When publishers turned down Sue Nyathi's debut novel, she printed 500 copies herself and sold them out of the trunk of her car. That 2012 self-published book, "The Polygamist," has since become a bestseller and, this year, the basis for a Netflix telenovela that has climbed into the platform's global top 10 in more than 60 countries, reaching number two in the United States.
The 22-episode adaptation premiered on Netflix in June and drew roughly two million views in its first week, according to Brittle Paper, before climbing to number three on Netflix's non-English-language chart and topping the rankings in South Africa, Nigeria, France, Belgium and Jamaica. The show relocates Nyathi's Zimbabwe-set story to South Africa, is performed largely in Zulu, and trims the number of wives from the novel, but keeps its central premise: a woman named Joyce believes she is in a monogamous marriage to a businessman, Jonasi, before discovering he has secretly kept three other women.
A Story About Consent, Not Custom
Nyathi, who was born in Bulawayo and drew on generations of polygamy within her own family for the novel, has been careful to distinguish her subject from polygamy as a sanctioned cultural or religious practice. "I'm not against polygamy," she has said, according to reporting on the adaptation's reception. "What I'm against is the lack of agency. It's wrong for the goalposts to be shifted once you're inside." The book and series instead focus on deception, financial dependence and the erosion of a woman's ability to negotiate the terms of her own marriage.
That framing appears to be resonating well beyond Southern Africa. Nyathi has said women regularly write to her describing themselves in Joyce's story, and Amnesty International's South Africa office circulated guidance on recognizing narcissistic abuse after the series' release. The show has not been without pushback: at least one Kenyan official, Geoffrey Mosiria, publicly criticized it for what he characterized as conflating polygamy itself with abuse and fraud, according to the same reporting.
Nyathi's own path to the screen took more than a decade. Before turning to fiction full time, she spent nearly two decades working in finance as an investment analyst, writing evenings and weekends while raising her son as a single mother. She did not become a full-time novelist until around age 40; she is now 48 and, per The Africa Report, is at work on a historical novel she began roughly two years ago. She has described the show's sudden global reach as the product of years of quiet persistence rather than an overnight breakthrough — a self-published book that took thirteen years to reach the audience she originally imagined for it.
