When The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, the easiest story will be that a popular Nigerian novel has finally become a film.
The more accurate story began sixteen years ago.
Lola Shoneyin published the novel in 2010, long before the current competition among Nigerian studios for recognisable intellectual property, before global streaming platforms began commissioning Nigerian originals, and before the language of “adaptation pipeline” became common in Nollywood business conversations. The book did not wait quietly for cinema. It travelled through translations, classrooms, theatre and radio while the screen industry caught up with the complexity of the women Shoneyin had already written.
This is not an interview with Shoneyin. It is a RollCallAfrica profile drawn from her published work, public statements and the documented life of the property.
The House Was Never Really Baba Segi’s
The title places Baba Segi at the door, but the novel’s architecture belongs to the women inside. Bolanle enters the household as his fourth wife. Her inability to conceive appears to make her the problem. Medical investigation eventually reveals that the household’s central assumption is false: Baba Segi is infertile, and the children around whom his authority is organised were conceived outside the marriage.
That reversal is more than a plot secret. Shoneyin uses it to expose a social arrangement in which women carry the shame for reproductive failure while male authority is protected from examination. Each wife’s private history complicates the temptation to divide the house into innocent women and cruel women. Survival has made them strategic, compromised and, at times, dangerous.
Shoneyin has long written about polygamy from proximity rather than abstraction. Her maternal grandfather was the traditional ruler of Iperu Remo and had five wives. In a public essay published alongside the novel’s arrival, she rejected romantic ideas about the system and described the rivalry and emotional damage it could produce. The novel’s humour never cancels that knowledge. It makes the indictment easier to enter.
Sixteen Years of Adaptation
The book’s movement towards the screen has not been a straight line. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize, translated into several languages and adapted for the stage by Rotimi Babatunde. Femi Elufowoju Jr’s London production opened at the Arcola Theatre in 2018, later travelled to Lagos and became the highest-grossing production in the theatre’s twenty-year history. A BBC Radio 3 dramatisation followed in 2019.
Every form tested something different. The novel could move between the wives’ interior lives. Theatre turned the household’s noise, competition and physical closeness into live performance. Radio had to make secrets audible without the visual shorthand of a crowded home. By the time EbonyLife announced the feature adaptation, the material had already demonstrated that its value was not confined to the reputation of the original book.
The film is directed by Daniel Oriahi from a screenplay by Adze Ugah. Its TIFF premiere places the property before an international audience in September, ahead of a confirmed Nigerian cinema release on 4 December 2026.
Why the Screen Needed Time
A faithful adaptation of Baba Segi needs more than the broad comic possibilities of a polygamous household. It must preserve the women’s separate histories, the sexual politics of infertility, the violence beneath the rivalry and the uncomfortable fact that survival does not always make people generous.
Nollywood has always understood the commercial legibility of marriage, co-wives, inheritance and family conflict. What has changed is the ambition with which those subjects can be packaged. A literary property can now be developed for a major festival premiere without abandoning a nationwide Nigerian theatrical release. The prestige route and the commercial route are being asked to support the same film.
That combination carries risk. Festival positioning can encourage an adaptation to perform seriousness for international approval. Domestic marketing can pull it in the other direction, reducing the wives to comic types and selling Baba Segi as a familiar patriarch surrounded by chaos. The novel survives both simplifications because it is funnier than a lecture and more devastating than a farce.
Oriahi’s task is not merely to put a beloved book on screen. It is to protect the tension that made the book travel for sixteen years.
The Property Outlived Several Nollywood Eras
Since 2010, Nigerian film has moved through the DVD decline, the cinema expansion, the streaming commissioning boom and the current period of caution. Baba Segi remained valuable through all four cycles.
That durability is an argument for developing intellectual property patiently. A book is not valuable simply because readers recognise its title. It is valuable when its central conflict can survive a change of medium and still speak to the audience waiting on the other side.
Shoneyin’s novel has already survived prose, theatre and radio. It has also survived the habit of treating women in polygamous stories as interchangeable obstacles around a man. The wives have different wounds, different calculations and different relationships to freedom. Bolanle’s arrival does not create those contradictions. It makes them impossible to conceal.
READ ALSO: Why international festivals so often expect African films to arrive carrying trauma.
The Test Begins After Toronto
Toronto can confirm that the film has international curatorial value. December will test whether the adaptation can convert sixteen years of literary recognition into a Nigerian cinema audience. Neither result will replace the other.
The film also arrives with an unusual advantage: the source material has already been interpreted publicly for years. Readers know where the tragedy sits. Theatre audiences know that the household can fill a room. Scholars have examined the book’s treatment of patriarchy, reproductive shame and female agency. The adaptation is not introducing the argument. It is entering an argument that has been alive since 2010.
Lola Shoneyin did not write a novel that needed cinema to complete it. She wrote women complicated enough to survive until cinema was ready.
RollCallAfrica profile compiled from Lola Shoneyin’s published work and public writing; the documented stage and radio adaptations; EbonyLife’s production announcement; TIFF programme information; and the confirmed Nigerian theatrical listing. RollCallAfrica has not represented this article as an original interview.
