Co-Wives’ Intra-Gender Conflict in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives Of Baba Segi’s Wives

Abstract

This paper critically examines the intra-gender conflict among co-wives in Lola Shoneyin ‘s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives through the lens of Motherism, an African feminist theory that emphasizes motherhood, nurture, sisterhood, and cooperation among women. Many scholars have researched into the issues of women’s subjugation, oppression, trauma but not many have worked on the issues of cowives conflict in Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives which is poignant presentation of the African woman’s predicament in a polygamous household. The study reveals that women are as much captives of patriarchal domination as they are the class of inequality, retrogressive traditionalism, neurosis and intra-gender conflict. While the novel presents a polygynous household fraught with rivalry, deception, and emotional fragmentation, this study interrogates how such conflict disrupts the ideal of maternal solidarity and communal womanhood proposed by Motherism. The paper reveals that the competitive and often hostile relationships among the co-wives are not inherent but structurally induced by patriarchal norms that commodify women and reduce their value to reproductive utility. By foregrounding motherhood and domestic power struggles, the paper explores how the co-wives' identities are shaped and constrained by a male-dominated system that fosters jealousy, secrecy, and surveillance rather than unity. The study contends that Shoneyin both critiques and complicates the ideals of Motherism, suggesting that the promise of maternal sisterhood is undermined when women are pitted against each other for male validation and surviva