Welcome to this seminar where Professor Wumi Raji presents her research on author Lola Shoneyin's first and only novel. The seminar is part of the English Research Seminar at the Department of Languages and Literatures.
The Secret Love for Baba Segi’s Wives is Lola Shoneyin’s first and only novel so far. Set in Ibadan, Nigeria’s second largest city, the novel tells the story of a man with multiple wives who would later discover that none of the children over whom he claims paternity is, in the biological sense, his child; and that while he remains sexually active, he has no ability to sire children. This paper explores the joke the author plays on her main character, and also the one the novel plays on the author herself. It explores as well the novelist’s suggestion on a new African masculinity. Postcolonial African societies remain, in the main, patriarchal, and an ability to father children in the natural sense is a central factor in its conception of masculinity. Lola Shoneyin puts forward a new suggestion on fatherhood in the novel, suggesting that it lays emphasis less on nature, but rather more on nurture, less on a man’s ability to get a woman pregnant, but more on whether he is the one who rears the child. The exploration of this perspective on fatherhood in the novel represents the major concern of the paper.
Wumi Raji is a Professor of Drama at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria and holds a doctoral degree of the University of Ibadan. He has, among others, been an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, a Volkswagen Foundation Research Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden, a Guest Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, a Guest Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK, Wumi Raji is the author of Long Dreams in Short Chapters: Essays in Postcolonial African, Cultural and Political Criticisms (Berlin: Lit, 2009), editor of Contemporary Literature of Africa: Tijan M. Sallah and Literary Works of The Gambia (Amherst: Cambria, 2014), and co-editor (with Femi Osofisan) of Ogun’s Errant Warrior: Celebrating Biodun Jeyifo at 70 (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2018. Wumi Raji has taught at the Universities of Ilorin, Benin, Bayreuth and The Gambia and his essays have appeared in Research in African Literatures, Journal of African Literature Association, African Literature Today and Matatu: Journal of African Culture, among others.