The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (novel)

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives is the title of the 2010 debut novel by the Nigerian poet Lola Shoneyin. The novel was longlisted for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction in 2011. It won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2011 and the ANA Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize in the same year. It was short listed for the NLNG Nigeria prize for literature in 2012 and was listed in the top ten novels about Nigeria by The Observer newspaper in 2014. It has been translated into several languages including Arabic and has been adapted for the stage and screen.

The novel follows the Ibadan, Alao family of Baba Segi, his four wives and seven children, during the period that his fourth wife, a university graduate, is within the household. In South Africa and Nigeria, polygamy is a common practice and the novel, written by an author familiar with this system of multiple wives, deals with the cultural pressures on the infertile and impotent within a polygamous society, as well as with the universal themes of rape, domestic abuse, marital property rights, girls’ education, jealousy and power relations in a family.

Because of its themes, the novel has been the basis of academic papers on stress management among co-wives, polygamy and female agency, and has contributed to a feminist analysis of patriarchal structures.