They faced and continue to face
the whip of squirming consequences
caused by the consistent silencing
and policing of their voices,
their bodies and their entire
existence continue to be neglected.

They face erasure in all its forms
and manifold manifestations
disguised as
tradition, culture, and heritage.

Their being
is reduced to the zone of non-being,
their needs and aspirations are displaced
and ignored as if their lives matters not.

Women, black women in particular
face erasure in all spheres of life,
be it in the history books, in the arts,
in the economy, in geopolitics and everything-in-between.

Women, black women in particular
are the main victims of this quagmire.
It will only take women
to dismantle this monster
by writing, singing, painting and sculpturing
their names into existence
like Zenzile Makeba did.

Lucid Lies

Ingane ishelwa ngamanga
To win the love of a beautiful queen,
You have to tell her
lucid lies.

Build her a castle that she
cannot refuse to live in with your words,
choose them carefully and be deliberate in how you say them.

Sometimes it is not what you have that matters to your queen,
but how you do and say certain things,
I use the word “certain things” carefully here
because I am not here to prescribe, but to suggest.

Lucid lies are best understood
when energies are aligned.
If you are her yin and her
your yang, then these
lucid lies will all make sense.

It might not make sense now, but
Remember that:
ingane ishelwa ngamanga
to win the love of a beautiful queen,
you have to tell her
lucid lies.

These are my poems that I have written which grapple with the idea of love, a force that I believe to be the most revolutionary of all. The world would certainly be meaningless if it had not been for the existence of love, even beautiful things like flowers, the stars, rivers and oceans would absolutely have no sentimental value whatsoever; had it not been for the existence of love. Love makes us appreciate beauty in inexplicable ways and that is the beauty of love.

So without further ado here are two poems:

I long for

I long for 
a sense of belonging,
for being affirmed, nurtured and reassured. 
I long for our rants,
mischievous acts of lunacy, frank talks,
and pillow talks. 

I long for the crazy times 
we spent with each other,
the long crazy hours we would spend over the phone
talking about nothing and everything.

I long for the irrationality that characterised our 
passion and compassion for each other.  
You made me complete,
sane and insane 
all at the same time.  

I long for the moments I missed
to be there for you, 
to show up for you 
and reveal my true love for you…

Artwork by @levy_pooe titled: Motho le motho wa gagwe, 2021 
Acrylic on canvas.

Porgy  

My dear Porgy,
Magic is what is written in your eyes, 
the gaze is luring, my thoughts are numbed by your precious eyes. 

You are the book that is magical in my world.
I so wish I was the character
in this book that rescues you 
from despair. 

Sadly, the plot for this book
is betrayed by our long lasting friendship, 
perhaps my sin was not being upfront with you,
that I have always wanted to be more than friends with you,
from the very first day we met.  

Maybe this will be possible in the next lifetime, 
but I remain hopeful. 
Porgy, I love you dearly, 
always remember that my dear porgy.  

NB: These two poems will also be featured in my upcoming debut anthology of poems like the previous two from the last blog post.

Recently on twitter, my dear comrade and brother, Mpho Ndaba (via @manofcolor_) tweeted that poetry matters and I could not agree with him more. As result, I saw it fit to share a few of my poems that I have written over a couple of years ago. Some of these pieces I have shared before, some not – please do indulge in any case.

When poetry meets jazz

When poetry meets jazz, 
jazz becomes poetry
with dense metaphors
whose grammar, syntax and style 
shapes the world with its melodic timeless textures.

When jazz meets poetry
poems compose poignant musings 
whose sound quell emotions
of bondage, and the brutality of racial violence
– lamenting about black subjectivity. 

The improvisation forces the composer 
to drown in the imaginative world,  
to paint images with colours and illustrations
that take his audiences on a trance, 
I’m speaking here
of transcendental musings 
and meditations. 

When jazz meets poetry 
the poet becomes the composer
composing songs of solitude,
solidarity and serenity.

When jazz meets poetry
poetry becomes jazz 
and jazz becomes poetry. 
when poetry meets jazz
jazz becomes poetry 
and poetry becomes jazz

Grazing 

Still grazing 
in the plantation that the master has built
with the hope to dismember the black folk. 

The situation is scathingly unbearable, 
but the black folk
found ways to subvert the oppression 
by making compelling music
to numb the pain. 
The trumpet blows loud in the misty 
winds of a cloudy Mississippi morning 
in the fields. 

The whip carries no power anymore, 
the song keeps reverberating the uncompromising
sense of hope and resilience   
That is inherently 
BLACK. 

Still grazing 
in the plantation that the master has built, 
only the songs of Solomon carry 
the resilient hope of the 
slaves in the fields of Mississippi. 

I close off by reminding you folks that poetry matters, and the purpose of poetry is to: “…express an imaginative-emotional-intellectual experience of the writer’s… in such a way that it creates a similar experience in the mind of his reader or listener” as Clive Sansom puts it succinctly.

Disclaimer: I do not own the rights of the songs featured. Also, these two poems will soon be featured in my upcoming debut anthology of poems.

Who is Madonna? 

This is the very question I asked myself before I actually started reading this novel because I was more intrigued about the reason(s) why Prof. Zakes Mda would write about Madonna. Well, I had to read the book to find the answer(s) – if any existed. With that in mind, in this review, my focus is in the different ways in which madonna is represented as multiple as they were: symbolically and otherwise. 

So, without further ado, here is my attempt in unpacking these various forms of representation of Madonna. The long and short answer is that it is still unclear to me as to why the author chose to title the representation of the women he wrote about in the book as ‘Madonna’, but I will nonetheless attempt to language the possible reasons why he did in the way he did, at least from the way I see it. Also, is must be pointed out that the aim here is not necessarily to reduce the entire novel to this representation of the women spoken about in the novel as the Madonna – whatever that means, but rather to think creatively and critically about what the book achieves in representing the women characters in the book in the various ways it did.

The novel, The Madonna of Excelsior  is Zakes Mda’s third novel written in the year 2002. It is a novel that is based on a true-life event(s) in the town of Excelsior, Bloemfontein,  whereby in 1971, a group of Afrikaner men were arrested for breaching the Immorality Act and were involved in what is described as “miscegenation” in the novel (as one of the chapters deals with this topic at length). The novel revolves around the lives of Niki and her children, Viliki and Popi whose life struggle is nothing but that of survival, given that their mother Niki worked as a domestic worker and a single parent.

Viliki’s father, Pule, on the other hand, was a deadbeat father and because of that, Niki had to find ways to make ends meet. She then decided to become a model for a local painter, Father Frans Claerhout – they sometimes referred to him as ‘Father’ or ‘the trinity’ because he was after all, a priest, an artist and a man hence he was interested and “an admirer of big hands and big breasts” (p. 2). His subjects were always women, the madonnas as we come to learn. Niki would therefore model for the trinity in order to feed her children. Niki like the other women in the novel – the other madonnas, would frequent to Thaba Nchu, where the priest was located, at the Roman Catholic mission in order to model for him whenever he was in the mood to paint his madonna subject(s). This is to say, Niki at some point was also a madonna that the priest was interested in painting. She too stripped naked for the priest for him to paint his Madonna subject into his canvass. This is to say, in the novel madonna were the women who were objects to the white men whose gaze tortured them not only at level of being the subject of the composition of visual art (The Trinity was much guilty of this), but also at the level of being victims of rape, assault and abuse (the other Afrikaner men are guilty of this), as I am going to demonstrate further in the review. I think it is noteworthy to make the disclaimer that I do not name these other Afrikaner men deliberately in this review, not as a way to appease their sensibilities, but rather to reduce their symbolic sense importance hence not mentioning their names does not fascinates me, my interest is not on them, but rather on the madonnas. Yet, this is not to suggest that their roles in the novel is insignificant, but rather my not mentioning their names should be seen and appreciated as a way of dignifying the women they violated.

So, moving to the prose, the words from the opening line of the novel are quite strikingly poignant and invigorating, they leave the reader curious, to say the least, in as far as forcing the reader to question: which sins are these that are alluded to in the opening line? Simply because the opening line reads as follows: “All these things flow from the sins of our mothers”, this opening line forces oneself to helplessly wonder what kinds of sins could these be? I personally could not help myself but wonder about these sins.

Essentially, the main plot is centred around the idea of miscegenation and in a way, the children who were birthed as a result of the sexual relations (between the Afrikaner men and the black women from Excelsior – the madonnas)  become the bearers of the shame and guilt of their mothers’ sins but at the same time, the book approaches the notion of blame between the victims (the women who were at times forcefully lured to sleep with Afrikaner men) and the perpetrators (the Afrikaner men) in a back-and-forth kind of approach – where the victims blame the perpetrators, and the perpetrators blame the victims. Thus, a pendulum swings on both sides, but in the end, it is left to the reader to decide which side was innocent and which side was not.

Ultimately, the apartheid regime favoured Afrikaner men and this came as no surprise, but as something that should have been expected from a vile system whose mandate was, at all material times, maintain racial segregation and discrimination.  Thus, in the novel we are challenged to battle with is dichotomy of blame-guilt situation between the victims and the perpetrators, this unfolds particularly during the court proceedings where the white men end up being acquitted. Later, the black women too are let free but only on bail with conditions – that in and of itself speaks symbolically to the systemic racism and victimisation of black bodies, particular black women, the madonnas that they were subject as a result of systematic racism.

Nevertheless, elsewhere, it is argued that Zakes Mda utilised satire as a literary device to further complicate the conflicting and contradicting relations between the black and white people in this book (see Ralph Goodman, 2009)[i]. For example, when looking at the character of Sekatle, “the rich business man” who is a politician in his own right, we get to notice how Mda satirised his character by pointing out the contradictions he symbolised given that he always claimed to be for the people as a the member of “the Movement” (the ANC in case you are wondering), yet in defending the people of Bapeihi, he tried to benefit from their plight when they were in need of housing. In this instance, Sekatle is satirised to expose his political manipulation and exploitation as he used his political power for his own personal gains.

As pointed out by Goodman (2009, p. 302), in the novel, “Mda focuses on Sekatle, using the disjunction between the intentions and the discourse of this former lackey of the apartheid system to satirise him”. The point here is that Sekatle is satirised as a hypocritical individual whose behaviour symbolises the thuggery behaviour of corrupt politicians who have no interests in serving the people, instead focus on their self-enriching endeavours. Thus, the satire functions in the effect of making this subtle observation about corrupt politicians even in the wake of the democratic dispensation. The novel at this point also morphs itself into being a microcosm of what was happening in South Africa at the time just after the democratic dispensation. In fact, it would not be a misreading of the novel to suggest that this particular issue (of corruption) raised in the novel is relevant till today, because our leaders are rotten to the core just like Sekatle.

Furthermore, the novel can also be read as a critique of the then democratic state, the ANC government who already in the early years of 2000s showed signs of corruption, greed and lack of morale as the leaders of the state. Perhaps, in this is instance Mda’s the novel can be read as a political commentary, especially considering the the latter part(s) of book where the period of democracy is tackled. I am making this argument with the utmost humility because I believe that Mda by borrowed from what Nina Simone speaks about in her meditation the role of the artists (in this case the novelist): “to reflect the times” . I believe that Mda’s novel functions as political commentary at that level, to critique the style of leadership that some of the country’s politicians like Sekatle from the novel showcased, by being greedy, deceitful and conjuring for their own personal gains. But then again, that is my own subjective intervention if you will.

But coming back, to the idea of the beauty of the novel, one cannot help but to comment on the narration of the novel, particularly as it relates to how beautifully Mda began each of his chapters by having his characters being foregrounded as the subject matter of the painter, “The Trinity” (whom I have spoken about earlier) and the symbolism behind this deliberate exploration is that each painting provides a hint of what is to follow within the unfolding story in each chapter, this will be demonstrated later in terms of how it formulated in the novel itself.

Among the themes explored in the novel, the theme of racism and racial segration takes centre within the main plot of the novel not only because of the breach of the Immoral Act, but also at the level spatial planning that is commented upon in the novel. The novel is after all set during the apartheid era and moves more towards the 1994 moment and most impostantly, post the ’94 moment – thereby spanning around a period of thirty years. As a result, the whites lived in the suburbs, whilst black people worked as domestic workers for baas, lived in the squalor (Niki and her children lived at the Mahlaswetsa township) and were subjected to abject poverty.

Another theme that is dealt within the novel is that of sibling rivalry – although Popi and her brother got very much along with and cared for each other as siblings, they also had moments of fighting among one another just like most of us who are siblings. The theme of family, motherhood and importantly the aesthetics of visual arts, or the polemic thereof are also the other themes that can be noted in the novel.

The latter also functioned as the leitmotif within the novel, thus the madonna subject takes various formulations because of this intriguing exploration, and is part of the reason why Popi later developed her keen interest in the arts. Her discovery of this new passion of hers arguably forms part of her coming out of age, along with her other ambitions – becoming a political leader in her own right, a path that she followed owing up to her older brother, Viliki whom in his early life was a militant freedom fighter. He too was later elected a the counsellor in the town of Excelsior, something that was unheard of given the racist history of the town itself.

However, the most intriguing theme for me was that of silence – long after her rampant acts of rage against not only the oppressive apartheid regime, but also against the racist judicial system, against the Afrikaner man she once worked and had an affair with, and the one that violated her (later bearing him child, Popi), Niki later faced an existential crisis where her rage became a silent one, that of regret and resentment. She no longer had it in her to fight, fortunately or unfortunately, that became a battle that her children adopted, wittingly or unwittingly, but for different reasons. Theirs was to wage struggle against apartheid. Ultimately, political freedom was achieved, but it came with its own challenges.

Nevertheless, Niki resented the man that violated her, she resented the white man she worked for and the wife of that same man who was jealous of her beauty. She also resented the man that she had assumed would be the lover of her life, Pule. This was the very man that betrayed her by leaving her for cheaper women at the mines, in the city where he worked, leaving her to fend for herself and having to raise her kids all by herself. This particular theme is what brings so much anger to me as a reader because it demonstrates effectively how the apartheid system deliberately broke down the family life and structure of black people, not out of their own willingness, but as a result of their subjugation and conscription to the migrant labour system.

At times, the writing read like a poem and this was one thing that one could not take for granted within the novel. For instance, the descriptions at the beginning of each chapter were so refreshing to read. The descriptions at the beginning of each chapter in the novel painted a particular picture of what would follow, and creatively, these descriptions in one way or the other became in synch with the mood of each chapter.

For example, in the book one of the chapters reads with this opening line:

“Colour explodes. Green, yellow, red and blue. Sleepy-eyed women are walking among sunflowers. Naked women are chasing white doves among sunflowers. True atonement of rhythm and line. A boy is riding a donkey backwards among sunflowers. The ground is red. The sky is blue. The boy is red.”

This chapter is the one that helped us to get to know about the secrets of the madonnas of Excelsior, as they would engage in dubious activities of entertaining Afrikaner men despite knowing that such an act was against the law. The striking thing here was that the painting of these madonnas being in the “green, yellow and red” colours “walking among sunflowers” (in the veld I would assume) created a possibility where these women made love to these men, hence the imagery of the beautiful ambiance that is described above. But, at the same time, the same imagery as the story unfolds took a sharp curve where now the very same Afrikaner men chose to violate these beautiful black women, including Niki by means of raping them. The imagery is now collapsed into an unsettling one.

In closing, the question I opened with was Who is Madonna? I hope this review helped in trying to find out who is this madonna is and why was she (or they) have been represented in the various ways they have been represented in the novel.

[i] Goodman, R. (2009). Race and post-colonial issues in The Madonna of Excelsior. In D. Bell & J. U. Jacobs (Eds.). The ways of writing: Critical essays on Zakes Mda (pp. 299-.313).  Durban, South Africa: UKZN University Press.

This is a riveting and captivating novel written by one of South Africa’s most prolific writers, Sello Kabelo Duiker. This novel is his debut which was awarded the 2001 Common-wealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region.

The novel is written in first person narration from the perspective of the twelve year-old boy child, Azure (or Ah-zoo-ray as he insists to be referred to) who is the protagonist. The use of first person narration and present tense as a literary device functions as a tool to explore the innocence of childhood, and to highlight the element of immediacy in the unfolding story. What is meant in the latter is that, the element of immediacy is used to reveal how the story happens as it is told as opposed to being told through a form recollections or back-and-forth accounts of reflection which a writer like Arundhati Roy employs in her award-winning novel, The god of small things, but that is a topic for another day.

The story revolves around Azure’s life as a street kid living in the larny streets of Sea Point, Cape Town. The story reveals the harsh conditions that this young man had to deal with following the passing of his parents who lived in Mshenguville – a fictional township somewhere in Johannesburg. He lives as a homeless orphan in place where he knows no one, where he is left to fend for himself and has to find ways to survive the harsh realities of homelessness – which vary from violence, gangsterism, crime, rape, prostitution and having to deal with corrupt police officers among other things. He is basically confronted with the underworld of Cape Town.

Azure is a school drop-out and we get to learn about this right at the beginning of the story, where he brutally tells us that the last time he went to school was three years ago only to find his parents “in a pool of blood” in their shack when he came back from school. This is quite a traumatically gripping image for a thirteen year-old child. Already this incident sets the tone of the kind of traumatic violence that ‘Blue’ experiences in the novel. The name Blue is one that Azure was given because he had blue eyes, he was given this name by one of the notorious gang members of the 28s, Gerald, a man who terrorises the town and is feared by many. One cannot help but hate the kind of person Gerald was, even though a few admired him because of the power he possessed as a gangster – he had money, fancy clothes and drove a white Ford Grenanda. His supposed power does not put him on a pedastal, at least not me as a reader of this novel. I loathe the person Gerald was and this is something I want to believe that one personally shared with Azure himself, and fortunately, the novel shows us consistently that Azure hated the man. But that is shown implicitly rather than explicitly, I think.

Another interesting character is that of Bafana, a 9-year old street kid that lives with Azure in Sea Point. He is such a naive young man from Langa and his friend Azure was puzzled as to why Bafana preferred being homeless despite the fact that he still had a home back in Langa with both parents that he could always returned to at any given point in time. The relationship between these two is interesting in the sense that Azure viewed himself as Bafana’s senior given the age gap between them, and he would often remind him, whenever he saw fit, that Bafana is a “laatie” to him, a “moegoe”, that he was not as street-wise like he was. So, the two would often argue about the most trivial things. Weirdly though, Bafana was a drug addict, he smoked glue and button which would often make him behave bizarrely. Azure on the other hand despised these drugs, he only enjoyed his zol (dagga that is) and the irony here, is that you would expect Azure to be the one that takes and enjoys these hard-core drugs. In fact, Azure did not even enjoy drinking alcohol.

It is the relationship of these two boys that is at the centre of the story, at least in the first part of the book. In this section, one is drawn more towards the innocency of these two young boys living in the streets of Sea Point and Camp’s Bay. They do the most discomforting things to survive – to get food and make a living for themselves. Azure in particular dabbles in prostitution as his way of surviving, and for him to make ends meet. He often sleeps with white men (sometimes married men) who then pay him for either playing with their genitals, or engaging in penetrative and oral sex with them in exchange of money and sometimes food. It is at this juncture that the theme of prostitution, sexuality and identity is foregrounded, and in the process Azure tries to establish who he really is. The sex scenes are very explicit and can be terribly discomforting considering Azure’s age. But in my view, Sello compels his readers to be emphatic to this young man by forcing them to make sense of circumstances Azure found himself in rather than them placing any form of judgement against this young man, whose world had crumpled before his eyes. The young lad had his back on his wall and was expected to face the world with grace despite the harsh realities he was confronted with.

Nevertheless, the other themes explored in the novel include: substance abuse, the bad vs good, angels vs devils. And it is particularly the second part of the novel that tackles these themes with the deliberate use of symbolism and magical realism (if you will) as tools of revealing these contradictions. I mention this because at the climax of the unfolding story – where Azure gets beaten by Sealy (one of his trusted friends) having been instructed by Gerald to “fucking him up”, Azure stands up to face his fears by actually confronting Gerald and stands up for himself as he was advised by Vincent. Azure after being kidnapped, tortured, and then molested by Gerald’s cronies, begins this journey of self-discovery. During this journey, Gerald first reveals to Azure certain discomforting details about Azure’s parents and how they died. Then he gives him life lessons that he should use to survive the streets: that he should be unapologetic and confident. Upon hearing these details, a sceptic Azure undergoes a self-discovering journey and runs away from the City where he ends up finding refuge in Table Mountain.

While he is in Table Mountain, Azure encounters the supernatural world and interacts with these demigod figures, that help him develop his inner strength – a strength that he ends up using to fight the demons he was faced with. At this juncture, the book taps into the supernatural world wherein it becomes difficult to distinguish what happens in the real world versus what happens in the imagined supernatural world. Fortunately enough, one gets to learn that the supernatural world only occurs when Azure is dreaming. His sleep takes him to this unknown world. But at the same time, there are instances in the first section of the book whereby pigeons and seagulls symbolise some demigod characteristics as we get to learn about some of the supernatural powers Gerald had – he had eyes and ears everywhere in the City (in the form of pigeons), which Gerald would often instruct them to follow Azure around, especially when he was on the run – running for his life as Gerald wanted to kill him. These pigeons operated as Gerard’s watchdogs – his surveillance basically.

This particular literary device complicates the book in a way, because one ends up being left with the impression that the book is partly a speculative fiction (as it delves into the supernatural world with interesting use of symbolism and magical realism); and partly a bildungsroman given that the novel is about the coming of age of Azure. Towards the end of the book, it is made quite clear that Azure now views himself as a “man” and I suppose, his justification is the amount of experiences he has experienced, not many children of his age can actually relate to what he has been through and that is what qualifies him to be the man that he perceives himself to be. With that said, one holds the view that somehow this book bends the categories of genre because in a way the book shares a duality – the book can be said to belong into both genres of speculative fiction just as it belongs to the genre of bildungsroman. This duality was carefully crafted in the novel and the author must be commended for his artistic brilliance.

Lastly, I personally enjoyed this book because of the simplicity of the language used and the rich, layered nuances I picked up in the book. The book is absolutely an intriguing read not only because it delicately deals with the underworld of Cape Town (which is still very much intact till this day, by the way) but also because of the way moments of vulnerability, in the book, were approached with the level of sensitivity that they deserved. For a debut novel, Sello outdone himself here.

*Side note: The author has also written two other novels: The quiet violence of dreams and The hidden star (respectfully). Do check them as well. Hopefully, I will review them later this year.

This is the debut novel of the Nigerian-born poet and novelist, Lola Shoneyin. It is an intriguing novel which is based on the complications of polygamy. The novel revolves around the lives of the four wives of Baba Segi (also known as Ishola Alao), a wealthy rich man. These wives are Iya Segi, Iya Tope, Iya Femi and the newly-wed Bolanle, my personal favourite in the novel.

Baba Segi is a typical Big Man as many men like him are often labelled in the Nigerian literary canon. In the novel, he is described as the man of the house who is “plump and prosperous”. His authority is felt quite quickly in the novel through his revered armchair that nobody else gets to use but himself. He does however reward his wives with an armchair after they were able to bear him his children. Weirdly enough, he gained his wealth when the mother of his first wife, Iya Segi, donated money to him so that he could marry his daughter. She did that because she did not want to be an example of a bad parent whose daughter was unable to marry. Basically, Iya Segi’s mother did not want her daughter to become ‘lefitwa’ – a word in Sesotho which describes a woman who has been unable to marry or has had a failed marriage.

It is therefore not surprising that Iya Segi had a lot of entitlement in Baba Segi’s household. Her entitlement was two fold: first, she was the first wife to this polygamous man, so she had all the authority to the be the leader among the other wives. Secondly, she was the main reason that this man enjoyed so much wealth after he inherited all the businesses she owned prior to marrying him.

The novel is set in Ibadan, one of the famous cities in Nigeria, yet it remains a very rural novel as the characters spend time in different villages including Baba Segi’s favourite: Ayikara – a place he would often visit to seek counsel from his friend, Teacher. This is place where he found refuge. He frequented Ayikara when he needed help and advice from other men that went there for the same reason(s): to pour out their hearts about the troubles they had as a result of their “quarrelsome” wives.

As mentioned before, the book tackles the topic of polygamy quite strongly and as the title of the book suggests the three wives married to Baba Segi had a secret that they devoted themselves not to reveal whatever it took. However, it is the presence of the fourth wife, Bolanle – a beautiful educated woman that forces Baba Segi to seek scientific truth around her barrenness. Bolanle’s so-called barrenness is symbolised by Baba Segi’s bellyache – a sign in his mind that indicates the reason why he needed to do ‘something’ about his wive’s inability to birth children for him.

The irony in this book is that the same reason why Baba Segi’s went to seek scientific truth is the same reason he found out about the secret of his other three wives had kept from him. The other wives include Iya Segi, Iya Tope (whom was the most neutral in so far as displaying some humility and genuineness towards Bolanle) and Iya Femi. The first and third wives, Iya Segi and Iya Femi, resented Bolanle so much, they always displayed contempt towards her not only because she was educated – unlike them – but also because she was beautiful and that she happened to be Baba Segi’s favourite. This was evidenced by the many gifts that Baba Segi would buy for Bolanle. Iya Segi and Iya Femi also resented Bolanle with contempt because she was loved by the kids and she was good with them. This is despite the fact that at first some of the kids imitated their parents’s contempt towards her, but it was Iya Tope’s generosity that enabled Bolanle to win the love of Baba Segi’s seven children after she was able to be very friendly with Iya Tope’s children (Tope, Afolake and Motun).

This is a very interesting book that is worth reading and I believe anyone that is interested in Nigerian literature like I am will definitely enjoy this book as I have. Not only is the writing candid, humorous and easy to read, the book also manages to use each character’s voice and perspective quite distinctively such that one gets fascinated by the idea of time in the book. I mention this because the author interestingly enabled each character to relate their lives (or their stories) in interesting ways where at times each character told their story in retrospect. This enabled the book not to necessarily follow a linear progression in terms of the chronology of the narrative. This is to say, because various characters tell their stories in retrospect, the book does not follow a linear progression as far as the chain of events is concerned.

Needless to say, the book dabbles in the themes of patriarchy, polygamy, marriage, religion versus science (especially in the case where Baba Segi’s believes about the use of herbal medicine is tested by Bolanle’s disregard of its use) and feminism. I want to argue that the book is a feminist text because in the end, the author uses Bolanle’s agency as way to collapse patriarchal authority as if it was Baba Segi’s authoritative decision for her to remain in the marriage or not post the revelation of the other wives’ secret. Instead, Bolanle’s agency and bold character puts to bear the fallacy of Baba Segi’s authoritative dominion, therefore collapsing his patriarchal authority.

I will not divulge on this further as I risk to spoil the book.