The Secret Love for Baba Segi’s Wives is Lola Shoneyin’s first and only novel so far. Set in Ibadan, Nigeria’s second-largest city, the novel tells the story of a man with multiple wives who would later discover that none of the children over whom he claims paternity is, in the biological sense, his child and that while he remains sexually active, he has no ability to sire children. This paper explores the joke the author plays on her main character and also the one the novel plays on the author herself. It explores as well the novelist’s suggestion of a new African masculinity. Postcolonial African societies remain, in the main, patriarchal, and the ability to father children in the natural sense is a central factor in their conception of masculinity. Lola Shoneyin puts forward a new suggestion on fatherhood in the novel, suggesting that it lays emphasis less on nature, but rather more on nurture, less on a man’s ability to get a woman pregnant but more on whether he is the one who rears the child. The exploration of this perspective on fatherhood in the novel represents the major concern of the paper.