Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) in contrast to the
exploration of polygamy in Nigerian-American dramatist Tess Onwueme’s early play The
Reign of Wazobia (1988), written a year after Chinua Achebe’s novel. As a third generation
African writer, and one whose work is less well recognized than other African novelists and
playwrights, Onwueme occupies a relatively marginal role in the Nigerian and African literary
canon. Nevertheless her work facilitates an analysis of neocolonialism, though in contrast to
Achebe’s realist narrative, her evocation of myth and tradition appears to take the discussion into
a pre-colonial past as in many of Wole Soyinka’s plays.