Unraveling family secret in lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

This paper is built in the context that there are changes in representation of the institution of family in contemporary African women’s writing. These changes are influenced by socio-cultural, political, and economic milieu of Africa and the global context generally. One of the notable forces behind these changes (apart from colonialism) is the change in gender politics: understanding gender roles and responsibilities, emigration, education, and the diaspora. This paper examines how the institution of family is fictionalised as a basis for gender role negotiation through veiling and unveiling family secrets. Informed by close reading, contextual, and thematic analysis, the paper reads Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives using Obioma Nnaemeka’s concept of ‘nego-feminism’ to uncover how the novel offers a complex understanding of the institution of the family as a domestic space that orients and disorients divisive gender politics in the face of biological reproduction. The paper interrogates the narrative focusing on how it juxtaposes traditional and modern societies in illuminating various levels of power negotiation at home. As the paper argues, the novel uses male’s infertility as a complex reproductive space for gender role negotiation.