JOSUGA: JOS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010) is interpreted as a radical feminist discourse, where Lola Shoneyin presents an emasculated or powerless patriarchy. This paper, utilising the sociological and radical feminist approaches to literary criticism, looks at how Shoneyin projects the reaction of the African woman in the face of depravity, corruption, sexploitation, and oppression by demystifying masculinity and patriarchy. Shoneyin’s special use of the scatological narrative technique succinctly describes how the woman is subjugated by patriarchy and how she uses her physical and mental capacities to circumvent it. This paper is discursive and shows how Shoneyin effectively uses the pathetic situation of the woman in the text to saliently describe the subtle but forceful ongoing role reversal between the genders in Nigeria. The paper concludes that gender politics is enforced by patriarchy and is sustained by the politics of economic subjugation of the female, and that the best way to transform things for the African woman is through positively aggressive changes. 

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