A single video on a WhatsApp group set me thinking. No veil, no mask, just raw, unfiltered words. A young woman looked into her phone and, without metaphor, named the Kanywood superstar Adamu A. Zango. She said she had watched him carefully, and that his manhood was small, that no woman could be satisfied, that this, not genotype, was why the marriages kept collapsing. She said the wives leave quietly, without fight or scandal, because the truth is unspeakable.
I laughed first, then I felt uneasy. What has free speech become when a stranger’s distant observation is delivered with the confidence of a diagnosis and circulated as content? I told myself it was an isolated outburst. By evening it was everywhere. Kano influencers, TikTok skits, sarcastic memes, all feeding on the same story. Another woman in a separate clip accused him of lying about genotype, “as if we are children.” The comments were jokes, but the jokes were heavy.
I was genuinely shocked that a man could divorce seven wives and still expect the public to grant him the benefit of doubt. Yet the more I watched, the more I understood something uncomfortable about how societies make sense of what they are not told. When institutions, families, and public figures leave a vacuum of clarity, people do not stay silent. They fill the gap. In communication theory this is called “sense-making.” Karl Weick argued that people, faced with ambiguity, will construct plausible stories to reduce anxiety, even if those stories are crude or cruel. In the absence of official narrative, the street writes its own. The video, the sarcasm, the conspiracy, all of it is jungle justice of meaning.
And it is not just about this man. It is about a norm we rarely interrogate. In many homes, when a marriage fails to produce children, the first prescription is another wife. The logic sounds simple: increase the chances, secure lineage, protect the man’s name. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call this “symbolic capital.” A man’s worth is tied to fertility, to continuity, to the public performance of virility. But what happens when the second wife does not conceive, nor the third, nor the fourth? At some point the private problem becomes a public experiment. Each new marriage becomes data. And data, in the hands of a gossiping public, becomes verdict.
Psychologists have long studied this. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains why people prefer a neat, if painful, explanation to an open wound of uncertainty. “He is the problem” is cleaner than “we don’t know.” Anthropologist Victor Turner wrote about social drama: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. When redress fails repeatedly, the community moves to judgment. Multiple divorces do not look like misfortune anymore. They look like pattern. And pattern, in the moral economy of the public, removes doubt.
There is another layer that is rarely spoken. Some men marry to meet expectation, to silence elders, to keep face. Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, described life as theater. We perform roles to impress an audience. But performance without capacity is dangerous. When the curtain falls in the bedroom and the wife cannot pretend any longer, the performance collapses in public. She leaves, and the audience, which once clapped, now jeers. The man who wanted to be seen as complete becomes the subject of ridicule because he could not endure the cost of honesty.
I am not saying the woman in the video is right. I am saying her cruelty found an audience because silence invited it. Research on rumor and misinformation by Gordon Allport and Leo Postman in the 1940s showed two things make rumors spread: importance and ambiguity. A superstar’s marriage is important. A divorce without clear reason is ambiguous. Put them together and you get wildfire. Add social media algorithms that reward outrage, and you get a marketplace where the most sensational version wins.
There is also the quiet violence of first impressions. During divorce, truth is usually the first casualty. Both sides tell versions. Sometimes one side blackmails, shapes narratives, diverts attention. But karma, or what people call natural justice, has a way of accumulating. Serial action invites serial interpretation. If you divorce once, you may be a victim. Twice, people ask questions. Seven times, the public stops asking you and starts answering for you. Remarrying quickly to “prove” you are desirable becomes another coded message. Staying single for years becomes another. The society reads both, rightly or wrongly.
Chinua Achebe warned us in Things Fall Apart about the man who thinks he is greater than the clan. “A man who is a palm tree stands alone,” he wrote, and the wind breaks him. No one is normal alone while everyone else is mad. Democracy, even in marriage, is the wisdom of the majority of experiences, not the stubbornness of one self-righteousness. If you cannot live with anyone, the problem may not be everyone else.
So what is the way out? Humility. A first divorce should teach caution. A second should invite introspection. By the third, a wise person should pause and ask hard questions instead of rushing to the next wedding to prove a point. If you know your weakness, it is braver to stay single than to drag another person into a union that will become content for strangers. The same society that pressures you to marry will be the same society that makes memes when it fails.
The Kanywood story is not really about one man and seven wives. It is about us. About how we treat ambiguity. About how we trade empathy for entertainment. About how we turn private pain into public theater because no one gave us a better script.
Until people in authority, in families, and in the public eye learn to speak early, clearly, and honestly, we will continue to outsource truth to influencers with phones. And they will always give us a version that is thrilling, but rarely fair.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
