The First Wife

After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double – or rather, a quintuple – life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other households for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband’s duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women – as well as an additional lover – through polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights. In this humorous and feverishly scathing critique, Mozambique’s first published female novelist explores her country’s tradition and culture, values and hypocrisy, and its subjection of women.