Ancentus “Danger” Akuku, 86, claims to be the most-married man in Kenya. Since 1940 he has taken 130 wives.

“I have a special ability to love women,” Mr Akuku said, sitting proudly outside one of his three houses in Homa Bay. “And I know how to satisfy them.”

Polygamy has long been a custom among the Luo people of western Kenya, the country’s third-biggest tribe. Wives represent status, security and wealth. But the practice is under threat from economic hardship, Aids and Western influences and for many people here Mr Akuku is a living monument to a dying tradition.

“He is a leader preserving our customs,” a man sitting beside a pot-holed road said. Even the Kenya Tourist Board is using Mr Akuku to promote this part of the country.

Mr Akuku was 22 and working as a tailor when he married Dinah, his first wife. When the relationship failed, he proposed to another woman. And then another. Most Luo men stop there, but Mr Akuku had acquired the “gift” of his maternal grandfather, who married 45 times. Soon, he was into double figures, acquiring wives at the rate of four a year.

“He was such a handsome guy,” Selmina, 65, one of Mr Akuku’s older spouses, said. “We were all trapped by his looks and couldn’t turn him down.”

Word soon spread that all the local women were being snapped up by the young tailor. “Here comes a dangerous man,” the men would whisper when he passed by, and the nickname “Danger” stuck.

Mr Akuku’s addiction to marriage has been expensive. Custom dictates that a bride’s family receives a dowry of 18 to 20 head of cattle. But now the wheel has turned. Each of his wives has borne him at least one child and no more than four, giving him “at least 200 sons and daughters”. As his daughters are married off, Mr Akuku is now receiving the dowry.

Ensuring harmony among so many spouses has been a challenge. The key is to act like a dictator, he says. He nominates one woman to cook for him and look after him at any time. Mr Akuku may also be the world record-holder for divorces and separations; 85 of his wives have been dismissed for poor cooking, jealousy, weakness, pig-headedness, trouble-making or adultery.

In 1998 he married for the 130th time. Jostine Auma, now 26, has the distinction of being his last wife. “I would have liked to marry again, but Aids makes it too risky to take a new partner. I’m too young to die.”

He has lost 30 sons and 15 daughters to the disease, which affects more than 20 per cent of adult Luos. That makes polygamy increasingly unattractive — but not out of the question. “At the moment I have only one wife,” Eric Otieno, 22, one of Mr Akuku’s sons, said. “But I want more.”

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