Sue Nyathi says people call her an overnight success but "the work has been put in over many years"
When Sue Nyathi sent her debut novel The Polygamist to publishers, "they thought there was no market for the book" about a married Zimbabwean man and the women he seduces, she says.
So the Zimbabwean author found her own editor, typesetter and artist, and in 2012 published 500 copies herself. It defied the publishers' predictions and became a huge hit.
It has now been adapted for Netflix and is in the top 10 of the platform's most streamed series in more than 60 countries, reaching number two in the United States. Hollywood actress Taraji P Henson said the series had her in a "chokehold" and she binge-watched all 22 episodes in a single day.
It is not, Nyathi is careful to point out, a straightforward story about polygamy. The traditional practice of polygamy is not foreign to her. Her mother's side the family was polygamous for generations.
Her grandfather, who died in 1979, had five wives, her great-grandfather had 11. Her grandmother, the first woman his grandfather married, presided as matriarch over a farm where the wives lived together, and often helped choose the newcomers herself.
Sye Nathi's grandmother was the first wife in a polygamous marriage, a position known as an Unlengkulu
"There was no infighting, because everyone knew their place," Nyathi says. When she asked her grandmother how she made sense of it, the answer was practical – more hands to do the work, physical labour and emotional labour alike. It was open.
"Everybody knows who's who in the zoo," Nyathi explains.
Polygamy is legally recognised in Zimbabwe and South Africa if conducted under specific established customs. But what Nyathi began to notice as a young working woman in Harare in 2001 was something else entirely.
Men who were purportedly monogamous were effectively living polygamous lives with secret women and secret households. That is the polygamy of her novel, what she calls "the modernised, or perverted, version" of the practice, relying on deception instead of consent
"I'm not against polygamy," Nyathi says. "What I'm against is the lack of agency. It's wrong for the goalposts to be shifted once you're inside."
In the novel, Nyathi's heroine, Joyce, believes she has married into a union of one man and one woman, yet her husband, Jonasi, marries and sets up homes with three other women behind her back. There is no confession and no announcement; Joyce simply comes to realise, as the secrets accumulate and the women's lives intertwine, that her idea of a monogamous marriage has been a sham all along.
There is an explosive rivalry between Joyce (in white) and Matipa (in black), who both married Jonasi
The question of who holds the power to negotiate and who does not runs through the whole storyline. Jonasi is a wealthy, self-made businessman, and in a patriarchal society he makes the decisions about everything.
