Akon made a rare disclosure about his polygamous marriages this week, pulling back the curtain on the rigid hierarchy he maintains in his family. The Ghetto hitmaker is a devout adherent of Islam, which traditionally allows a man up to four wives, and has staunchly defended his belief in polygamy. There have been conflicting claims over the years about precisely how many wives he has, with varying reports placing the number at either two or four. His household's composition appears to have changed in the past year, as his rumored first wife Tomeka Thiam is said to have filed for divorce last September.
However the Senegalese-American musician cast up a cloud of mystery about the current state of his love life by gushing about the exalted position his first wife enjoys over the others, on the podcast We Need to Talk. 'Cause that one is the reason why I even got one, two or three. She’s the queen, period. You gotta know that,' said the 52-year-old. 'Nobody violates Wife Number One. The moment they violate, out the door, hands down. If you don’t understand that, that’s entertainment,' he said with a laugh.
The wife he married before the rest of them 'comes first,' he remarked, noting that 'there's levels in the end' differentiating his spouses. Although Akon has kept the identity of his wives private, the Afrobeat artist Amirror publicly alleged in 2023 that she was married to him, a claim he left unconfirmed. He has divulged in the past that he has nine children, but neglected to specify how many women he had them with or whether he was married to all of the mothers.
In his new interview, he reflected that his first wife was 'the one that’s actually sacrificing in the end' inasmuch as 'with new people a part of your family, there’s gonna be new attitudes, new mindsets, new behaviors and they gotta deal with that, only so that you can be able to do what you need to do as a man.' He added: 'But more than anything, it’s a level of happiness that comes with that too, so they gotta help preserve even that happiness, so that they can even stay happy. So yeah, they’re the queens for sure, Wife Number One.'
Akon argued that women have higher 'pain tolerance' and 'emotional tolerance' than men, who are 'not good at emotions,' with the result that they cope with their feelings by resorting to violence and becoming 'rowdy' and 'dangerous.' In his view, his duty is to 'ease' whatever 'emotional distress' his wives suffer and ensure that they never feel 'compromised,' 'disrespected' or 'unvalued.' He clarified that he remains the 'only man' in his marriages, but when asked how many wives he has, he demurred: 'I'll just leave that to your imagination.'
His appraisal of his form of polygamy is that 'oftentimes when the family is united in that way, the benefit is more for the woman than it is for the man for sure, 'cause the man actually has to take care of all of them.' He has to treat them all equally, and their responsibility bears on him as well. So it's not just his responsibility, but all their responsibility is his responsibility. The wives, on the other hand, have each other as 'partners' and can 'alternate' who picks up various tasks like cooking, cleaning and minding the children.
Akon asserted that 'the answer and the solution' to retaining comity at home was 'communication,' saying: 'You gotta be mature enough to know that if this is the situation that I'm gonna park in, I have to communicate.' His modus operandi is to be clear about his likes and dislikes 'and once y'all lay down those rules, just abide by them. It's literally that simple.'
It emerged last September that one of Akon's wives, Tomeka Thiam - the mother of his 18-year-old daughter Journey - had filed for divorce, according to People. They were four days shy of their 29th wedding anniversary when she submitted papers to dissolve their union on grounds of irreconcilable differences. Akon previously mounted a defense of his polygamy near the end of 2022, during a wide-ranging interview on The Zeze Mills Show. He explained that the practice 'looks normal' to him because 'we didn’t go outside of our African culture when we got to the Western world.'
