Around ten publishers said no to The Polygamist. Fourteen years later, the book they passed on is the source of one of the biggest African shows Netflix has ever had, and the way it got there says a lot about how screen deals for African books actually work.
A book nobody wanted to publish
Sue Nyathi, born in Bulawayo and working in corporate finance at the time, finished the manuscript in 2010 and spent 2011 sending query letters with her editor. According to Samrack Media's account of her Nairobi visit, about 10 companies rejected it, mostly doubting there was a market for a fast-paced drama about wealthy Zimbabwean polygamy.
So she paid for it herself. Editing, typesetting, printing, distribution and marketing all came out of her salary, topped up with money borrowed from a friend, as she told The Horizon Wire. The first print run was 500 copies, and sales were slow at first. At one point a bookshop told her it had sold eight.
That decision matters for the rest of the story. Because there was no publisher, there was nobody else holding a slice of the book. When producers came knocking, they came to her.
Two deals that went nowhere
They started knocking early. News24 reports that people approached Nyathi about a film as early as 2013, a year after publication, and that an option with Branded Soul Productions expired without the project being developed. Samrack Media describes a second attempt in 2015, when a director acquired the rights, which also stalled.
This is the part of adaptation deals that rarely makes headlines. An option gives a producer the exclusive right to develop a book for a set period. If they can't raise the money or find a buyer before it runs out, the rights go back to the author and the project dies quietly. Nyathi went through that cycle more than once, and in the meantime she built a career, signing with Pan Macmillan for her second novel, The Gold Diggers, and leaving finance in 2018 to write full-time.
How the Netflix version was put together
The version that worked started in 2022, when Stained Glass, the production company run by Gugulethu Zuma-Ncube and Pepsi Pokane, came calling, per News24. Stained Glass developed the show first and then took it to the streamer. "In 2024, they managed to sell the idea to Netflix," Nyathi told The Horizon Wire. Production ran through 2025 and filming wrapped that August.
So the chain was author to producer to platform, with Netflix buying a series from an independent South African production house rather than commissioning the book directly. The financial terms of Nyathi's agreement have not been made public, so we won't guess at them.
What has been reported is how the creative side was split. Nyathi didn't write the scripts. Busisiwe Zwane was head writer, and Samrack Media reports that a team of 10 writers adapted the book, which made Nyathi nervous until she read the finished scripts. She told News24 she chose trust over control, noting that an earlier attempt she was part of to write a screenplay "wasn't that great". CGTN notes the series credits her book as its source, while the Zimbabwean characters were moved into a South African setting and the dialogue into Zulu.
What the hit has paid back
The payoff arrived on the book side as much as the screen side. Fullview, in a piece carrying Netflix's own figures, reports that sales of The Polygamist tripled after the June premiere, that it hit number one on Exclusive Books' bestseller list in South Africa, and that the first run of her 2024 novel An Angel's Demise, which had sold 2,500 copies in two years, sold out.
The show itself has kept climbing. At a Johannesburg event marking a decade of Netflix in South Africa, company executives told Reuters the series had reached the top 10 in 62 countries for seven straight weeks and drawn nearly 28 million views. The sequels Netflix announced at that event were for other titles, and no second season of The Polygamist has been confirmed.
Demand also exposed a gap. In June, Citizen Digital reported Nyathi warning Kenyan fans about pirated copies being sold on Nairobi's Ronald Ngala Street, at a time when no Kenyan distributor was authorised to sell the book.
What it means for Zimbabwean writers
The Polygamist is a Zimbabwean story, written by a Bulawayo-born author, that became a South African production. Fullview reports the shoot employed roughly 150 cast and crew and more than 45 local vendors, all in South Africa. The producer who could get it made was South African, so the jobs, the language and the setting went south with it.
There are still lessons worth taking home. Owning your rights outright, as a self-published author does, means you are the one who signs when a producer calls. An option that lapses is not the end of the road. And the real long-term value may be the backlist: a hit show sent readers back to every Nyathi title on the shelf.
Nyathi put the distribution problem bluntly to News24, saying that African writers who publish on the continent get low visibility and their work rarely travels. A streaming deal changed that for her. The harder question is how Zimbabwe builds the producers, distributors and anti-piracy protection that would let the next Nyathi make that deal from home.
Sources
- No publisher wanted it: How Sue Nyathi's rejected novel became Netflix show 'The Polygamist', News24
- 'Polygamist' Author Sue Nyathi Visits Kenya as Book Becomes Netflix Series, Samrack Media
- 'Polygamist' author Sue Nyathi on first visit to Kenya and turning book to film, The Horizon Wire
- Author Sue Nyathi reflects on Netflix adaptation of her novel The Polygamist, Fullview
- 'The Polygamist' surprise success helps spur Netflix South Africa titles, Reuters
- 'The Polygamist' author unpacks Netflix sensation, CGTN Africa
- 'The Polygamist' author Sue Nyathi raises alarm over pirated copies of her book in Nairobi, Citizen Digital
