30/08/2026
THE WOMEN OF JAMES ENE HENSHAW PART 2
In Part 1, we focussed on the female characters in James Ene Henshaw’s THIS IS OUR CHANCE. In this section we be looking the females in his second great play, MEDICINE FOR LOVE. Again, the women again carry the play's real intelligence while the men get the comic credit.
Ewia Ekunyah is a successful, unmarried public man running for election in an African city, whose peace is shattered when relatives start "marrying" wives for him according to tradition — without his consent. Two arrive almost simultaneously: Bekin Wari, sent by Chief Wajie, and Ibiere Sua, sent by Uncle Chief Yemba. Both move into his house with a parent in tow, and the two women wage constant, comic war over him, each suspecting the other's family of using love medicine to win his affection. Ekunyah's meddling Auntie Dupeh then insists on sending a third woman, Nene Katsina, and later summons a flamboyant medicine-man, Agatarata, to protect Ekunyah from "love charms" — all while Ekunyah's Chaplain looks on in despair at a supposedly Christian, modern man drowning in traditional wives.
The chaos resolves through genuine feeling rather than tradition or juju: Ibiere Sua falls for a young doctor, Dr Marsey; Bekin Wari realises she loves Ekunyah's loyal secretary, Olu Ita; Auntie Dupeh herself is courted by an old friend, Kiudu Bonga; and Ekunyah, freed of obligation, falls for Nene Katsina, who proves herself through competence and kindness rather than charm. The play ends with multiple weddings, poking gentle fun at superstition while championing love chosen freely over marriage imposed by custom.
BEKIN WARI, “bravado as a mask for the overlooked”, announces herself with ci******es and a catchphrase — "It's as simple as that" — a performance of toughness that reads, on inspection, as a defence mechanism. She's a "traditional wife" nobody asked her opinion about either, dropped into a rivalry she didn't choose, and her aggression toward Ibiere Sua is really displaced anger at a situation neither woman controls. Henshaw's twist is that Bekin Wari's real story is happening in the margins the whole time — Olu Ita, Ekunyah's secretary, has been quietly in love with her, and it's only when she stops performing for Ekunyah's attention that she recognises it: "I never knew all this time that I was in love with you." Her father's late remark is sharp and telling: she's "done nothing to convince Ekunyah that she would be a good wife" because the entire courtship-by-proxy arrangement never asked her to be a person, only a claim. Once she drops the posture, she gets an actual match.
IBIERE SUA, “the one who names the real choice”, starts out nearly indistinguishable from Bekin Wari in function — the mirror-image rival wife, prone to tears rather than ci******es, but locked in the identical trap. Her arc is the play's clearest statement of the younger generation's revolt against arranged "traditional" marriage: when Dr Marsey falls for her, she doesn't equivocate — she corrects everyone who calls him "this man" or "the wrong man" and insists, "he is a darling and a dear." Her mother Mama Ebunde and Papa Garuka both ultimately side with her choice over the arrangement they themselves had brokered, which matters — the older generation in this play isn't a monolith defending Tradition; it bends when a daughter states her own preference plainly. Ibiere is where Henshaw shows that emancipation from the "traditional wife" system isn't rebellion for its own sake — it's simply choosing love that's actually mutual, in daylight, over an inherited arrangement.
NENE KATSINA, “competence without combat”, is introduced being literally thrown out of the house by the other two women before she's said more than her own name — and yet she's the only one of the three "wives" who never engages in the sniping and cigarette-hissing rivalry. When Auntie Dupeh collapses, it's Nene who takes charge instantly — loosening her clothing, calling for the ambulance, insisting on going to the hospital — while Bekin Wari and Ibiere Sua refuse outright. That single scene reorders the whole competition: Ekunyah doesn't fall for Nene because of beauty or scheming, but because she's the one who acts with care when it counts. Structurally, Henshaw uses her to answer the play's title directly — she is the actual "medicine for love," arriving with no charm, no juju, and no manipulation, just competence and kindness.
AUNTIE DUPEH, “comic force, real authority”, is the play's most purely comic creation — barging in with her umbrella, inventing an entire fictional cousin named Lazarus on the spot to smuggle a medicine-man past the Chaplain, bulldozing everyone's objections — but underneath the farce she's the one person in the household whose word actually moves events. She sent Nene Katsina in the first place, she summons Agatarata, and her collapse is the catalytic event that finally puts Ekunyah in a room with Nene and lets his real feelings surface. She also gets her own late-life romance with Kiudu Bonga, refusing his silly pet name ("beautiful Front Tooth") without refusing him — Henshaw lets an older woman be both ridiculous and completely undiminished by it, still fully in charge of her own choices at the end. She's proof that "traditional" and "matriarchal power" aren't opposites in Henshaw's imagination — Auntie Dupeh wields more real authority over the household than Ekunyah does.
MAMA EBUNDE, “the play's thesis, spoken plainly”, looks at first like a stock mother-in-law figure, arriving to "protect" her daughter and getting drawn into petty warfare with Papa Garuka and Auntie Dupeh. But she's given the single line that names the whole play's argument: "the best medicine for love is good looks, good manners, and good cooking" — a flat rejection of the medicine-man's charms and superstition in favour of plain human decency, delivered by an "ordinary" older village woman rather than the educated hero or the Chaplain. It's a quietly subversive move: the play's moral center on the question of real versus superstitious "medicine" comes not from Ekunyah, not from the Church, but from a mother defending her daughter's worth in her own vernacular. Her late, unhurried romance with Papa Garuka — two elderly parents finding their own "cure for loneliness" while their children sort themselves out — mirrors Auntie Dupeh's arc and reinforces Henshaw's recurring move: older women in his plays are never past desire, agency, or their own story.
Where This Is Our Chance gives women moral and diplomatic power in a tragedy about tradition, Medicine for Love gives them the punchline and the wisdom in a comedy about the same tension — modern love versus arranged, "traditional" marriage. Across both plays the pattern holds: the men hold titles (Chief, public man, Prime Minister), but the women hold the actual instruments that resolve the plot — Ansa's diplomacy, Ayi's conscience, Kudaro's medicine; and here, Nene's competence, Ibiere's clarity, Auntie Dupeh's authority, and Mama Ebunde's plain-spoken truth. It's a strong throughline for your thesis about how uniquely Henshaw wrote women, and it's rooted, as you note, in a household where the women around him — his mother, Dr Lawrence's household, his wife Caroline — held real, if informal, power.
