86 wives and counting

May 15, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Nigerian, 87, thwarts government challenges

Los Angeles Times

BIDA, Nigeria

He fell in love with his first wife because she was sincere and eager to please.

His second wife, a cousin, was irresistible because she did everything he wished and nothing he didn’t.

“That alone made me love her.”

His third wife won him because she submitted to his every request.

“I saw her, I liked her. I went to her parents and asked for her hand in marriage.”

Wife No. 4 was very obedient. So was wife No. 5. Wife No. 6, the same. As were wives 7 and 8 and 9 and ...

Well, by then — it was the late 1980s — things had taken off for Bello Maasaba, an Islamic faith healer from this city in Niger state. He went from a wedding every few months to one every few weeks.

All told, the 87-year-old has married 107 women, which, even in a society with a tradition of polygamy, is on the high side. The Nigerian government is not amused. Neither are Islamic authorities.

But he’s still marrying, every time Miss Right comes along. He now has 86 wives, the youngest 19 and the oldest 64. Nine have died, and 12 he divorced (for disobedience).

After school, he led an ordinary life for 21 years, involved in the clothing business and later working for a sugar company, keeping just two wives. Life was normal until a religious “vision” in the 1970s, which he says involved a visit from the archangel Gabriel. He fell deeply ill, unable to eat or sleep for days, and all the medicine the doctors gave him only made him worse.

He gave up work and became a traditional faith healer who eschewed medicine. The angel also instructed him to take wife after wife after wife.

“I get a revelation from God telling me any woman I’m going to marry. If it wasn’t from God, I wouldn’t have gone beyond two,” he said.

Maasaba has to pause to remember the number of children he has — an ever growing figure, with the youngest just 1 month old. He has fathered 185, and 133 are still living. He has acquired an extended family of some 5,000 people, many who live in the sprawling compound in the block surrounding his house.

It takes three enormous sacks of rice a day and prodigious quantities of meat and vegetables to feed his enormous clan. He’s rich because of the handsome fees paid by those who come to be healed.

Three years ago, Islamic authorities in Niger, a majority Muslim state with Shariah, or Islamic law, ordered that Maasaba divorce 82 of his wives, keeping four. He refused and was ordered by the Shariah court to leave town. (Muslim scholars generally agree that the Quran allows up to four wives, provided each gets equal treatment.)

Police raided Maasaba’s house at 3:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008. He was taken away to jail. That November, at the High Court in the capital, Abuja, the lawyers called in his wives and their parents, one by one, to testify that they had agreed to marriage. At wife No. 57, the court told the lawyers to stop, and ordered Maasaba freed.