If your moral compass is so fragile that a fictional rogue sends you spiralling into a panic about black people’s reputation, do us all a favour: close Netflix, and go read a government compliance handbook. Fiction is evidently proving too hazardous for you.
By Themba Khumalo
The single malt whisky holds the low room light hostage, a heavy, matured liquid that leaves golden legs clinging to the glass like a long-lost memory.
It is a sublime, golden lubricant for brain cells routinely set ablaze by the staggering righteousness of the internet’s self-appointed moral constabulary.
One sip of this peat-kissed nectar is very necessary before diving into the swamp of contemporary cultural commentary, if only to wash away the cloying taste of public-square sanctimony.
Good Lord, deliver us from the purists. Deliver us from the joyless, leaden-footed hall monitors of the soul who roam the digital plains, desperately trying to turn every piece of gripping fiction into a sterile, government-approved classroom.
The latest target of these tedious scolds is The Polygamist, the riveting 22-episode tour de force adapted from Sue Nyathi’s novel of the same name.
It is a gritty, in-your-face piece of storytelling that features S’dumo Mtshali delivering a brilliant, skin-crawling performance as Jonasi Gomora—a character of such spectacular moral turpitude that he makes ordinary scoundrels look like choirboys.
Naturally, because the show is an absolute firecracker of entertainment, the pearl-clutchers have marched out in full regalia, crying into their herbal tea about “societal messaging.”
We have columnists and commentators wringing their hands, weeping that the series “fails to interrogate polygamy and instead mistakes sexual pathology for culture.”
To which the kleva black, Ndumiso iQadi Ngcobo, rightly gave the most devastating, back-handed slap imaginable: “Our education system has failed us miserably if we struggle to differentiate between a fictional feature film and a documentary.”
He is spot on. Since when did a novelist sign a blood pact to become a social worker?
Stripping away the pretentious moral jargon with the precision of a meat cleaver, Ndumiso hacked: “Even if Sue Nyathi had decided to give Jonasi Gomora seven cocks instead of just one, she would have been within her rights, within the confines of fiction.”
Art does not owe you a lecture on ethics. It owes you an experience.
But the absolute peak of this comedy came after the tjatjarag Fred Khumalo penned a wonderfully rib-tickling, marathon binge-watch review.
Up popped a classic specimen of the puristanis internetus, who appears to have been completely glued to the screen while frantically taking notes for a Sunday sermon.
“However, my question is what are the young ones learned [sic] from this? Promiscuity as Polygamy??”, complained the puristanis internetus.
Then, right on cue, they dragged out the dreaded “laughing stock” complex, weeping that “Muslims practice polygamy but you’ll never see them reducing themselves… As Africans we enjoy to make [sic] ourselves laughing stocks.”
It is a tragic, deeply internalised anxiety—this exhausting idea that every single piece of African fiction must carry the burden of public relations.
It betrays a lingering insecurity that African art exists under a permanent obligation to rehabilitate the continent’s image before a global jury.
Every novelist becomes an ambassador; every screenplay a diplomatic communiqué; every fictional villain a public-relations crisis waiting to happen.
It is an impossible burden that no other literary tradition is routinely expected to carry.
It suggests that African creators cannot simply tell a gripping story about human depravity without being accused of sabotaging the entire continent’s reputation.
According to this joyless handbook, Sue Nyathi shouldn’t write a thrilling drama; she should be drafting public service announcements about “police collaborating with criminals” or rolling out warnings against alcoholism.
This is the ultimate peak of paternalism: treating African audiences like children who cannot watch a fictional villain without immediately falling into ruin, while treating African art as nothing more than an uplifting, state-approved educational pamphlet.
They even went on to praise a Nigerian series, Blood Sisters, solely because it checked their preferred ideological boxes by showing “how the rich roll out money to control state institutions.”
You really cannot make this stuff up. These party poopers are completely blind to the irony of their own arguments.
They watch a gripping, train-wreck character like Jonasi—a man so malodorous that pigs would object to sharing a mud bath with him—and instead of enjoying the sheer dramatic ride, they throw a tantrum because the series is not tucking them into bed with a moral fable and a glass of warm milk.
Let us take the gloves off properly: these uppity purists are suffering from a severe case of cultural illiteracy.
They expect fiction to function as a Ministry of Good Behaviour rather than as art. They want writers to voluntarily amputate their own creativity, disinfect the messy, chaotic depths of human behaviour, and submit every manuscript for imaginary moral certification before it reaches an audience.
To expect every story about a flawed African character to be a pristine, uplifting public service announcement is not just artistically bankrupt; it is deeply patronising.
It suggests the audience has the intellectual capacity of a wet cardboard box, unable to watch a villain do terrible things without immediately wanting to emulate them.
Newsflash to the morality brigade: drama is conflict. Remove the villains, the predators, the fraudsters and the fools, and what remains is not art. It is compliance training.
If fiction existed only to reward virtue and punish vice, Shakespeare would have been out of business, Dostoevsky unemployed, and half the world’s literary canon confined to the recycling bin.
Great storytelling has never been about presenting model citizens. It has always been about exposing the full, uncomfortable spectrum of human nature.
If you want an untainted, squeaky-clean lecture on how to live a righteous life, close Netflix, step away from fiction altogether, and go sit in a Sunday school classroom.
The rest of us will be over here, pouring another dram of single malt, and celebrating writers who actually have the guts to create something worth talking about.