This study examines the complex and contested terrain of plural marriage — commonly termed polygamy — within Uganda's local governance structures and family systems, situating this examination within the broader global politics of abolition and the resistance that formal legal prohibition encounters in practice. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theoretical frameworks, and employing a phenomenological qualitative methodology involving twenty- eight in-depth interviews with local government councillors, women's rights advocates, married women in polygamous unions, and male heads of polygamous households, the study reveals that plural marriage persists not despite legal ambiguity and social criticism but through intricate webs of economic rationality, cultural legitimacy, religious sanction, and institutional accommodation that local government structures have proven unable or unwilling to dismantle. Participants described plural marriage through multiple and often contradictory framings: as a cultural inheritance deserving respect, as an economic arrangement enabling resource pooling in agrarian communities, as a site of gendered suffering and power asymmetry, and as a target of Western-influenced legal reform that inadequately engages with African family complexity. The study concludes that abolition politics, without structural economic transformation and genuine cultural dialogue, are unlikely to reduce plural marriage's prevalence and may paradoxically drive it further underground, reducing legal protections for women in unregistered unions.