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.

Across generations, women have been taught that a “good woman” knows her place, that patience is a woman’s crown, and that endurance is the true mark of virtue. These lessons, passed down lovingly from mothers to daughters, were never meant to wound. They were meant to prepare, to protect women in a world that has always demanded their quiet submission. Yet these same lessons have become invisible chains, binding women to systems that depend on their compliance to survive.

Patriarchy, contrary to popular belief, is not sustained by men alone. It is reinforced every day through the actions, choices, and teachings of women, mothers, wives, teachers, and community leaders, who have been conditioned to see subservience as righteousness and domination as order. This conditioning is not innate; it is learned, rehearsed, and deeply internalised through what I call colonial social conditioning.

Before colonial contact, Yoruba gender relations were guided by complementarity rather than hierarchy. Social roles were distributed by seniority and capability, not by biological sex. But colonial governance, Christian missionary education, and Victorian morality introduced a rigid gender binary that privileged men and confined women to domestic spaces. Over time, these imported hierarchies became naturalised through everyday life, embedded in school lessons, church sermons, and family advice. In trying to adapt, women themselves became the primary carriers of these colonial ideals, ensuring that new generations inherited not just culture, but the consciousness of subordination.

Consider how early this conditioning begins. Girls are taught to cross their legs, to lower their voices, to serve their brothers first. In school, they are praised for obedience, not curiosity. In churches, they are told that submission is divine. By adolescence, many have learned that to be accepted, they must shrink. When these girls become mothers, they repeat the same lessons, believing it is love. The cycle continues, unchallenged because it wears the familiar face of tradition.

In my ongoing research on Nigerian womanhood, I found that this internalised patriarchy is often maintained most fiercely by those who have suffered under it. A woman who endured silence in her marriage may advise her daughter to do the same. A female employer may hesitate to promote another woman, fearing it will disrupt male expectations. Even among educated women, patriarchal loyalty manifests subtly, in self-doubt, in guilt for ambition, in the reflex to apologise for success. These are not just personal flaws; they are the social symptoms of colonial conditioning.

The tragedy of this pattern is not only that women participate in their own containment, but that they do so believing they are upholding morality, modesty, or “our culture.” Many of the proverbs that shape womanhood in Nigeria, “A woman’s glory is in her husband”, “A quiet woman builds her home”, were once tools of survival in an oppressive order. Today, they are still repeated as wisdom, long after the conditions that produced them have changed.

But there is hope in awareness. Recognising social conditioning is the first step toward feminist reconditioning, a process of deliberate unlearning. This does not mean rejecting all aspects of culture; rather, it means reclaiming those indigenous values that predate colonial distortion. In Yoruba society, womanhood was once associated with strength, intellect, and spiritual authority. Women served as chiefs, traders, priestesses, and advisers. The goal, therefore, is not to erase culture but to recover its egalitarian essence; Yoruba indigenous complementarity.

Feminist reconditioning begins in small, conscious acts. It is the mother who teaches her daughter that her voice is not rebellion but expression. It is the teacher who encourages girls to lead, to question, to imagine. It is the woman who stops apologising for wanting more. And it is the community that learns to value both care and autonomy as shared human responsibilities, not gendered duties.

If patriarchy survives through repetition, then liberation must also be rehearsed, every day, in every home, by every woman who chooses to see differently. We must stop mistaking endurance for strength and silence for peace. We must stop guarding the gates of our own exclusion.

It is time to understand that the fight against patriarchy is not only external. It begins in the mind, in the private scripts we inherited and continue to perform. As women, we cannot dismantle a system we unconsciously protect. The power to unlearn is the power to begin again, to teach our daughters that womanhood is not obedience, but agency; not sacrifice, but choice.

When women stop guarding the gates, the walls will fall.

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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.

‘Titanic’ can mean something that is very big, gigantic or enormous and it was also the name of a ship that sank on its maiden voyage.

When the Titanic sank in 1912 it sank due to a number of avoidable factors: a ship deemed unsinkable that wasn’t fitted with watertight compartments, a ‘unprofessional’ seasoned captain who was apparently bullied into going at full speed through known ice-berg strewn waters, lack of common binoculars for the deck watch and the unavailability of enough life boats for all the passengers.

This all put together, as they say, was a recipe for disaster. Red flags were ignored.

Translating this to President Tinubu’s modern-day Nigeria, the avoidable factors that can sink the country are way too obvious.

Nigerians have long enjoyed the benefits of fuel subsidy. Costly as it is to maintain it’s enabled the economy to keep running by keeping the cost of things low. It’s removal, as can be seen, has created a domino effect, as the experts predicted, resulting in the prices of even the basic commodities skyrocketing as everyone passes on the additional costs. With inflation currently at 32.7% and still rising, things are only going to keep on getting more and more expensive. As a result, the new minimum wage of N70,000 will have less purchasing power than the previous 2021 minimum wage of N30,000. If fuel subsidy removal was meant to boost the economy it has done the opposite and will stagnate any efforts to kickstart it.

The government’s inability to control corruption or severely punish corrupt officials which is robbing the country’s coffers of billions and billions of naira every year is a stumbling block for development. If a corrupt government official who built 750 houses with stolen funds or an ex-governor accused of misappropriating 80 Billion Naira are allowed to walk around freely, supposedly on bail, without fear of eventual conviction, it questions the message the government is sending out to future looters: if the culprits were in Russia or China the outcome will be totally different.

Even though an austerity economic policy may seem harsh like it was designed to rob Peter to pay Paul, it should be short, sharp hardship with green pastures in the foreseeable future – not ever! A good start will be to cut down on the number of foreign loans being obtained every year as their repayment can take a huge chunk out of the country’s annual income.

The new tax laws are long overdue and it should include that VAT earned in a state stays in that state: so, if your state doesn’t generate any VAT (- such as from the sale of alcohol products) you don’t get to share in what other states have collected.

Insecurity in the country is not something that started yesterday. Previous governments have blood on their hands for not nipping these insurrections in the bud before they grew to become monstrosities. You don’t pat yourself on the back, like the Nigerian Army likes to do believing you have the threat ‘under control’ – you eliminate the threat completely using what ever means necessary. Unless the order [ given by ‘Somebody’] is not to destroy them completely and to quote the late Sani Abacha,“…any insurgency that lasts more than 24 hours, a government official has a hand in it..”, no wonder Boko Haram continues to flourish and bandits like Turji Bello continue to taut the government. When the armed robber Lawrence Anini did something similar in 1986 he was fished out within months, tried and executed.

As I’ve written before, the Nigerian Police Force is long past its sell by date and considering the ever growing population of Nigeria with its associated acts of anti-social behaviour, it’s time to seriously consider devolving the NPF into state-run outfits. The growing popularity of state-run security outfits, such as Amotekun, proves this is feasible and effective.

Considering the fact the country is going through severe economic hardship the President, himself, should curb frivolous spending where possible: no more new Presidential yachts or planes ( – that includes the new one for the VP), a cap on ridiculous-no-real-job SA and SSA appointments and most important of all a cap on ALL politicians salaries and perks ( – which is to say if politicians are patriotic enough they’ll agree to a pay cut, forgo some of their benefits and pay for their own jaunts abroad). Implementing the Steve Oronsaye Report which recommends merging and closing of ministries etc that have been passed over by every President since President Goodluck commissioned it in 2011 will cut government operating costs even further. This should not just be at Presidential level but extended to all the states: this will not just streamline the bloated and largely inefficient civil service but will also weed out ghost workers and white elephant projects.

The ‘japa’ movement which the government is trying to discourage should be allowed to continue. It’s morally wrong for a government that can’t provide suitable employment for its citizens to try and prevent them from seeking opportunities abroad : ‘japa’ is not just limited to Nigerians, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. People, British, American ,Filipinos, are migrating worldwide to where ever there are opportunities for them to prosper. That’s the way the world works now: nobody is going to stay in a ‘sh*t-hole’ country if there are no opportunities for them to grow. Scr3w patriotism! It’s every man for himself! So, if a country can’t provide adequate employment opportunities people will pack their bags and ‘japa’! And if you restrict them from leaving the country what are they going to do? Get up to mischief – 419, cultism, kidnapping!

These same people send money back to their home countries all the time: Nigerians in diaspora in 2023 alone sent home more than $19.5 Billion Dollars. This is a huge injection of foreign currency for a country that desperately needs it.

So, just like the Titanic, the warning signs are there and the inevitable that will happen should they be ignored. The question is, which way is President Tinubu going to go. This is what I call the ‘Titanic Wahala’, ignore the obvious and the proverbial will hit the fan, sooner or later.

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You can follow Tony Ogunlowo on Twitter: @Archangel641 or visit http://www.archangel641.blogspot.co.uk