I read The Polygamist by Sue Nyathi before watching the Netflix adaptation, and I’m glad I did. More than a story about polygamy, the novel explores power, betrayal, forgiveness, wealth and the hidden cost of the choices we make. Here’s my honest review.
There is a habit I picked up years ago after watching The Godfather. Whenever a famous film is based on a book, I try and make sure to read the book before I watch the movie. Not because I dislike adaptations – quite the opposite. Some films are masterpieces in their own right. But The Godfather taught me something I have never forgotten. As brilliant as the film was, it was nowhere close to how great Mario Puzo’s novel was. Actually, some characters in the film were highly disappointing in how they had been downplayed. The pages gave me what the screen never could; access to every hesitation, every fear, every motive and every silence that shaped the characters. By the time I finally watched the movie, I wasn’t simply following a story. I understood the people living inside it.
So when Sue Nyathi’s The Polygamist began making waves after Netflix adapted it into a film, I knew I wouldn’t be rushing to the television.
I bought the book first. And after turning the final page, I have to say that I have no regrets.
Because The Polygamist is not simply a story about a wealthy man with multiple wives. If anything, the title is almost misleading. This is a novel about power and the illusion that power somehow frees people from consequences. It is about marriage, wealth, betrayal, forgiveness and the quiet resilience of women who are forced to carry burdens they never created. It is about the choices people make when love becomes entangled with money, status and children.
Above all, it is a painfully African story.
Not because polygamy is uniquely African, but because Sue Nyathi writes with a familiarity that feels like home. Every family has its secrets. Every neighborhood has that influential man whose private life everyone whispers about but nobody confronts and women who know far more than they ever admit, choosing peace over confrontation because they have learnt that survival sometimes demands silence.
Nyathi captures that world beautifully, refusing to rush her readers towards easy conclusions. She does not tell us who deserves our sympathy or who deserves our anger. Instead, she introduces us to complicated people and trusts us to wrestle with them ourselves. Just when you decide a character is beyond redemption, she reveals another layer that makes you pause. And just when you begin rooting for someone, they make a decision that leaves you questioning everything you thought you knew about them.
That, to me, is the mark of exceptional storytelling.
Jonasi Gomora Is Not the Villain You Expect
It would be easy to dismiss Jonasi Gomora as nothing more than an unfaithful husband. And do not get me wrong, he is certainly that. But reducing him to a serial adulterer would mean missing the larger tragedy of his character.
Jonasi is ambitious, intelligent and charismatic. He rises from humble beginnings to build an enviable business empire, becoming the kind of man young entrepreneurs admire and families proudly associate themselves with. Success follows him wherever he goes……and so do women.
At first, it almost feels as though he is living the dream many men secretly fantasize about. A beautiful wife who stood by him before the money came. A successful career. Influence. Respect. More women who willingly enter his life. You might be tempted to think he has it all – and he does, for a while – and that there is no price to pay.
But perhaps that is precisely how temptation works. Sin rarely introduces itself carrying consequences.
It arrives carrying rewards, and the consequences come later.
What Are the Wages of Sin?
As I turned the final pages, I found myself asking questions that had little to do with Jonasi himself. What are the wages of sin? Does every betrayal eventually come due, even if it takes decades? Jonasi spends years collecting women, children and businesses as though success somehow exempts him from consequence. For a long time, it appears he is right. The empire grow and the money comes in fast. The women remain. But Sue Nyathi understands something many great storytellers understand: consequences are patient. They rarely arrive when we expect them. But arrive they will.
There is something strangely familiar about Jonasi Gomora. Not because most men have four wives, but because many societies have spent generations excusing male excess as though it were a badge of success. The richer he becomes, the more entitled he feels; not only to women’s bodies, but to their forgiveness. He expects Joyce to understand and Matipa to wait. He expects Essie to remain available whenever he desires comfort. Even Lindani, young and ambitious in her own right, is eventually drawn into his orbit. The tragedy is not simply that Jonasi loves many women. It is that he mistakes possession for love and obedience for loyalty.
And I hated how entitled he felt towards their bodies, taking and taking, sometimes even without permission.
By the time consequences finally catch up with Jonasi, they do not arrive one at a time. They come all at once. His relationships fracture while his companies struggle under Zimbabwe’s worsening economy. His health deteriorates. The women he spent years trying to control begin reclaiming their own lives.
It is almost biblical, a reminder that while wrongdoing may appear profitable for a season, every choice eventually presents its invoice.
But What About the Women Who Stay?
Perhaps the question that haunted me most after finishing this novel was about the women. Why did they stay?
It is an easy question to ask from the comfort of certainty, but much harder to answer when children are involved. When history is involved and love refuses to disappear simply because betrayal has entered the room.
The novel also asks an uncomfortable question of the women. Why stay? Joyce knows. Matipa knows. Essie certainly knows. None of them are blind to Jonasi’s infidelity or his violence. Yet leaving is never as simple as outsiders imagine. Instead of asking, “Why didn’t she leave?” perhaps we should be asking, “What would it have cost her if she had?”
Perhaps this is where The Polygamist becomes less about marriage and more about humanity.
Leaving is rarely just walking away because it means uprooting children and starting over financially. It means explaining yourself to family and living with society’s judgment.
We often ask women why they stayed but maybe we should also ask what it would have cost them to leave.
Joyce Is the Soul of This Story
If Jonasi is the engine that drives the plot, Joyce is undoubtedly its heart. She met Jonasi before the suits, before the boardrooms and before the millions.
She loved possibility before she ever experienced prosperity, which makes his betrayal infinitely more painful.
She is not mourning both the man he became and the young man she first believed in. Yet she never allows bitterness to become her entire identity.
Somehow, despite unimaginable heartbreak, she continues showing up for her children. She even discovers compassion in places where readers least expect it, particularly in her evolving relationship with Matipa.
Their friendship is one of the novel’s greatest surprises, considering how she beat Matipa black and blue when they first met. It quietly dismantles the tired stereotype that women must always remain enemies whenever a man is involved.
In the end, they begin to realise they were never truly competing against one another, but surviving the same man.
One of the greatest ironies in The Polygamist is that Jonasi’s business empire grows at almost the exact pace his personal life begins falling apart.
Success amplifies everything already inside him, as his confidence becomes arrogance and his generosity becomes entitlement.
We watch as righ tbefore our eyes, his ambition becomes excess.
Money did not create Jonasi’s character, It merely gave him the freedom to reveal it. And that may be one of the novel’s most uncomfortable truths – how power, contrary to popular belief – rarely changes people, but exposes who they really are.
Final Thoughts
As Jonasi’s own health became worse, Lindani (another of his women) became overwhelmed with caring for a sick man who no longer possessed the resources he once had. By this time the power and money he had once boasted about were long gone, memories of another distant life. Zimbabwe’s worsening economic conditions had devastated his companies, and much of his business empire had gone under. What was he to do, apart from what every other great polygamist does when shit hits the roof? Jonasi returned to Joyce’s house. His first wife. And despite everything he put her through, she still took care of him. Then, Lindani comes to the house while there is a birthday and she comes into contact with one of Jonasi’s sons. One thing leads to another, and they have sex. Jonasi eventually walked into the house and found the two in the act.
The cherry on top? Lindani was HIV-positive, a status she’d learnt of after her miscarriage. Jonasi would later die from complications related to HIV/AIDS.
When Jonasi Gomora dies, readers are left asking what remains after a life has been lived?
Businesses collapse, money disappears, beauty fades, health fails and influence eventually belongs to someone else.
Only legacy remains.
Jonasi spent much of his life building companies, acquiring wealth and collecting relationships. Yet by the end of the novel, the conversations surrounding him are not about his financial success but about the pain he left behind.
Perhaps that is Sue Nyathi’s greatest achievement as a writer, reminding us that success without integrity is ultimately a fragile thing.
So yes, I will still watch Netflix’s adaptation of The Polygamist (i know, i know, i am late to the party)
But I am grateful I read the book first because while films often tell us what happened, great novels help us understand why.
