Negotiating patriarchy, agency, and secrecy in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

This article examines Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives drawing on feminist theories of secrecy and Global South conceptions of agency to advance weaponised surreption as a critical framework for understanding women’s survival strategies in polygynous marriage. It engages the novel to challenge feminist models that exclusively equate agency with voice, resistance, or emancipation in Nigerian marital economies underlined by reproductive surveillance, agrarian dispossession, and gendered inheritance regimes. It draws theoretical insights from Adrienne Rich’s feminist ethics of secrecy, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s criticism of universalised feminist agency, and Sylvia Tamale’s African feminist praxis to argue that secrecy in the novel functions as an intentional, material, and relational strategy oriented towards personal safety instead of transformation. Through a close character analysis of Iya Segi, Iya Tope, and Iya Femi, weaponised surreption unravels as a calculative survival tactic – one that undermines and sustains patriarchal power. This fronts the limits and contradictions of weaponised surreption. Bolanle’s refusal of secrecy is read as ethical rupture in contrast to the tactical resistance of her co-wives. The article therefore contributes to Global South feminist literary criticism in theorising secrecy as a strategic agency within hegemonic institutions like polygynous marriage.