and argued that he had no place else to go. The woman also begged him to stay and finally, Murula accepted he could stay and they’d share the same woman.
“When it comes to intimacy moments, one of us leaves the other to enjoy. The woman is the one who identifies the father of the children. My family knows my situation and advised me to calm down because I abandoned my wife” said Murula, first husband.

Jisele says it’s hard for her, she wishes each man had a home and she would go to them. She doesn’t want the three of them to keep meeting in the same bedroom at the same time:
“We eat at the same table, sleep in the same bedroom and on the same bed. I love them both. We live at peace at home.”
While polygamy is not so common across Africa as it was in the past, it is certainly more common than polyandry (one woman living with several men).
Last weekend, a Cameroonian man got married to four women in the seaside town of Kribi in the South region of Cameroon. That too was breaking news, since the practice is not as popular among contemporary Cameroonian youth.