Before the white man’s ship touched our shores, the Yoruba world moved in rhythm with balance. Life was ordered not by gendered power but by communal responsibility. Men and women stood side by side in the fields, in the market, and at the council. Roles differed, but value was equal. Leadership flowed through wisdom and age, not through sex. Polygyny, then, was not a sign of male dominance but a social arrangement that offered women mutual support, economic stability, and shared motherhood in a society where no one was left behind.
That harmony did not survive the colonial encounter. With colonial rule came capitalism, Christianity, and a rigid moral code that recast African social systems in Europe’s image. The British could not comprehend a world where women traded, advised kings, or owned property. To make sense of Yoruba life, they rewrote it. They introduced gendered education, made the man the “head of the home,” and confined womanhood to the domestic space. Colonial capitalism turned what was once a system of interdependence into a hierarchy of control, one that rewarded men for dominance and taught women that their purpose was service. In the process, our culture was not only interrupted; it was rewritten.
Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives bears witness to this rupture. Her novel opens inside the chaotic household of Baba Segi, a man who prides himself on his wealth, appetite, and four wives, the ultimate markers of patriarchal success. Yet beneath his confidence lies a broken echo of what polygyny used to be. Where precolonial polygyny was structured around care and complementarity, Baba Segi’s home is built on competition, secrecy, and survival. His wives are not companions in a communal system but rivals trapped in a house that feeds on their subjugation.
Young Iya Segi had worked tirelessly to amass a considerable fortune, only for her efforts to be exploited. Her mother, upon discovering that her daughter had secretly amassed a large sum of money, a troubling sign of her isolation and impending loneliness, responded by arranging a marriage for her, handing over every penny of that hard-earned savings to the man who would become Baba Segi. This decision, reflects a societal norm where marriage is often seen as a safeguard for young women, regardless of their agency or financial independence. Iya Tope, the second wife, enters the Alao household as a peace offering and payment from her father to Baba Segi. After a bad harvest and a big debt, an arrangement is made for Baba Segi to marry Iya Tope. Iya Femi, the third wife, enters into marriage with Baba Segi as a desperate escape from years of mistreatment as a housemaid after being rubbed of her inheritance by her greedy uncle. For her, the marriage is not about love or partnership but a means of liberation from a life of servitude.
Bolanle, the youngest and most educated of Baba Segi’s wives, chose to marry him not out of love or necessity, but out of a deep-seated belief that she no longer deserved a partner who mirrored her background or aspirations. Having endured the trauma of a violent rape and a secret abortion in her youth, she carried a profound sense of shame and brokenness. Baba Segi’s proposal came with no probing questions, no demands for her past, only the promise of a quiet life where her sole duty would be to bear children. To Bolanle, this seemed like refuge, a place to disappear into silence. In that home, she believed, she could hide, bury her past, and fulfill the only role required of her, childbearing. The marriage, then, became not a union, but an escape. A muted surrender to a life where silence was safer than self-expression.
Through these characters, Shoneyin captures the full cost of cultural distortion. The wives are not inherently submissive, they are products of social conditioning. They have learned to play the roles that secure acceptance in a system that never truly valued them. The result is a house governed by suspicion rather than solidarity, envy rather than empathy. Even as they resist Baba Segi’s authority, they reinforce it by turning on one another. Iya Segi, proud of her position, mocks Bolanle’s education, warning her that schooling “teaches a woman to look at men as equals.” It is one of the novel’s most devastating lines, a reminder that patriarchy no longer needs men to enforce its rules when women have been trained to guard them.
Baba Segi himself is a relic of a colonial masculinity that confuses control for honour. He cannot read or write, yet he considers himself the ultimate patriarch. His ignorance mirrors a society that has mistaken dominance for strength. Eventually, due to the wives’ deceit, concealing the paternity of their children, the balance of the home begins to crumble, exposing how fragile the patriarchal order truly is.
Bolanle’s decision to leave Baba Segi is not simply an act of rebellion; it is an act of restoration, a return to selfhood, to the forgotten truth that womanhood need not be tethered to a man’s validation. Her departure represents the feminist reconditioning our society desperately needs: a conscious unlearning of the internalised hierarchies that masquerade as culture.
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives reminds us that patriarchy in Nigeria is not native; it is inherited. It grew from the collision of colonial capitalism and cultural dislocation. And if it was learned, it can be unlearned. The task before us is to remember what our foremothers knew; that power shared is power multiplied, that womanhood is not a role to be performed but a life to be lived.
To repair the rupture, we must teach differently, speak differently, and raise our daughters, and sons, to value equality and mutual respect. For the Yoruba once knew balance. We can know it again.
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Tolulope Victoria Adebileje is a researcher and educator whose work explores colonial social conditioning, internalised patriarchy, and feminist reconditioning in Nigerian womanhood.