Mairo Mudi’s ‘The Second Wife’: A woman’s flower blooms only for so long
By Paul Liam
MAIRO Muhammad Mudi’s novel, The Second Wife (Manpower Publishing House, Lagos; 2025) chronicles the life of Bintu, a faithful and spiritual Muslim woman caught in the theatrics of polygamy, witchcraft, and the vile hostility of a jealous co-wife. It is a tale of love, perseverance, and agony set against Islamic and Hausa sociocultural ethos. It is an instructive family thriller that upholds the values of marriage, family, patience, and culture. The novel’s first three chapters introduce the reader to the naïve predilection of Bintu, a 24-year-old working-class lady from a humble background who desires to be a second wife. Through her exchanges with her friend, Asma’u, and via the narrator’s account, various socio-cultural challenges faced by women, especially unmarried women in traditional societies, are brought to life. Against Asma’u’s good judgment of the demerits of polygamy, Bintu insists on living her dream of becoming a second wife. Unknown to her, what she desires will become her worst nightmare as a second wife.
Bintu eventually marries Khalifa, the son of her father’s former boss. Her marriage is reminiscent of the traditional northern Muslim marriage rights. Her first night as a married woman is nothing short of a Kanywood movie script; it is replete with drama as Bintu complains of a nagging headache and is tended to by her mother-in-law, Hajiya, who gives her painkillers to take for the headache. Exhausted, Bintu goes to bed only to wake up with pains all over her body. While she sleeps, her husband consummates their marriage without her knowing when it happens. She complains of body pain as her husband dots over her with affection, offering to take her to the hospital but Bintu refuses; he reports the situation to his mother who comes to check up on her but Bintu is embarrassed by the family’s knowledge of her first sexual experience, so she hides behind the contains in her room. Hajiya discovers the white cloth on the bed stained with blood. The bloodstained white cloth signifies that Bintu had never known a man before she met her husband. This discovery fills them with pride. Hajiya declares that she will send the white cloth with gifts to Bintu’s parents as a mark of her purity and gratitude for raising an upright woman.
On discovering the white sheet, Hajiya remarks, “I’ll call the aunties to take this sheet to her mother with gifts”. This depiction illustrates the religious and cultural significance of purity in traditional societies. Marrying off a daughter that has never been deflowered is celebrated as the greatest honour of a woman and her family. Particularly, in Bintu’s case, it has double significance because of the rumors that were spread around the town that she was a loose woman who had slept with different men and had an abortion. It highlights the pressure single women face in many traditional societies, especially educated and working-class women like Bintu, who are believed to be wayward. Bintu proves the point that not all single women are loose.
The main conflict of the narration is activated when Bintu and her husband relocate to Port Harcourt, where he works and lives with his first wife, Aliya, and their children. Aliya, the first wife, is her husband’s cousin. She rejects Bintu, vowing to deal with her for marrying her husband. Bintu’s endless efforts at making peace are met with Aliya’s aggressive rebuttal and machinations. Bintu endures all forms of abuse and attacks from her co-wife, who ends up using diabolical means to cause Bintu to lose her first pregnancy. Khalifa and his mother’s efforts to pacify Aliya to accept Bintu proved abortive as she remained antagonistic to Bintu till the end. Bintu, on the other hand, remains diligent, caring, and humble. She is loved by her husband, mother-in-law, and husband’s siblings. She endures all the spiritual attacks orchestrated by Aliya; through seething pain and sickness, she endures, becoming victorious in the end as Khalifa ends up divorcing Aliya after she buried charms in the house, causing Bintu to temporarily lose her sanity. Bintu prevails in the end, bearing children and living happily ever after.
One of the story’s key highlights is its reflection on the sociocultural constructs underpinned by patriarchal value systems, which subject women to all kinds of censorship and pressures. Mudi presupposes that a woman in a traditional patriarchal society has no agency and is expected to act according to laid-down social norms without recourse to her needs and aspirations as a human capable of self-direction. This notion is underscored by the deliberate representations in the opening chapters of the book captured via the exchanges between Bintu and Asma’u. For example, Bintu criticizes men who view women as objects that they buy and possess with their wealth. The case of Maiwadata, a wealthy man who seeks her hand in marriage through his driver rather than approaching her himself, is portrayed as an example of a rich man who thinks he can use his money to get any woman he wants without respecting the woman’s dignity. Bintu rejects his proposal on account of his narcissistic disposition. She says to her friend, Asma’u, that she doesn’t want to marry a wealthy but comfortable man who will value and treat her like a human being.
Equally, Bintu’s inability to find a man strains her relations with her father and family, who regard her as being irresponsible. Her father stops answering her greetings as a demonstration of his unhappiness with her refusal to bring home a man. Her younger cousins make jest of her for the same reason of not being able to find a man. Other members of the society are not left out of the charade of mocking her for being single at 24. This depiction echoes the well-known social pressures that society places on young women of marriageable age. It calls to mind a similar representation by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii’s play, I Will Marry When I Want (1970), which portrays Gathoni’s struggle against her parents and society’s pressure to get married. Gathoni insists in the play that she will marry when she wants to the chagrin of her parents and society.
The narration also highlights the implications of societal pressure on the mental health of women, especially single women. It accentuates the perception of single women as misfits and wayward. This assertion is corroborated by Bintu’s reflection on the effect of such pressures on her well-being and happiness. She asserts:
“But deep inside, I wasn’t laughing. The pressure at home was becoming unbearable. A woman’s flower blooms for only so long, and at twenty-four, my petals were, according to society, beginning to wilt”.
Bintu’s self-deprecating remarks about losing her value because of her inability to find a husband is a sad representation of the ugly situation many single women find themselves in traditional societies. Single women are made to feel worthless for supposedly failing to meet societal expectations and standards that undermine their agency. Society often ignores the negative impact of forcing young women to enter into marriages that sometimes threaten their lives and happiness. It pushes some women to indulge in illicit behaviours like adultery or murdering their spouses.
Even when young women go into such pressured marriages, they are safe, they sometimes face spousal abuse and in-laws’ hate. Bintu supports this assertion by using the story of her childhood friend, Jummai, who got married immediately after secondary school to the love of her life but ended up facing unbearable animosity from her in-laws, leading to a divorce. This leads Bintu to conclude that early marriage does not guarantee a happy marriage. She further notes, “Jummai’s story taught me a harsh truth—sometimes, love isn’t enough to shield a woman from the arrows of in-laws and society”.
The foregoing assertions buttress Mudi’s feminist concerns regarding the societal abuse of women. Her representations indicate that women are still faced with all kinds of oppressive systems and behaviours threatening their attainment of economic and sociopolitical independence in many societies in Nigeria. The recent case of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan and the Senate President, Senator Godswill Akpabio, is a sterling example of the suppressive systems women are subjected to in Nigeria. Mudi’s novel is thus a social realist depiction of the plight of women in Nigeria and Africa in general. It fosters feminist discourse from a northern Muslim woman’s perspective.
The Second Wife is a profound, contemporary representation of the realities of northern Nigerian women who are conditioned to endure the dishonoring inadequacies of polygamy in silence. It is also a celebration of the power of spiritual devotion and perseverance in the face of adversity, as indicated by the text’s copious allusion and dependence on God and the teachings of the Holy Quran.
However, the quality of editing and overall craft of the work are less impressive. The narration is straight to the point and does not pretend to offer any grand aesthetic appeal. It is a simple story that can be enjoyed by all categories of readers. The plot and conflict are pretty straightforward and don’t leave much to the imagination. It is heavily dependent on dialogue, narrowly escaping becoming a work of drama. The characters are predictable, even as they can easily be likened to everyday folks on the streets of northern Nigeria. Overall, the story is relatable and filled with several moral lessons for society. It will appeal more to a less critical audience. It makes for a good advocacy novel that can be used in educating young girls and women on the values of self-development, education, faith, patience, humility, and economic independence. The Second Wife is a worthy addition to Nigerian literature.
* Liam is a writer and culture critic based in Abuja
