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Funmbi* talks about her relationship with James*, the incidents that led to their breakup, and the possibility of getting back with the love of her life.
Image created with Starryai
This is Funmbi’s* story, as told to Chioma.
I met James* on Tinder in 2021. He was sweet and hilarious, so we exchanged contacts and started talking, but it all fizzled out after a while.
One night, I was ranting on my WhatsApp status, and he reached out to check on me. He called me again the following day, and we spoke for about two hours. Before it ended, he gave me a gig. It was the nicest thing anyone had done for me that month.
After that, we just continued talking to each other. He was smart and kind, and the next thing I knew, I was convincing myself that my school in Ilorin wasn’t even that far from Lagos, where he was, and long-distance relationships weren’t that bad. I knew he wanted to ask me out, and he was just waiting for the right moment, but I didn’t have the patience for that, so two weeks later, I asked him to be my boyfriend.
Our relationship was great. He was the best boyfriend anyone could ask for, and we had this communication rule to make sure the long distance didn’t affect us as much, but I knew something would go wrong. I assumed the worst and hatched a plan for when it happened. So I already thought of the worst thing—him cheating—and then I told myself that he was probably already doing it.
I wasn’t wrong.
James and I were heavy on communication, calls, texts, notes by pigeon. As long as we got to speak to each other constantly, we would do it. Two months into our relationship, I started noticing a communication gap. He would disappear for hours and come back without explanation, so one day, I decided to go to Lagos and see what was happening. I had an event to attend, I had cash, and all this man had to do was pick me up from my friend’s place and take me to his house. We needed to talk, and most importantly, we needed to have sex.
I waited all day for James to show up, but he didn’t. I was livid. I had travelled from Illorin to see him, but he couldn’t drive from Ajah to Lekki to pick me up. I wanted to be petty. I wanted to do something to spite him, so I had sex with the friend I was staying with.
I swear, it didn’t mean anything. To me, sex isn’t such a big deal. I mean, it is, but only when you attach meaning to it, and as far as I was concerned, sex outside a relationship was as meaningless as it came.
I think that’s why I was able to forgive him when he finally confessed to cheating on me the first time.
He came to pick me up from that friend’s house, and after we spoke about the communication gap in our relationship, he confessed. I forgave him after a couple hours because, well, I did just cheat on him, too, but I still loved him, and I already knew he was cheating. He lived in Lagos. We were doing long distance. He gets horny at least twice a week, and he’s a hot guy. There’s too much fish in the river for him not to be tempted.
I didn’t want to lose him, and I had a feeling it would happen again because how do you ask a man to stay celibate because of long distance? In Lagos? It’s like begging water and oil to mix. It’s like trying to say Tinubu should approve a ₦400k minimum wage. It won’t work.
I suggested we open up our relationship. We would still love each other and be together, but we could sleep with whomever we pleased and talk about it. He went ballistic and said he didn’t want that. I think his ego couldn’t handle the thought of someone else touching me. Instead of opening up our relationship, he decided we would take a break and try to sort out our issues. I was fine with that, and then I found out he used that time to cheat again. I gave up after that, and we broke up.
It’s been a year since we broke up, and we’ve built a really good friendship.
The friendship is golden.
He japa’d last August and has been trying to get me to move. That’s a more complicated discussion. But I still love him a lot, and I know it’s mutual to some extent.
Want to know something crazy? If he asks me to give it another shot, even with him thousands of miles away, I just might say yes.
I was curious about people who live beside cemeteries and wanted to know about their experiences when I found Ibrahim*.
In this story, Ibrahim talks about his family’s cemetery residence with its supposedly good-luck charm, the ghost rumours and the friendship heartbreaks that came with it.
As told to Adeyinka
Until I turned 12, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to my environment. I knew we lived on Lagos mainland and had lots of trees in the area. Occasionally, an influx of people showed up on random days, and they always seemed so sad. Some of them even cried. One day, I asked my mum about these strangers and why they always gathered in the compound next to us.
My mum told me, “That’s where they bury people who have gone to heaven.” I’m not sure if I understood this, but I didn’t press further.
Then, I got into secondary school and got a true picture of how weird our accommodation was. My friends would hesitate when I invited them to visit, then come up with all sorts of excuses. I was sad when this happened because I visited them without fail.
When I was in JSS 3, another major event put things into perspective for me. It was a few weeks before the Junior WAEC exams and two of my friends and I had a lesson teacher who taught us at our homes. But the workload was too much for him, so he asked our parents if they could agree to have him teach all of us at once at one person’s house.
Our parents agreed until the question of the lesson location came up and the teacher suggested my house. To be fair, we were the only ones with a spacious backyard that could be used as a makeshift classroom.
The other parents didn’t like the idea. They didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of their kids being that close to a cemetery. The lesson was also from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., so that timing freaked them out.
That was the first time I felt ashamed of where I lived. But this shame didn’t translate into us moving out, and I get why. The building was a family house and our rent was subsidised. It was also a pretty comfortable house. Also, my dad strongly believed the house brought us good luck and aligned with our stars. I don’t remember us having any major difficulties or setbacks in the house.
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Here’s the thing: In the 20+ years we lived there, I never had any encounters with ghosts or any of these bogus rumours about cemeteries you see in Nollywood movies. Yes, there were times we woke up in the morning and found calabashes with sacrifices at the junction, but I think this was common with places that had T-junctions. Maybe the cemetery in the area contributed to this, I honestly don’t know.
Some neighbours and older folks claimed they heard or saw things — from strange footsteps to shadows in the midnight. But neither I nor my family members did, so we treated them as what they were… rumours.
The last one I heard about before relocating was someone who said he was washing his car late at night and whistling. He heard a voice asking him to stop the noise. He didn’t answer and continued, then a ghost slapped him.
I’ll say the only thing that scared me, even till my adult years, was walking past the cemetery late at night or early in the morning. There’s an eerie calm and coldness that hangs in the air during these times. I can’t explain it, but it’s always there.
In 2022, I moved to Osogbo for NYSC and decided to stay back after my service year ended. My parents also moved out in late 2022 into a house they built.
It’s still our family house, but we’re considering renting it out. Let me say it’s not easy getting people to rent a house beside a cemetery.
Femi Dapson recently went viral on X for this post.
He shared a throwback video from when he was a cleaner in 2017, which he’d made as evidence of his strong belief that he’d make it one day. It has since amassed over two million views.
It’s 2023, and he did make it. He shares his inspiring journey with Zikoko.
As told to Boluwatife
Credit: Nouvelle Films
I grew up poor.
We were so poor my family rented uncompleted buildings because we couldn’t afford anything else. It was that bad.
I was born in Agege, but we moved to Idowu Egba, a neighbourhood in Igando, when I was about four years old. The uncompleted building we lived in had no windows or roof, so we used empty rice sacks to cover the ceiling and window openings. The floor was uncemented, so we put mats over the red sand.
Despite the sorry situation we were in, I always knew it wasn’t the life I was made for. My dad was a driver, and my mum sold food. I saw them constantly struggling and would always tell myself that I’d never end up like them.
And I backed this mindset with actions.
I made a deliberate effort not to make friends on my street. We were all poor there, so what was I supposed to gain from an equally poor person?
I have a way with people, and I’d always target rich kids. I wanted to be like them. So, I’d wake up every morning, iron and wear the only shirt I had, and walk the 15-minute distance to Diamond Estate to meet with the friends I’d made from church or while helping my mum sell food in schools.
My rich friends liked my vibes. I showed and told them things and slang they’d never heard before. In return, I learned how they lived, ate their food and always stood out when I returned home. The only person I got close to in my neighbourhood was the son of a prominent general, and it was because I did everything in my power to make sure we became friends.
Growing up poor meant I also had to start hustling early. I did many menial jobs while moving from one secondary school to the other due to challenges with paying the fees. You want to clear the grass in your compound? I’m there. You need someone to paint your house? I’ll most likely do rubbish, but just pay me ₦2k.
I started my hustle proper after I dropped out of school in SS one when my parents could no longer pay my fees. There’s almost nothing I didn’t do to survive —from barman, to primary school teacher, to factory worker. One thing I made sure to do each time was to put in 110% in every job.
In 2014, we moved to yet another uncompleted building in Sango, and I got a job cleaning at a popular church’s headquarters in Ota. I got paid between ₦11k – 15k monthly to sweep portions of the church premises, chapels, and sometimes, wash cars. I did that for about two years.
One principle guides my life: “If you can read and write, you can teach yourself anything.” In 2016, while still cleaning, I started volunteering to help input evangelism converts’ data into a computer. I’d taught myself computer basics with a cousin’s computer when I was in JSS one, so while other volunteers would use all day to input the data of 100 people, I’d do it in 30 minutes.
The General Overseer’s secretary noticed and took a liking to me, and I unofficially became the assistant secretary to the G.O. Because I didn’t pass through the normal employment process, I didn’t get a raise. But it didn’t stop me from putting in my all. I helped the department make financial approval processes almost paperless before I left after six months. My reason? I was scared they’d just wake up one day and tell everyone without the right qualifications to go.
In 2017, I moved in with a cousin in Ikeja and got a cleaning job at an event centre. It paid between ₦18k – ₦21k/monthly, but damn, the workload wasn’t beans. After parties ended around 10 p.m., the whole place would be a mess, and I’d clean and clean.
But I understood the power of positive confessions. I’d always tell my guys and say to myself that I’d be great; I was born to be great. I’d watch celebrities come to parties where I worked and even pour soap to wash their hands after they used the restroom so they’d give me ₦200 tips. That was the life I wanted. To spray money freely at parties and be greeted, “Good evening, sir”, when I entered toilets, too.
I made this video in 2017 at a low point. I was down with Typhoid and had been in and out of the hospital for two weeks, but I left and returned to work while still sick because I was scared I’d be sacked for staying away that long.
On that day, I was weak and frustrated. I had just finished cleaning the hall and was washing the toilets. At a point, I stopped and started self-affirming that this was just a temporary phase and I’d look back at the memory one day. I decided to document that moment, so I took my phone and recorded myself. If not for the fact that my physical look has improved since then, people would say I took the video yesterday, and I’m just lying. The confidence with which I spoke was crazy.
A large part of my confidence stemmed from the fact that I know God loves me — that’s even what my name, Oluwafemi Ifeoluwa, means. I also had a habit of sacrificially giving out the little money I had at the time — I still give a lot. I believe that the more you give, the more you receive, and I know God is too faithful to fail.
Knowing God saw my heart, I’d drop my bracelet or anything on me in faith when I didn’t have money. I even gave my toothbrush as an offering once. It wasn’t useful to anyone, but God knew that was all I had.
So, I made that video with complete confidence and kept it as evidence so that when I made my money, no one would come and say I did fraud.
And God did come through for me.
I gathered the little money I had and sat for O’Levels in 2018. Then a year later, I got an opportunity to work as a junior auditor in an auditing firm for ₦30k/month. How I got the job was even funny. When I arrived at the interview, I met guys with degrees speaking big English, but when it got to my turn and I showed the partners how I helped make that church in Ota go paperless, their minds were blown.
I had to leave the job a couple of months later because I had stayed with my cousin for too long, and it was starting to become uncomfortable for him. My next stop was Egbeda, where I moved in with a photographer friend, Perliks. We started working together, and I helped him rebrand and manage his business. He was such an amazing photographer, and I made sure he saw it, too. Many of the projects we worked on together went viral.
It wasn’t just Perliks and I in Egbeda; some other friends lived with us. One of them was an artist, and that same year, he got funding for a music video. Perliks had some directing knowledge because he had been on a similar set before, so he said he could shoot it, and I’d produce. I didn’t know anything about production, but I read up about it and said I could do it.
The first day of that production was a disaster because rain destroyed the set, but we pushed through and made the video. It cost ₦800k to shoot, and we even ran at a loss because of the rain. Another artist manager saw it, loved it, and hired us to shoot a video for one of the artists she managed. We went on to shoot three videos for three of her artists. We didn’t make any money from it — we were just trying to give our all.
Around the same time, I pitched a social media influencer and told her I’d like to manage her, and she agreed. While doing that, I met someone who organised monthly parties for a Whiskey brand. He asked me to come on as his partner to blow the brand in Lagos. We threw the littest parties, and it brought cool money. Money cool enough to buy my first car; a Toyota Avalon which cost ₦1.6m.
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In 2020, a media production company signed Perliks and me as director and producer, respectively. It’s still crazy how these professionals were absolutely loving what I did with music videos, and I was just a random boy from Egbeda.
When my contract expired the following year, I left and created my own company — Nouvelle Films — and I’ve had the privilege of working on amazing jobs. That’s what I do till date: production and the parties.
I believe everything I’ve gone through in life was specially designed to allow me to get to where I am right now. I never look down on people because someone selling Gala on the streets could be at a level you’d never imagined tomorrow.
Now, some people message me to say we grew up together; they may never have imagined I’d be where I am today. I mean, if someone had told me four years ago that I’d be driving a Mercedes Benz today, I may not have believed it.
Some advice I’d give anyone is to hold on to positive thoughts, hold God and believe in yourself. If you don’t first see IT, no one will see IT with you.
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I grew up in a Muslim family of five. We were moderately religious, at least when I was younger.
My father had grown up in a staunchly religious family but left home early, so he couldn’t learn so much about the religion before going off to boarding school. He didn’t want the same thing for me, so I started learning about Islam very early on.
I was five years old when I was first enrolled in a Madrasa — an Islamic school, where I learned about the basics of Arabic and Islam itself. I spent two hours at the Madrasa after school on weekdays and five hours during the weekends.
By the time I was eight, I’d memorized the entire Quran. It was a flex; many people in the area and in my family thought it was a cool thing to achieve at such a young age.
I didn’t stop attending the Madrasa after this, so I was able to go deeper into my studies. At this point, I was in the high school equivalent of Islamic Studies. I learned about Islamic Law, Arabic Grammar, theological thought, and even how to write poetry in Arabic. When I was ten years old, I was already speaking fluent Arabic.
A female childhood best friend recently told me she always thought I’d become a Muslim cleric. But I did not.
At the time, though, I was the model kid for my dad and my extended family — well-learned in religion and doing great at school, too. It was the best of both worlds for them.
But there was one problem — I was too inquisitive. It started off as a harmless thing my dad indulged, but it eventually took on a life of its own.
I’d question everything I didn’t understand, and I’d debate you until I got a satisfactory answer.
In early secondary school, I got into religious debates with my Christian classmates about which religion was “more correct”. Now that I think about it, I must have been quite insufferable. To me, I knew everything, and my religion was perfect. There were no flaws in what I’d learnt, and I had sound logical explanations for everything. Not that the interreligious conversation ever went beyond harmless debates, but I derived pleasure from proving that I was right.
I was 13 when I first realised that I might be wrong. It started when I asked the cleric I’d learned from a question about the concept of destiny. In the Islamic doctrine, belief in Qadar (destiny) is one of the articles of faith.
But the explanation I got from my cleric just didn’t make sense.
As a Muslim, you’re meant to believe that everything that happens is ordained and destined by God. Both the good and the bad stuff. And this doesn’t apply to just the broad strokes of our lives alone. Even the tiny details like the choice of food you had for breakfast on a certain Monday happened because God said so.
My question was simple: if this was the case, why does God still need us to pray, have faith, do good, or even do anything? Since it’s simply all His will playing out in everyone’s life.
For the first time, I was told that some questions are inspired by the devil. But this event was the start of my search for answers. I asked every adult I knew for answers, and while they all saw how inconsistent the idea was, it made them sick to their stomach that someone pointed it out. They were always shocked at the realization of what the logical conclusion is. So, they’d ask me to stop asking questions and stick to my faith, because some things are beyond the knowledge of man.
Since I couldn’t get answers from the people in my life, I turned to books. My dad never censored the kinds of books we read, and luckily, my school had lots of them. It had books that had no business being in the library of a secondary school. It had novels that explored the history of religion, and even a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. It was there I read a lot about other religions and the doctrines they’re built upon. I also learned about Abrahamic religions through the lens of history and started to see things really differently.
For example, I read about how the collation of the Qur’an was completed many years after the prophet passed, and how the formation of the Qur’an formed the basis for standardised Arabic today, as the tribes had different dialects at the time.
So, how could I even be sure that what I’d memorised actually meant what I was taught that it meant? It all started to seem a lot less divine at this point.
Also, with the thousands of religions that exist, and the documented reports of metaphysical experiences from each of them, how can I ever be sure that mine is the right one?
I suffered cognitive dissonance for a while, but I just kept learning outside of what I’d always known. When I went off to university, I was finally able to be open up about my views with the friends I made. Some of them were shocked that I’d say such things, while others admitted that they had their doubts, but they’re choosing to believe. With time, I realised that I didn’t really care so much about the faith anymore.
I started missing prayers because I thought, “What’s the point anyway?”. I also got tired of asking questions because I mostly didn’t care anymore. At home, my parents noticed that I’d stopped praying altogether, but they thought it was just a phase. They still forced me to do it anyway, but it was all for show.
A year ago, I had an existential crisis that shook me. I felt like I needed some sense of meaning since I didn’t believe that anyone up there was guiding my life anymore. I was somewhat depressed because it felt like my life had no meaning whatsoever. I thought, “Why not just go back to the safety of having faith in God? Does it really matter if any of it is true?”
I started praying often and doing all the things I’d normally do as a devout Muslim, but it felt like I was only going through the motions.
I’ve made my peace with it now — I’ve outgrown faith, and I doubt that anything can change it. But I don’t intend to come out publicly about my disbelief, at least not in real life. So, I’ll carry on and hope something changes and makes it feel right again.
Up until the time I went to university, I was always the best at everything — schoolwork and extracurricular activities. This genuinely made me believe that God anointed my brain to pass any exam . I never had it difficult. I never needed to study too hard for anything. The only time I ever studied hard in my life was in JSS1 when my position briefly dropped from 1st to 2nd because the competition increased. I was smart like that. But that belief was quickly challenged when I got into the university.
I went to college at 15, like others do. But unlike many Nigerian kids who had set ambitions, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to work with technology, as I’d fallen in love with computers after getting my first one at 8. But that conviction wasn’t strong enough because I was also drawn to pure sciences and had a strong interest in physics. It also didn’t help that the prominent people in physics were revered as being super-smart. So I thought I could be like them.
You can imagine the look on my dad’s face when I showed him my JAMB form and he saw “Physics” on it. It was one of disgust. “Physics?” he asked. “What do you want to do with it?” I mentioned that I could work at CERN (a huge research lab somewhere in Europe) and that I just loved physics and wanted to pursue it. My man looked me in the eyes and said “Unless you want to become a teacher, I’m not paying for you to go and study this thing”.
I argued this out with him for a few days but my dad is a stubborn man. It also didn’t help that I had zero leverage in this situation. When it finally came to it, he chose a course for me. And you know what he chose? Pharmacy. He argued that getting a job is assured and I could make more money if I start my own thing.
It sounded like a good deal, so I chose it. I filled out the form, wrote the test and scored high enough to study pharmacy. That was the beginning of all my problems. Coming from a relatively comfortable school life, I was quickly introduced to running after lecturers in search of a lecture hall, sitting on the floor in overfilled classes, and extremely long hours under the sun in the name of ccomputer-based tests. In short, I suffered. But that was my first year.
In my second year, the suffering moved from physical to mental. 10-hour classes every day, with extra labs on top. That boy who never had to stress to get through school suddenly started freaking out every day. My first year dealt the first blow to my ego, but the real kicker came in my second year.
During my second year final exams, I fell sick. I was so sick that I had to be admitted in the hospital for a few days. I’d forced myself to push through three exams in my half-alive mental state, I failed those three courses. Three D’s in one semester. At first, I was confused. I had okay test scores. So how did this happen? As it turned out, I wasn’t dreaming at all. I had a D in all three of them, and in my department, that meant that I had three carryovers.
What followed was the roughest period of my life. Denial was the first phase, so I started trying to prove to myself that it wasn’t really me and that something was wrong. I worked twice as hard as I used to, and even took everything way more seriously than I ever had. But nothing worked. My grades didn’t go back to being stellar. I’d have panic attacks before exams and sometimes fall physically ill whenever a huge deadline was coming up. In the end, my grades were slightly above average at best.
This felt like an attack on who Ithought I was, and I spent the next two years nursing an identity crisis. I started searching for that validation outside of school. I learned new things and picked up new skills to prove to myself that I was still that guy. I guess it’s hard to know if I was because I didn’t have to write any exams. I got reasonably good at those things but the minute I realized that I was, I dropped it and started to pursue something else.
Over that time, I learned to code, learned to write, and dabbled in finance, among other things. They all came in handy as I started earning a lot of money before I graduated from college. I was working two remote jobs at a point, making $1000 a month. I finished the degree and even though all my toiling in school had stopped, my personal scrambling continued. But one day, after stressing so much to get a finance certification, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying most of these things. I was doing them to prove something to myself. But I didn’t need to. School was already behind me and I could just face real life now, and the good part was, there are no exams here.
To be honest, I think my life would have been so much easier if I’d cut myself some slack. I’m not that special, and there’s honestly no need to be. After coming to that realisation, I decided to take a step back from working so much to figure out what I actually enjoyed.
I realized that it was computers all along. This might sound cliche but while I’d changed so much, I’d also remained the same. I’ve always enjoyed working with them and learning about them. I had so much more clarity when I stepped back from overwork than all my years of trying to force my way through. I feel like I’ve finally figured my life out, and I just want one thing from here on out — to do what I love and make I life out of it. At the moment, I’m doing an MSc in computer science at a school in the USA and even though it’s not easy, I know I chose for myself this time.
*Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity
I caused my first and only real heartbreak at 21, but even though it felt like tearing my heart out, I’d do it again if I had to.
I met Joseph* in 2014, our first year at the university. We were still settling into school life, and he was this active, outspoken guy who seemed to be everywhere at once. I, on the other hand, was what you’d describe as a wallflower. When the time came for us to choose a class governor, he was the obvious choice. That was how we got close. A lecturer had given us an assignment due at the end of the day, and I was nowhere near finished, so I met Joseph and begged him to delay submitting everyone’s work by an hour. He did, and that’s how we became friends.
He soon started telling me he liked me, and I liked how it seemed he only had eyes for me. We started dating about a month after the assignment incident and were together through all five years in school. It wasn’t all smooth, though.
Joseph was a loud and very ambitious person, a walking representation of an “I must get everything I want” mantra. He always wanted to be better than everyone, the poster boy of success. I’m the direct opposite of that.
As the daughter of a preacher, I grew up with a contentment mentality. My siblings and I were taught to enjoy the simple things — food, a roof over our heads and just enough money to meet our basic needs and maybe help those around us. Even though I started rebelling against religion around the time I entered university, I still have the same mindset. Economists tell us that man’s needs are unlimited; we’ll always want the next big thing. That sounds like a wasted life to me, where you can’t enjoy what you have because something else looks better, and you just need to have it. For as long as I can remember, I’ve just wanted to be. Not to want something so much, it affects my life.
This personality clash was the major cause of the fights Joseph and I had.
When he ventured into student union politics in our second year, he struggled to understand why I thought he needed to focus on his studies instead. He also didn’t understand why I was angry that he decided to spend all his savings on a Nokia Lumia when he still had a perfectly working phone because, in his words, “Everyone is using Nokia Lumia now”.
He also expected me to get that his sudden friendship and partying with shady guys on campus was because he needed to boost his street credibility ahead of running for student union president. Through all this, it didn’t occur to me to leave him. He was all I knew, and maybe this was due to his “must-have-everything” nature, but he constantly showered me with love and attention. There was no reason for me to want more.
The extent of how far he’d go for success only became fully apparent to me after we left school in 2019. He didn’t go for service immediately because he had to sort out some issues with the school’s senate, so I worked my NYSC posting to the same state we were in so he wouldn’t feel left out, and I’d be closer to him.
But even with that, he started getting frustrated about his mates being ahead of him, so he told me he’d decided to make money via internet fraud. I was shocked. This was someone whose parents were quite comfortable and who lacked nothing. His rationale was, Nigeria didn’t reward honest work, and that his parent’s money was theirs, not his. He gave two of his cousins as examples. They’d been working for about four years at the time, but still couldn’t afford a car. As is typical of him, he gave what he thought were convincing reasons why he had to “make a name” for himself. He said it was so he could also provide for me. He assured me he’d only do it for a few years until he made enough money to leave the country.
That’s when I mentally checked out of the relationship. If he could go this far to make money he didn’t really need, what happens if he someday became broke? I knew I had to leave, but I didn’t know how. Then about four months later, in late 2019, he landed a tech job. I was relieved, thinking it’d be the end of internet fraud. But remember what the economists say? He was used to having more and didn’t want to be limited to a salary, so he still did fraud on the side. That was what finally gave me the courage to end the relationship. I cried for weeks after, but I know it was the best decision I’ve ever made.
He’s a high-flying tech bro now — I see his exploits every now and then on LinkedIn — but I know he’ll always be looking for the next big thing, legal or not. I can’t live like that. If I’d stayed, we’d probably be a “power couple”, but I wouldn’t be at peace. I may never gather enough money from my 9-5 to go on a luxury vacation or japa, but I’m fulfilled with what I have; a career, friends and good health. I’m at peace.
*Names have been changed to protect their identity.
When this #NairaLife started a conversation online about savings culture, Gabriel* (28) saw himself in the subject. He talks about having millions saved but refusing to spend more than ₦20k per month, instead choosing to seek bailouts from friends.
I don’t know if I suffer from a chronic case of stinginess, but I have this chronic need to save money. I don’t have any issues with spending other people’s money, but I draw the line when it comes to mine.
I’m what my parents like to call a “miracle baby”. I have just one sibling, and he’s 13 years older than me. After my parents had my brother, they tried for years for another child, and eventually had me when they’d given up. By then, they’d spent so much on fertility treatments which really drained their finances. By the time I came around, they didn’t have money, but to them, I was an answered prayer.
I didn’t realise how bad the situation was until I was around eight or nine. If I ate twice a day, it meant my parents could only eat once that day. I watched as my brother worked crazy hard to support us financially. And it looked like he’d actually be the one to lift us from the depths of poverty. Around that time, he made enough to move us out of our one-room apartment in Bariga. But he decided to invest the rent money and the investment flopped. It was back to square one, and we never recovered.
I think that’s when my chronic need to save started. In my mind, if I don’t touch the money, nothing bad would happen to it. Anytime anyone dashed me money or asked me to keep the change after running an errand, I’d hide it inside a hole in the wall of our apartment. I preferred to beg my mates for sweets when they bought them with money they were given, rather than buy my own sweets.
Even when I managed to get into university, I kept feeling like I’d be made to drop out at any time over unpaid fees, so even though I helped my fellow students with assignments for a fee, I wouldn’t touch the money I made. I lived on handouts from my brother and squatted with friends. The few times I had to touch my savings for school expenses when my brother couldn’t afford it, it felt like I was physically hurting myself.
I work now and earn an average of ₦180k per month, but my mantra is, “I don’t have money”. My parents and friends think I earn ₦60k because I’m trying to avoid black tax. I live on around ₦20k every month only because I have to eat and take public transportation to get to work.
I’m a single homebody, so I never have to eat out or spend money on a girlfriend. My friends are amazing guys who make good money, and they’re always helping me with bailouts. I live with my best friend so rent isn’t a problem, though I try to handle our food expenses once in a while. The last time I bought myself clothes was three years ago. I still have a shirt I’ve been wearing since 2016.
I sometimes feel bad that I can’t be honest with my friends about how much I earn, but them knowing would only increase their expectations of me, and when I refuse to spend, they may call me stingy. But I honestly can’t bring myself to spend unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even then, I hate spending my own money.
My savings are running into millions now, but I try not to focus on it. In this country, you’re one sickness away from depleting your entire account. One medical emergency can have you spending ₦5 million like it’s ₦5k. So, it only makes sense to save for the rainy day.
I hope to japa one day, so I also save with that in mind, but the truth is, even if I don’t need money for proof of funds in the future, I’d still save like my life depends on it, because it does. There’s this assurance that seeing money in my bank account gives me. It tells me I’d never go back to that eight-year-old boy whose dream of leaving Bariga was unexpectedly cut short because of money.
Lynda* 22, struggles with perfectionist tendencies. She talks about recognising how her high expectations negatively affect her life and relationships, and how her fear of admitting her imperfection prevents her from seeking professional help.
This is Lynda’s story, as told to Boluwatife
Image Source: Pexels
On paper, I’m the perfect employee. I easily tick off most job requirement boxes. “Keen attention to details”? Check. “Able to take ownership at all times”? Double check. Everyone wants the diligent “perfectionist” on their team, but perfectionism is ruining my life.
No, I don’t have a professional diagnosis yet, but every psychological book and resource I’ve read points to me as the poster child of this “condition”. Is it too perfectionist of me to say I don’t need a therapist to tell me something I already know I have?
I should start by saying I’ve also been an introvert for as long as I can remember, and I think this is related to my desire for perfection. For someone born to two extroverts, I wonder if my tendency to stay on my lane results from a lifetime of trying to keep up with parents who always needed to be out there. I’m an only child, and it always felt like the burden rested on me to strike a balance between my usually loud parents.
I don’t know which came first — introversion or perfectionism, but from my primary school days, I remember staying back in my classroom, while my mates went crazy on the swings, to arrange notes or just sit quietly to avoid staining my white socks. Teachers loved me and even encouraged others to be as put together as I was.
But now that I’m older, I struggle to even like myself. I just have to be in control of everything. Trusting others to do something as well as I’d do it is extremely difficult. I overthink and hardly ask for help, even when it’s completely legitimate. I work in HR, but my workplace is a startup, which means duties overlap a lot and there’s no clear role distinction, especially for me. TBH, I’m the main cause of this situation. Let me explain.
Recently, our content marketing executive resigned, and I was tasked with recruiting to fill up the role. I was meant to interview candidates with the soon-to-be-ex executive and just submit the names to our boss. I ended up also making the exiting employee hand over and explain all his duties and processes to me so I could provide answers to the new employee if he had questions. I even recorded the hand-over sessions and created spreadsheets to document the entire content process. This took three weeks.
My health suffered because I hardly slept during that period. I’d rather throw sleep away than let my work suffer, so my work rate was still impeccable. I was a star employee to my bosses, but my teammates just think I’m an oversabi — which I totally am. I’m almost always burned out at work. It’s not that I like work. I’m just allergic to mistakes.
I can confidently say I remember almost every mistake I’ve ever made. For perfectionists, making mistakes isn’t a “normal human experience”. It’s a sin worse than eating eba with a fork. My brain never lets me forget exactly how I messed up. It doesn’t matter that it’s something that may have been beyond my control. My perfect self should just have known better.
My relationships? If there were a level lower than being in the streets, I’d be there. When I want to make myself feel better about the sorry state of my relationships, I blame introversion. But even I know when I’m simply lying to myself.
I have just a handful of slightly close friends — exactly four of them. And the fact that they’ve stayed around for more than two years is nothing short of a miracle and sheer will on their part. I’m a pain to be around. Remember when I said my brain constantly judges me when I make a mistake? Well, that’s how I judge the people around me too.
I’m the worst person to discuss boy-girl relationship problems with because I’ll call out what I perceive to be weaknesses or mistakes. I remember a friend I almost made in 2019, my final year in university. We were classmates but never had any reason to be close. Not surprising because I hardly talked to people, but I knew she wanted to be my friend. People tend to want to befriend the class efiko.
We got paired, along with other students, for a group assignment, and we somehow hit it off. Well, until she complained to me about her boyfriend withdrawing her money with her ATM card. I didn’t hold back and told her in clear terms she’d made a silly mistake letting him know her pin in the first place. How could she trust a boyfriend with that? I forced her to call him, and I gave him a good talking to, even threatened to call the police. They eventually settled, and I stopped talking to her. Obviously, she had bad judgment, and I couldn’t handle that.
I have certain expectations of my relationships with friends and family. How they should understand my thoughts, the right words I want to hear at certain times and other annoying rubbish like that. When they do things contrary to what I expect, my mind goes, “How do you not know this is the right thing to do?” at the same time that a little voice tells me, “They’re not wizards for Chrissakes!”
I try to be reasonable — even when my head tells me my way of doing things is the most reasonable way — and other times, I judge and react. I don’t want to be a horrible person, but most times, I just can’t help it.
I’ve been in three relationships since I turned 20, and though two ended due to cheating, and the last, when he japa without telling me, 90% of the fights within the relationships were linked to them not meeting my expectations, spoken or not. After every fight, I’d lock up until they gave in and apologised or agreed with my points. I just had to be right.
I recently confided in one of my four friends about my struggles with perfection. She believes that since I recognise just how much perfectionism harms me, I’m already on the path to becoming better, but I struggle to believe her.
Is your personality something you can just turn on and off at will? I may gather the courage to visit a therapist soon. I’ve not done so yet because having a professional confirm I’m flawed and not the perfect person I think I am is a scary prospect. I may damn the consequences one day. But before then, I have to figure out how to take every day one at a time and try not to push people out of my life each day.
*Subject’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
Are women the only ones who struggle with infertility? This is a question that has stuck with me for a while now. Maybe it’s the Nollywood films about looking for the fruit of the womb or the hundreds of religious activities that centre women looking to “complete” their family, either way, it seems like men are excluded from this narrative. To answer this question, I started asking questions of my own and that’s how I met Kolapo*.
Looking to start a family of his own, the 38 year-old was shocked when he realised he was the cause of his family’s infertility struggles. I asked him to tell me a little bit about his story, and this is what he said.
For as long as I can remember, the idea of having children had always been a core part of who I was as a person. I remember being asked as a child what I’d like to be when I grew up, and my answer — to my mother’s greatest embarrassment — was something along the lines of, “I want to be a daddy.” But after all the struggles my wife and I have been through in trying to have a child, given the choice, I doubt I’d still choose to be a dad. I’m exhausted.
I met my wife Tolu* in my second year of university. Even though we’d been in the same year and attended the same classes, we didn’t really notice each other until she became the assistant course representative. These days, I fondly remind her of her terrorist behaviour back then; she was the class’” I Too Know” asking extra questions in class and making sure everyone submitted their assignments on time. But I’ll never forget the day she randomly helped me prepare for a test throughout the night when she didn’t have to. Since then, we’ve been inseparable. By the time we got to final year, we were in love and we could weather any storm together.
We graduated, got decent jobs and got married. We could provide the necessities and still travel to Western countries every once in a while. By Nigerian standards, we were balling. For the first two years, we didn’t want kids because we wanted to have a good time and figure out our dynamic without the pressure of someone crying or wanting to suck breasts or something. We had a good time. However, it was when we eventually decided to start having kids that life just started to turn into a pot of spoiled beans.
We took out pregnancy pills from the equation and started going at it. We both enjoy having sex, so no one needed to tell us to off pant and get busy. We did this for about a year, but crickets. Nothing happened. My wife and I didn’t read much into it, after all, we were still having fun. But when our families started adding their question marks to the equation, we decided it was time to find out what was going on.
I never got tested because I just assumed we were fine. Tolu, on the other hand, was poked and prodded with needles like some guinea pig for months on end. She desperately wanted answers, and while all the doctors said nothing was wrong with her, she still couldn’t get pregnant. Our families piled on the questions because we were both first children in our respective homes and they just wanted to see their grandkids. More questions and jokes about pregnancy made Tolu stressed and insecure. Even though I reminded her that she was enough and maybe we just needed to chill for a bit, she was already invested in this baby thing and there was no stopping her.
Following the advice of a friend at the end of last year, Tolu eventually asked me to get tested too. I didn’t think it was a big deal, after all, as a virile Nigerian man, I couldn’t be the reason for our childlessness. But everything changed when the doctor called to tell me that I had no viable sperm left in my body. I sat there, losing my shit in silence as I prayed and waited desperately for someone to wake me up.
After I got off the phone with my doctor, I left work immediately and headed back home to talk to my wife. It was the most difficult discussion I had ever been involved in. She had a straight face throughout as I gave her a detailed account of what the doctor had told me over the phone. For a second, I thought she was going to leave me. Instead, she held my hands and told me we’d be alright. Since then, every time I start to panic about something, I think back to this conversation and what she told me and it helps me power through h.
Telling my wife was one thing, but telling our families? Omo, it was crazy. To this day, my mum doesn’t believe my condition is medical — to her, all of this could be solved if only we prayed more often and “moved in faith”. There was a lot of crying, casting and binding on my parents’ side, but that didn’t change anything .
I wish the questions and shady comments came from only our families. But, as with typical Nigerian settings, neighbours, church members and work colleagues also poked their noses in my family’s business. asking about kids and when we were going to have some of our own. It was harder on Tolu because just like I assumed at the start of our pregnancy journey, a lot of people immediately assume she’s the problem, and I can’t go around trying to correct that impression. If I could, I would, but most of them wouldn’t even believe me anyway; they’d just assume I was trying to protect her.
I feel guilty because not only did a part of me feel it was her fault initially, I actually hoped it was her fault. How many times have you heard that a man was the one behind a couple’s infertility issue? It’s always women, so I don’t know why my case is different. I’ve spent the past few months depressed and feeling like shit. Knowing I can’t father my own kids makes me feel like a failure as a man.
I’m still grieving this loss and trying to make sense of it.
My wife has asked that we look into adoption, but honestly, I’m over it — not the adoption, just kids in general. The failure of not being able to father my own children has become too much of a burden to bear, and it has thrown me off having children in general. I don’t know how to tell her I don’t care for kids anymore, especially after all she went through with tests and looking for answers. I’ll go with it, but I don’t know If I’d be able to fully love the child as I should. I’m willing to work through this and I’m seeing a therapist now, but it’s going to be a long journey. I feel like I’ve ruined everything, so building it back is going to take some time.
Growing up, I always felt a deep sense of responsibility for my family. For as long as I can remember, my extended family never stopped reminding me that my birth wasn’t easy on my mother. Despite being the second of four children, my birth had become a cautionary tale in my family, detailing how I almost killed my mother, made my father a widower and left my older sister motherless. When that’s all you hear as a child, it’s hard not to feel indebted to your parents. After all, you owe them your life.
The first time I realised I was sacrificing my happiness to please my family was when I had to choose between science and arts in SS1. I wanted to study Law, but my family insisted I pick a science course instead. That’s how I started my journey towards becoming a pharmacist. I’m smart, so no matter what I chose, I knew I wouldn’t struggle, but this didn’t stop me from being really disappointed with the choice. I tried to voice my concern to my mum, but she reminded me that I was the smartest of my siblings, and the one who’d take care of her when she grew old. How do you argue with a statement like that? I played my part as the good kid, selected science classes and did what I believed was the best thing for my family.
After all, I owed my parents my life.
My mum turned out to be right though. Now at 36, I’m the most successful of all my siblings. But it came at great personal costs. While my mates and siblings were enjoying their youth, I was drowning myself in my books and taking internship opportunities every time I had a school break.
Every time I tried to come up for air, I’d remember I was my parents’ retirement plan and dived back into studying. I never dated in university, never went to the club or skipped classes.
You’d think that after all of this, I’d have my life back post-university, but it only got worse. I earned more money than every other one of my siblings so the responsibility of everything that had to do with my parents fell on my shoulders. From big things like my dad’s battle with glaucoma and all the surgeries, to the little things like paying the cleaning lady, my siblings just left everything to me. Whenever I tried to bring it up or at least delegate a small portion of the bills, they all ignored me. So I kept coughing out money without any sort of assistance
When my mum got diagnosed with cancer, she needed all the help she could get. I pleaded with my younger brother who lived in the same city with her to at least move in with her so he could monitor the caregivers I had hired. Big mistake on my part. This guy, a full-grown adult at 28, decided to “take care” of our mum by spending all the money I sent to her through him.
I had to leave a work conference and fly back to the East after my mum collapsed because she hadn’t been taking her medication — something I’d paid for. I was livid. The worst part was, my mum kept defending him, and somehow I became the villain.
I paid for my parents’ medical bills, I covered tuition for some of my nieces and nephews. And let’s not get started on the uncles and aunties I had to “settle” once in a while. I was a walking NGO with my family as the ungrateful beneficiaries. The most annoying thing is that with all I spent on them, I barely spent on myself. I still use the same car I was using four years ago, while my siblings change cars all the time — and yet, they somehow always manage to be broke. I can’t remember the last time I travelled abroad for something other than work or my parents’ medical trips.
In my romantic relationships, I found it difficult to go all out and spend money on my partners or fun experiences with them. In the back of my head, there was always this nagging voice that I needed to save all my money in case my family came to me with one emergency or the other. I became a slave to their expenses. It had to stop.
I cut my family off last year. My mum passed away — I paid for the funeral — and since my dad was already deceased, it just felt like the right time to finally step back. The people that brought me to this world are gone and now, I can show everyone my true colour.
I gave my siblings one month more of enjoyment and then I started airing them. The school fees for my nieces and nephews? Aired — don’t take your kids to schools you can’t afford. Random calls asking for this or that? Aired. I told them to fuck off and support themselves.
My extended family has been calling to tell me that I’m wicked for abandoning my siblings, and it’s wild to me because they aren’t children. I finally have peace, but I regret not telling my parents how frustrating it felt having the entire family’s weight on my back, while they were still alive. They died thinking I enjoyed it, and I blame them for it, as my suffering was all their fault.
Anyway, it’s time for me to finally live my life and enjoy my money. Where’s everyone going this summer? I have money to blow.
In this story, a pharmacist tells us of his experience working at a general hospital and how the experience affected him forever.
My days started pretty early when I worked at the general hospital. I made sure to get to work every day by 7:45 a.m. to relieve whoever worked the night shift. For context, the hospital got a lot of elderly patients who were mostly people with very little money because the government had screwed them over regarding their pensions, so they depended on free drugs from the hospital. The process of getting free drugs was so stressful, whoever did the job of handing them out had to be someone who had their full mind in it, which is hard to do when you’ve just finished the night shift and are struggling to stay awake. So to avoid a situation where the person who worked the night shift was too tired to give the patients the attention they needed, I arrived early to help.
I worked at the pharmacy unit and would interact with patients after they’d gotten prescriptions from the doctor. These prescriptions usually contained drugs that cost what a privileged person would consider chicken change, but these people struggled to afford it. I watched people pick between buying food or buying the drugs they needed. There was a woman who fainted because she had to pick between buying food or her drugs, and she picked her drugs, causing her to take them on an empty stomach. There was a diabetic woman who came regularly to get free anti-diabetic drugs from the hospital. I can’t remember why now but she missed a couple of days, and the next time she showed up was in excruciating pain. She described it as thousands of needles pricking her arms and legs. The doctor prescribed a drug for her that cost thousands of naira. I knew damn well she couldn’t afford it so I told the doctor this, and he suggested I prescribe the cheapest brand of the drug we had instead. I took the drug to her and told her the price (N100), and she broke down crying that she couldn’t afford it. I ended up paying the fee because it broke my heart to see her like that.
There was another woman who came to the hospital every two days to buy subsidised anti-psychotics for her children. Everyone at the hospital knew her so we assumed she lived close by. I eventually found out that she lived in Ikorudu and came from there every two days. After talking with her, I bought her two weeks worth of drugs (which cost N2500) so she could rest. She cried and thanked me. A man came with his toddler who was coughing and stooling. They were asked to buy two bottles of antibiotics, but the father decided to buy one because that was all he could afford. I tried explaining antibiotic resistance to him and that the drugs would only work when taken together but he said there was nothing he could do and that God would do the rest.
Seeing countless people suffer like this changed me. I could no longer be as happy-go-lucky as I used to be. I promised I would do as much as I could to help ease these people’s struggles, and I did, but it felt like I was fighting a losing battle because there was always someone else who needed help. We were trapped in a system that didn’t work, and one person couldn’t change anything. I continued to do the best I could but also came to terms with a hard truth; I couldn’t save everyone.
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I am not the kind of person to participate in group sex. It’s not my thing. I prefer a one-on-one session with my partner. But then I met *Joshua on a dating app.
We planned to hook up on a Tuesday evening. He’d said he was having a threesome later that night but was still down to have sex with me in the evening. I was surprised, but I went to his house in Lekki. When I got there, he told me that one of his threesome partners was en route, and we could wait for him to have our own threesome. It sounded interesting, so I waited. That’s how I had my first threesome in Lagos.
After that day, Joshua and I exchanged numbers and became cordial, and he became my threesome plug.
The Friday night when the fivesome happened, I had gone to Joshua’s house for a threesome. I got there around 10 p.m., and we went on a dating app in search of a third party for our threesome. We sent messages to some people on the dating app but didn’t get any response. Eventually, Joshua asked one of his friends who lived nearby to come over. He agreed. While he was on his way, one of the people we texted on the app responded. He said he was down for a threesome and wanted us to come over to his house in Victoria Island.
We would have gone to his house, but Joshua’s friend was already on his way to us, and there was no way we could leave for Victoria Island without seeing the friend first. Besides, it was already almost midnight, and we didn’t want to move around Lagos anyhow — we didn’t drive.
The Victoria Island guy offered to come pick us up, but we declined. We told him we had already found someone and the person was on his way over. We should have stopped texting him at this point; Joshua tried to stop, in fact, but I told him to continue the conversation just so we would see where it would lead. It was supposed to be harmless.
After we exchanged photos, the Victoria Island guy said he also had a friend over at his house and they, too, were looking for a partner. He said they didn’t mind coming over to the house, and after thinking about it, Joshua and I sent the address. In less than 20 minutes, they were already at our flat.
Now, this is where you should take note of the people involved so you don’t get things twisted.
There’s me.
And then there’s my friend, Joshua.
Then there’s Joshua’s friend who lived nearby. Let’s call him TY.
Now, include Victoria Island guy. Let’s call him Emmanuel.
And then add his friend. Let’s call him Ifeanyi.
At a gathering of gay men in Lagos; someone has probably slept with someone before. It turned out the Victoria Island guy (Emmanuel) knew Joshua’s friend (TY). When they came in and saw each other, they did a cordial greeting and went straight to kissing.
And this was the start of my problems. I wanted to kiss Emmanuel because he was attractive. I wasn’t attracted to Joshua’s friend TY at all. Next thing, Victoria Island guy’s friend (Ifeanyi) started kissing Joshua, and so I was left stranded. All the parties in the threesome were kissing each other and I was by myself, looking askance. After so much kissing had gone on, they decided to make room for me.
I should add that TY became available to kiss at some point, but because I wasn’t attracted to him, I kept moving away so he wouldn’t come close. Each time he drew near, I drew backwards or found someone’s body part to occupy me. It was weird.
Soon, space freed up for me to kiss Emmanuel, but when I came close to him, he bent his head all the way back, almost like a gymnast. It seemed weird at first until I realised he didn’t want to kiss me.
In this whole arrangement, I should mention the sexual roles played by everybody. I am a top, as well as the three other guys: Emmanuel, TY, and Ifeanyi. Only Joshua was bottom, and if we were fair, this seemed a bit unbalanced. A better equation would be three tops and two bottoms or people who could switch from top to bottom. I could have bottomed, but I wasn’t prepared for it. When I came for the threesome, my plan was to top. One top and two bottoms.
But back to this fivesome.
After several minutes of kissing, sucking and playing around, the sex began. Emmanuel bent Joshua over, lubed him up and penetrated him. And I had never seen anything scarier all my life. How do I describe it? Emmanuel was so aggressive with his thrusts. Even pornstars don’t behave like that. And as though his rough thrusts were not enough, he added very loud slaps to the mix. He would thrust very fast, then slap Joshua’s butt so hard, it resounded across the apartment. When I heard the first slap, I panicked. I wanted to ask Joshua if he was okay because I did not understand how anyone would genuinely enjoy such a violent act.
***
We took turns. After Emmanuel pulled out, I went next. Then TY, and then Ifeanyi. I don’t think Ifeanyi was really into it. He penetrated briefly and then pulled out. At this point, nobody had climaxed yet. The main focus seemed to be on pleasuring each other.
Because we had just one person bottoming and no other person willing to take dick at that time, people started fucking each other’s thighs. I would have bottomed too, at least to ease the workload of the bottom, but I debated it.
And then, Emmanuel came to me, wanting to fuck my thigh. I wanted to say no, but he was horribly persistent, so I allowed him. He had a condom on and it was dark, so I let him do his thing.
Soon enough, he started begging me to let him put his dick in me. I said no. I wasn’t prepared to bottom and did not want to stain anywhere, but he was persistent. After a long while of incessant begging, I agreed.
He penetrated. About five thrusts in, I noticed something was off, so I asked him if he was wearing a condom. He said yes. That didn’t reassure me. I don’t trust men, certainly not in this setting where we were meeting for the first time. Men lie a lot, and when sex is involved, the lies take on new dimensions.
So I tried to feel his dick for the condom. He moved my hand away and asked what I was trying to do.
“I’m checking for the condom you said you are wearing,” I said.
He hesitated, and so I pushed him out of me. Lo and behold, he had no condom on.
“Where’s the condom you said you had on?” I said.
To see Emmanuel penetrate me without a condom and still lie about it made me very upset. I felt violated, lied to. I am on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) but I don’t have raw sex with people, especially Lagos men. I mean, I don’t know where your dick has been, so don’t give me something I won’t be able to account for. I use condoms for a number of reasons. One, I am very sexually active. Two, I like to have sex with people and forget about them. When you have sex without condoms, you are plagued with anxiety about your partner’s health status. I don’t want that kind of anxiety.
“Guy, what is the meaning of this rubbish?” I demanded. “Why did you fuck me raw and still lie about it? Why would you do that kind of thing?” I was agitated at this point. Right there, I took my phone and set a calendar reminder to get tested in two weeks time.
Emmanuel lied. He said he was wearing one, and that it probably fell off somewhere.
Fell off where? Is this guy mad?
I threw a fit. I turned on the lights and told everyone to stop fucking, immediately.
“Oya, oya, all of you start wearing your clothes. This thing is over. Pack it up and go home. Now!”
It wasn’t my house, but if I was being violated that way, surely I had a major say. Everyone looked surprised, but I wasn’t backing down.
Now, here’s the most surprising thing. While I was throwing this fit and becoming agitated by the lie told by Emmanuel, my friend, Joshua said nothing, did nothing to show that he was on my side. I know he wasn’t my friend in the true sense of the word; we met about two sex appointments ago, but I still expected him to say or do something to show that he was on my side and was annoyed by Emmanuel’s actions. But he did nothing. I did not know how to feel about that.
Emmanuel continued to lie. He told everyone that he didn’t know he was not wearing a condom, and that when he realised, he pulled out immediately.
EXCUSE ME? Guy, you were not wearing a condom!
But no matter. The sex that everyone had was enough.
They got dressed and started leaving. At the door, Emmanuel tried to shake my hands as though everything was normal.
“Fuck off,” I said.
That was when TY stepped in to stop any budding conflict.
“Emmanuel was just trying to make peace,” TY said.
But I was not having it. I kept my hands to my sides until they exited the house and I was left alone with Joshua.
“Why didn’t you speak up when I told everyone what Emmanuel did?” I asked Joshua after everyone had left.
His reason was that he had been in situations and heard stories where people having an orgy would get into a fight and throw fists and everything would get so messy, and he was trying to avoid that.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to speak up,” he said. “But you know we are gay people. If the whole thing escalates, someone might call the police and you and I both know where that can lead.”
At that moment, I understood why he chose silence.
“Do you still want to fuck?” Joshua asked later when I calmed down.
“Yes,” I said. “I still want my nut.”
We had sex and we came. Two weeks later, I went to get tested and I was negative for any disease.
It was an interesting experience, and I do want to have sex with more people. After that time, I have done a foursome with Joshua, and I am open to more. Lagos can make you do things; that’s the conclusion of the matter.
I was looking to write about Nigerian women who had been stalked, when Ginger reached out to me.
*Ginger is a 25-year-old woman who was harassed by her older cousin’s friend from when she was 13-years-old. Her cousin knew about it, but played it off as a joke. Read her story:
When I was 13, my parents travelled. They left me and my younger sister at home with my cousins who were both youth corpers. A few days after they left, my cousin brought in his friend who he claimed was in Lagos for a job interview. The first time I met him was when he came with my cousin to pick me up from school. This strange man ran to hug me and helped me with my bag. I didn’t understand what was going on, but my cousin introduced him as his friend.
I got a weird vibe from him. My sister and I had our bedrooms upstairs, while both my cousins and the guest stayed downstairs. I never locked my room door, but on the day this guy came to our house, I started locking it because of how he looked at me.
My cousin said he was going to be there for two days, but two days passed and he didn’t leave. I called my parents to tell them what was going on—that there was a strange man in their house.
My dad was livid. He called my cousin demanding to know who the man was, and what he was doing in our house. My cousin explained he was just there for an interview, and promised that he was going to leave the next day. The next day turned into the day after that, and the day after that. He ended up staying till the day before my parents returned to the country.
After he left, I got a strange message on my Facebook. It was a long love epistle from him. I was so confused. Why was he sending this message to a 13-year-old? He was probably in his late 20s because he was older than my cousin who at that time was 24. I was just in JSS2. I told him that I wasn’t interested. I was flattered, but I wasn’t interested at all.
He kept sending messages but I ignored them. A few days later, I got a text message from him. I didn’t know how he got my number. It was also a very long epistle. He kept sending me daily messages, calling me his darling, telling me he missed me and couldn’t wait to see me again.
At some point, I started replying his messages, but I kept thinking, “what exactly is this guy doing?” I eventually told him we could be friends even though we had nothing in common. In our conversations, he would say stuff like, “don’t you know you’re no longer a child?”
My family has a village house that we go to every year and it turns out that this guy was from our village as well. I think that’s where he met my cousin. We went to the village that year, and every time I went to my cousin’s house, his friend was always there. He would sit uncomfortably close to me, trying to touch me and telling me that I needed to realise that I wasn’t a child anymore. He kept trying to get me to go places with him. I was always very uncomfortable around him.
One time, he tried to visit me in my house, but my dad was there and asked who he was and what he was doing in our house. When he said he was there to see me, my dad screamed at him and told him to leave the house.
After the experience in the village, I told my brother what was going on— about how he had been sending me messages for months even though I had stopped replying, and my brother said he was going to handle it. He called my cousin’s friend and warned him to never contact me again.
When I think about it now, I wonder why I never blocked him. After my brother warned him to stop messaging me, he sent me a text saying he was happy to know that I was alive and well. He also said he didn’t care what my brother said, because he knew we were meant to be.
He kept messaging me for years. He would message me daily from December to February. After February, he would message me once a week or once a month, until December would come again and the whole cycle would repeat itself.
By the time I turned 16, I was too scared to come out of my house whenever I was in the village because I knew I would bump into him. I also stopped going to my cousin’s house because he was always there. One time, I was riding a bicycle around the village and I saw him. I didn’t know he was the one at first. I assumed it was someone that knew my dad because he kept calling my name. It was when I got closer that I realised it was him.
He held onto the handle of my bicycle, telling me that I was no longer a child and that he really wanted to be with me. I was terrified. We were alone on a bush path in a village. He could have held on to me, and nobody would have heard me even if I screamed. I finally agreed to meet up with him later and he let go of my bicycle. I rode back home immediately, and I was so shaken that I told my mum everything that happened and that had been happening. I told her that it had been going on for years.
The year after, he kept messaging me and I told my mum, who told my dad. My dad called him and warned him to stay away from me. I eventually blocked him everywhere, but I couldn’t avoid him in the village.
There was a time he wrote me a song and came to sing it. I was very scared. I’m not a very confrontational person, but my younger sister heard about it and cleared him. His behaviour went on till I was in my early 20s.
A few years ago, I saw him again. He came up to me and said he was sorry if he ever made me uncomfortable when I was younger. He also said he still wanted to be friends and asked if he could get my present number. I told him not to worry, that I would text him.
Just last year, I was in the village with my younger cousins. He tried to get friendly with the oldest, who was 17. He was holding her and telling her that he wanted them to be friends. My mum saw this and got very angry. She chased him out and told him that she never wanted to see him around any of her relatives.
I truly believe he’s a paedophile. I’m just very happy that I am safe from him and that it never escalated into anything physical.
How does it feel like to have parents who you know are flawed but who are often praised for uprightness by people outside who do not know them and who look up to them? What does such a thing do to you?
*Vivian, a pastor’s daughter, shared her story with me.
*Names have been changed.
I was in SS1 when I was informed that my father had become a pastor. My first thought was, “Who sent him message?”
All my life, I’d known him for his vices: drinking, adultery, even abuse. And now, he had become a pastor, the same man who beats my mother and sometimes beats us, the children, with her. Being a pastor meant that our lives would change; we were now ‘Pastor’s Family,’ and I was now a ‘Pastor’s Child‘.
I was 14 years old.
*Image used for illustrative purposes.
***
My father still beats my mother. When people look at him, I am sure they see a godly man who cannot hurt an ant, someone who needs no chastisement. And maybe this is why they focus all their energy on the pastor’s child.
As a pastor’s child, all eyes are on you. And I think it’s worse when you are a girl. All eyes were on me. I would wear a skirt, and they would say it’s too tight. If it’s a gown, they would say it’s too short. And this is from those church mummies whose children are wearing clothes that are worse than mine. But they never seem to see their own children. The only set of people they have eyes for is other people’s children. They always have a comment ready. And this did a lot of harm to how I perceived myself.
Once, I made purple braids. The moment they saw me, they called a meeting. My father was in attendance, a church mummy who is an evangelist also attended, and there was someone else too, the head usher. They said a lot of things I no longer remember, but that hair came off my head that day. I took out the entire thing.
*Image used for illustrative purposes.
***
If my mum sees me talking to a boy in church, she would accuse me of liking boys too much. She was aware of the pastor’s child stereotype and wanted to shrug it off, but in trying to do that, she enforced it the more.
I understand that stories are different, but I feel that most pastors children are “bad” because even when they are not, they are still being accused wrongly. So why not do what you are being accused of, so the punishment can fit the crime?
When I got a phone in 100 level, my father would check my phone everytime I returned home. He was always looking for something to hold against me, a sign that I slipped into the very sin he was warning me about, or that I had ventured on the path of destruction. He stopped doing that when I was in 300 level because he found no evidence.
In 300 level, I stopped asking for money from home except I was given. This was because I understood that I had siblings that needed to be taken care of and I could manage whatever I was given rather than demand constantly. One day, at about 4am in the morning, my mum called me and wanted to know where I was. “I’m in my hostel,” I said. “Where else?” The next thing she said was that she and my father saw a vision that I had started sleeping with men for money. At 4am.
Back when I was in secondary school, he made me promise with the Bible in my hand that I would remain a virgin until marriage. This affected me in my relationships, because anytime I wanted to go further, willingly, I would remember that promise and feel a pang of guilt for wanting pleasure.
When I eventually had the sex, I beat myself up so much. I felt that I had let him down and that I had let God down too, and so I was going to receive double punishment for that very sin. For a long time, I would use my menstrual pain as a punishment of my sin — each time it came, I dwelled in it as a form of penance.
*Image used for illustrative purposes.
I am done with school now, and I like to believe that I am in a better place: I have more understanding about things, more control. But in school, I felt like I was spiralling. I went to night clubs. I drank alcohol. I tried weed. I did everything I was told not to do, partook in the vices that we judged unbelievers for. I did these things not because I was completely interested, but because I wanted to know what it felt like to be in the other shoe. I wanted to live life free of the expectations demanded from me as a pastor’s daughter. I wanted to live the other life my parents were fiercely determined to keep me away from, because of their religious positions.
“I never really got the chance to be close to my father. By the time I was born, he had become so invested in the ministry that he had little or no time for me. My father is the type of person who would favour his church members over his own family, and I did not like that. It was as though all the love he had left in him was reserved for them. They took higher precedence in his list of priorities, and I hated that. I went from one member’s house to another, and eventually, I was molested, but I couldn’t tell anyone because I was too young to understand what happened.”
In March, Kachi* messaged me to say she had a story for me about her relationship with her mum. We had a conversation and here’s what she told me:
The relationship I have with my mum is the kind of relationship people have with their sisters. Maybe it is because I am all she has and she is all I have. But I think even if I had siblings, we would still be close because she is not like the typical Nigerian parent. First of all, she is only 43 and has a small stature like me. When we walk together, people often assume we are siblings. There are some things she does though that may mimic the typical Nigerian parent, especially when it concerns religion. She is the kind of Christian that replies “You’re not dead in Jesus name” to jokes. She takes church seriously but has never pressured me to do the same. These days, we talk about the holes in the Bible’s plot and misogynist pastors.
Some people accuse her of indulging me too much. This makes no sense to me because I was also spanked as a child. She pays them no mind though because she prefers civil conversation. She grew up in the typical Nigerian home where there were unspoken rules you could not break and she did not want that for us. When I was about 7, she stopped trying to correct me with her hands but we still have our fair share of fights. One time, we used to fight a lot about me going out. We would argue for hours but we eventually found a way around it. She explained her concerns about my safety and how she misses me when I’m gone so I try to be home early. I also gist her about what happened where I went so she doesn’t feel left out.
In the typical arrangement in a Nigerian home, children are not allowed to talk back to their parents but my mum and I fight like agemates. We would sit down and talk deeply about our issues — who went wrong, why and how we can be better for each other. If I say something hurtful to her, she can tell me about it and vice versa. She does not believe in avoiding apologies so when she is wrong, she won’t do things like cooking my favourite food or giving me money as other parents do. She would apologize and make sure I am okay. After resolving a fight, we hug and call each other best friends.
My friends always tell me how much they like her. I understand it because when I go to their houses, their parents are always so stiff. They just greet and that’s all the interaction they have apart from scolding. In my house, they are free to talk to my mum as they like. Sometimes, when they are unable to reach me, they call her. One time, she picked up the phone pretending to be me and my friend didn’t even notice. When my friends tell me that they can’t talk about guys around their mother, I can’t relate because my male friends can even call my mum’s phone to talk to me. Sometimes, she already knows who I like before I say it. This is because of how often we gist. When I like someone, I talk about them a lot. She would pick up on that and ask me without being weird.
However, there are some things I can’t tell her. I have always known that I am queer and I prefer being with women. I am still trying to make sense of a lot of things about myself so I try not to pressure myself with labels. It’s a secret I am hyper-aware of because my mum wants me to be more womanly and act my age. She says this because I hate hair extensions and only wear T-shirts and jeans. She thinks it makes me look like a teenager. But I am not ready for the heavy conversation we will have when I tell her. She will have a lot of questions I do not have the answers to yet. I will eventually tell her but only under different financial circumstances.
She works so hard and money is getting harder to earn. I do not want to tell her something that might destabilize her even more. I am very protective of her just as she is of me. She understands my emotions and respects them. When she notices that I am sad, she gives me space and offers comfort from afar until I am ready to talk about it. She doesn’t just jump to my defence when I tell her someone offended me. She asks for explicit details and uses the information to evaluate whether I am wrong or right as a friend would. When I am wrong, she points it out and asks me to apologise or do the right thing. When I am right, she asks me what I need from her.
In the same way, I look out for her. On one occasion, she was having issues at work and because she is a soft person, she broke down mentally. I asked her what was wrong and she told me everything. I was trying to be tough for her but it hurt me to see her hurting like that. I wish I could give her all the money she needs so she won’t have to face difficult situations. It is why I work so hard to make her proud.
For a while now, I had been asking people what the most interesting parts about their love life. So, when someone reached out to me and said she fell in love with her Uncle, I wondered if I was reading right.
The person in today’s As Told To is *Anna, a 19-year-old girl who fell in love with her 23-year-old Uncle. She talks about how her mother found out, and how they all dealt with it.
Names are changed for the purpose of anonymity.
How we met
We never actually grew up together. My extended family has always been very close, but because we lived in different states growing up he was never one of those Uncles you could see whenever you wanted to. When my family finally moved to Lagos, my uncle *David and I both lived in Ikeja, so we saw each other a lot more. He’s four years older than I am, so we had a lot of things to talk about. I am the first child, so it was nice to have someone take care of me for a change. Maybe that was one of the reasons why I fell for him.
Falling in love
During the pandemic, he worked from home and my school was out of session, so we spent a lot of time together and got even closer. We would text till late in the night and it felt nice to have someone I could talk to. He is kind, intelligent, funny, handsome, and treats me the way I wish more people did, like an adult. I was going through a very tough time and David was constantly there for me. He became the blueprint for the kind of guy I wanted to end up with.
When I started comparing him to guys that approached me was when I knew what I felt for him was more than what you feel for family members, so I told him. He said he felt the same way, but we knew we could never be together. We never initiated anything physical. I do not know if the reason was that we were related, or because I made a chastity vow. We even tried to reduce the amount of time we spent together, but because he is family, we still spent a lot of time together.
One day, my mum came into my room and started asking questions about my Uncle. She told me that she was already aware of the situation and *David had told her everything. Apparently, *David never told her anything but she had her suspicions. She went through my phone looking for the conversations I had with him. She did not shout at me or punish me, but instead, she scheduled prayer meetings for me. Luckily, she also promised to not tell anyone else in the family about it. She promised to handle it all and I let her. There was nothing else I could do.
Since my mother found out initially, *David and I have seen in person only once. It was during a family dinner where we were surrounded by lots of other family members. We think it is best to reduce any and every form of interaction we have with one another. Currently, he has a girlfriend and I have gone back to school in a different state.
I travelled to Ilorin for an exam last week and on the bus, I rode in, I met Yoma*. Somehow the conversation of faith came up, and she told me she didn’t subscribe to the Christianity practised in churches. When I asked why, this is what she told me:
I grew up in a polygamous home — my mum was my father’s fourth and last wife. It wasn’t the kind of family where we talked to each other. There was jealousy among the wives and children. As I grew older, I realised that there was no difference between them and the families in Africa Magic movies, so I started looking forward to leaving home.
In 2015, I got admission to study psychology at the University of Lagos*, and I moved from Abuja there. The first few years were fun. I met people like me. I got to write poetry and perform my poems in front of an audience, but then I also found drugs.
I went to a party and someone offered me weed. I liked how it felt, and he suggested that I try it with codeine. That felt nice as well, so when he offered me molly another time, I didn’t object. Soon enough, Rohypnol and Ecstasy became a part of my routine. I also tried Tramadol, but my body didn’t like it — every time I took it, I threw up.
By 2018, smoking and taking drugs became my only personality trait. I would smoke every day, take pills instead of food and codeine instead of water. I spent my school fees and my house rent on drugs. I got the money back, but I spent it again. I would wake up and the first thing I wanted to do was call my dealer. Sometimes, he would be the one to wake me up with a refill. I was also missing classes and tests because I was either too tired to meet up or simply didn’t give a fuck.
One day, I woke up and realised I had not eaten for three days. At that point, I knew I had a problem so I reached out to a friend who linked me up with a psychiatrist. I met with him once, and he advised me to stop taking hard drugs. He prescribed drugs to stop the addiction and combat dependence. I also spoke to my pastor about it, and he prayed with me. I stopped smoking and focused on the medications the doctor prescribed but within two weeks, I was back to smoking and taking pills.
During this time, I was in my third year of University, and I had not paid my school fees. My school reopened the school fees portal for late payments but the deadline was in three weeks and they had increased the fees. I realised I would not be able to raise the money on my own so I went home.
I opened up to my sister-in-law about my addiction to drugs and how I needed money to pay my school fees because I had spent it all. She gave me the money and paid the fees. One day, after I returned home for the holidays, my brother came to the house with a pastor. They called me to join them in the parlour with my mum, which I did. As we all sat there, my brother broke the news to my mother that I was an addict.
The first question my mother asked was, “She takes drugs or she sells them?” They asked me how I started taking drugs, who introduced me, how does it make me feel, and many other questions. I answered their questions, but I didn’t understand why they needed to know these details. My brother started shouting at me. He said, “You don’t even have any remorse.” It was the longest family meeting ever. Everybody was shouting at me, including the pastor and my sister-in-law. I regretted telling them about it. I kept thinking I came out about my addiction — they didn’t catch me even though I had smoked in the house a number of times. There was no iota of care towards me or my well-being, just that I was hurting the idea of what a good daughter in their family should look like.
They wanted me to go to a rehab centre in Abuja because, but I declined. I thought it was a waste of money because I could go to rehab and continue smoking. I decided to try on my own. Somehow, I was able to stay away from drugs and smoking for about five months. One day, I rolled myself a joint because I needed an appetite to eat. I continued smoking but this time, instead of back to back joints, I would smoke once in three to five days. It was a system that worked. I went back to attending my classes and taking notes.
Early 2019, my pastor saw a vision about me. My mum called me one day and told me to call him as soon as possible. When I did, he said, “I just came down from the mountain. Up there, I had a disturbing vision about you. They want to kill you. You need to come home for prayers and fasting.” Coincidentally, I was already thinking of going home because school had been quite stressful. I took a bus to Abuja the next day and went to see him. He said, “You have to fast for one week. You will come to church every day for these seven days. There is a prophetess who will pray with you. She will take you to a river where she will bathe you.”
I started the prayer plan the following day. Whenever the prophetess prayed with me, she would ask me if I saw a snake in my dream the night before. She did this for the first three days. I had to tell her I don’t even dream so she could stop asking. She would rub my head with oil before I left the prayer house every day. After one week of non-stop praying and fasting, I reached out to my pastor and told him I had to go back to school. He said, ‘You can’t go back now. The way I am seeing it, if you go back to school, it’s your dead body they will bring home.” So, I spent another week in Abuja, fasting and praying.
He eventually let me go to school after I had missed a lot of classes and tests. Before I left, he made me get salt and olive oil that I would use to bathe every day. He said he was going to send some scriptures and prayer points that I would use to activate the salt and olive oil. When I got back to school, I was very anxious. I would go out and imagine that a car would hit me or something. When my friends cooked, I wouldn’t eat because I was scared they could poison me even though they had been my roommates since my first year in school. I kept calling my pastor to send the scriptures, but he wasn’t picking up. After a week, I gave up, and he didn’t call me for about two months.
Then one morning, he called me. He asked how I was doing. I responded that I was well and then he asked, “Do you have anything to tell me?” I said, “I should be asking you if you have something to tell me. You were supposed to send some scriptures. What if I died?” He laughed and said a lot of things happened that he had to take care of, then he asked, “When was the last time you smoked?” I said last night, and he started yelling at me. “Do you think we make these things up? Do you want to kill yourself?” After shouting for some minutes, he asked me to promise him I will stop smoking. I told him it would be a lie if I did. He started shouting again, and I asked him to stop. I said, “It’s not like you saw me smoking in the vision — I was the one that opened up to you. I can’t just stop — it doesn’t work like that. If you think it’s that easy, why don’t you just pray for me to quit from your end?” He got upset and hung up.
I didn’t hear from him till August. I travelled to Lagos with my friends for the Salah holiday. There I got sick — I was purging and vomiting. I had a severe abdominal pain. I got worried and called my mum. I told her my symptoms and her solution was to call the pastor. When he called me, he asked, “What exactly is wrong with you?” I was describing the stomach ache for him when he asked, “Did you just have an abortion?”
I was angry. I asked him why that was the first thing he thought about me. I said I wasn’t pregnant. He went on to ask if I was with a man or woman. I told him I was at my best friend’s family house for the holidays and then he started saying that I won’t kill myself in Jesus’ name. I was so confused. He said I should get a scan done to find out what is wrong with me. I told him I was waiting on some cash before heading to the lab. He said he was going to send me money — he never did.
I took some tests and it turned out I had food poisoning. I went to see a doctor who placed me on medications and I went home to rest. That evening, the pastor called me to ask if I did the scan. I said yes, but I didn’t get any money from him. He asked if I was sure. I told him every credit alert that entered my phone came with the name of the person who credited me. He changed the topic and asked me to come home for prayer and fasting. I was pissed because I had told him how weak I was and how I couldn’t keep food in my stomach yet he wanted me to make a 10-hour trip to Abuja. I said, “In the bible, Jesus said just speak the word and it will come to pass, so why do I have to come home for my miracle to happen?” He hung up on me and didn’t call back.
A month later, I saw a job vacancy at a radio station for an on-air personality. I have always been a vocal person so I applied and I got it. Even though they don’t give newbies shows until after the first three months, I was asked to anchor a program within my first month there. I continued even after school resumed and I have learned so much on the job.
When Christmas came and I didn’t go home, my mum became worried, but I knew that if I did I would be forced to go to the prayer house. She called to beg me to come and when that didn’t work, she asked my siblings to call me. Eventually, my pastor called. The first thing he said was, “I am led in my spirit to pray for you.” I said, “Sir, let your spirit lead you somewhere else.” His voice rose, “Do you understand you are talking to a man of God?” I said, “Yes and God understands that I’m trying to protect my peace. If you are led to pray for me, you can just say the prayer wherever you are without involving me.” He was shocked. He said maybe it’s the mood I am in, that he will call me back later. I said, “If you call me, you will realise that I have already blocked your number.” He said okay and hung up.
In early 2020, my mother told me she received calls from different relatives who said they had seen a vision where someone killed me. One time, she forwarded a message to me saying, “Pray against the spirit of death, using your last daughter as a point of contact.” That day, I sat down wondering why anyone would want to kill me. I have never used an iPhone in my life. My hair is always low so I never bothered about buying expensive wigs. If I can’t afford designer products, I am fine wearing plains forever. I have an extra year at school so I know I am not the brightest in my class. I wasn’t in a relationship so no one could say I snatched their partner so what exactly did I do to anyone that they would want to kill me. And people were jealous of that. I wasn’t in a relationship where someone would say I stole his or her partner or something. So what did I do to deserve death from somebody? Why did no one ever see good visions where I won a million dollars or travelled abroad. I did nothing about it.
In May, my father died. He had been sick for a really long time, but I wondered why nobody saw his death coming in a vision. The pastor officiated the service of songs. After the ceremony, he asked the children of the deceased to come for prayers. In his office, he laid his hands on my brother and said, “You will lead well. You will travel and nothing will happen to you.” To my sister, he said, “God will grant you your heart desires.” When it got to my turn, he said, “May the Lord redirect your steps.” I could hear my mother’s loud amen. In my head I was thinking, this path that I have chosen is the one for me. I have a good job and I am doing better at school. I have never felt better in my life.
After the prayers, he walked up to me and said, “Don’t you think we should end our fight?” I said I wasn’t fighting with him, but he shouldn’t consider me as his friend. He said I shouldn’t talk like that and asked me to come and see him after the burial. I told him I didn’t want to see him and walked away.
I haven’t gone home since then. At my job, they increased my pay and I was able to find another job as a social media manager of a bookstore on the side. I take online courses to help me get better at my job. I am currently working on my final year project and most of it has been approved. I now practice Christianity away from the church. I pray and read my bible on my own. I no longer take drugs and I have never felt the urge since I stopped. I have never felt better in my whole 22 years on earth, and I look forward to a calmer life.
When the subject of this story reached out to me — ‘I have a story, but I don’t want to write it myself. I have never told anyone because I have been in denial about it, and it’s time I unburdened myself’— I wondered what their story would be.
How does it feel to lose a parent to addiction? Or worse, to find out that the family members are working overtime to make grieving difficult for you?
What do you do when you find your father’s body posted on Facebook by someone who is not a member of your family?
This person’s experience gives you a glimpse of everything that could possibly happen.
For five years now, I have tried denying the fact that someone posted pictures of my dad’s body in his casket on Facebook, and he captioned it: “Vanity upon vanity.” This person isn’t a family member, but he felt it was okay to take these photos and share them on Facebook for everyone to see.
***
My father was a very responsible man. He had a successful military career and a great stint as a two-time special adviser, but he battled with one thing: alcohol addiction. Often, our loved ones go through difficult things we have no idea about. Usually, these things hide in plain sight. Sometimes, we love them so much that we see it, and other times, that same love blinds us, keeping us blissfully unaware of their struggles.
With my father, I think it was a mix of both: love that helped us see him, and love that blurred our vision. We were uninformed about the addiction; we loved him so much that we could not address it. And to be fair, we never had to address it. Though he drank a lot, he never lost his cool, and the drinking was a part of his life that he kept separate. But you can only keep an addiction a secret for so long.
The first time I became aware that my father had a problem was the day I found, in his library, books about addiction and how to fight them. That day, I saw that he had acknowledged the problem and was willing to fight it.
***
One night, my dad and mom went out. When they returned, he was in physical pain. He was vomiting and could barely walk, he had to be carried to the hospital. After days of testing and treatment, it was confirmed that my dad had Type 2 Diabetes. Everyone thought it was hereditary because my grandfather had that same illness. But those who were close to my father knew it had to have been the alcohol.
And yet, despite how much my father struggled to quit, he always failed. He drank until his diabetes led to a heart problem and then liver failure. I and my mom didn’t think he would die because money for treatment was never the issue. But one day, inside the intensive care unit of LUTH, my dad had a heart attack. And just like that, he was gone.
***
Grieving him was the next stage for me and my siblings. I was the closest to my dad and even though I was hurt, I spent a lot of days in pure denial. I was happy, bubbly, and people that came to console us were confused about this level of ‘normalcy.’ That was the only sane period we had before my father’s family came around and scattered everything.
My father’s family members are proper assholes. Planning his funeral showed me that. As soon as my father’s death was announced, I launched into alert mode. I was 16, and I remember hiding my mom’s wedding certificates, the land documents and other receipts because family will always be family. And they stayed true to character. The moment they arrived, they let us know they were broke. They didn’t stop at that. They made inquiries about my father’s properties, and even though I had gained admission to study Law by then, one of them asked me if I could consider working as a house help.
The military handled the funeral cost and we had to bury him at home because we didn’t want to fight about the property with his siblings. My father was buried in front of the house. We tried to convince them to bury him in the backyard, but apparently, it’s against Yoruba customs to do that. My mom’s room faces the part where his grave is. She no longer opens the curtains in that area. It hurts a lot to see your father buried in a place you used to call home with him. But what hurts, even more, is seeing people treat that part of the house as a taboo. I have a complicated relationship with the gravesite. Sometimes, I don’t want to go home because it is the first thing I see. And sometimes when I am alone in the house, I go there to sit and just talk to him. Doing that brings me peace.
***
But let’s go back to his funeral and how his family members put on the greatest drama since Fuji’s House of Commotion. During that funeral, my dad’s youngest sibling had a fainting spell that was easily cured with a can of Malt. One of his younger sisters fought because of party packs and Jollof rice, and yet these people didn’t drop a dime.
I should let you know that my dad’s siblings are educated. And I mean Masters level education, so to see them act like this was beyond all of us. At some point, my dad’s sister asked us (again), about my dad’s properties and said my siblings and I should send our account numbers. That was the end of it. To date, I haven’t seen any of them, and that’s fine with me.
A few weeks after the burial, we found out that someone carted away all my dad’s wristwatches, about twenty-something designer pieces, and perfumes. His designer shoes and shirts, all of them gone. Even his car battery.
***
After the funeral, tensions cooled down. It was then that my siblings and I came to accept the truth that we were now fatherless. Our lives would definitely have to change. One day, I was bored and I remembered how much my dad loved Facebook. While he was alive, we blocked him, but now that he was late, I wanted to see what he used to post about.
I couldn’t find his account, so I ran a general name search. The first thing that showed up was my dad’s body in his casket with the caption, “This world is vanity upon vanity.”
At first, I was shocked. There was my father’s body, laid bare for the Internet, a world of strangers, to see. Why would someone do that to him? Why show him at his most vulnerable? I closed the page and I never returned to Facebook.
Later, I found out who posted it: one of the guys that used to perform with the live band my family used at our events. I never mentioned this to anyone. Not even my brothers.
***
Forget all they say about Igbos and their burial rites, Yoruba culture isn’t any better.
My mother couldn’t leave the house for 42 days. She wasn’t supposed to watch TV for that 42 days too. We, her kids, were told not to sleep on the same bed or on the same couch with her because it would affect our luck. She was only fed ogi (pap) and eko for a long time, and she had to use different plates and cups, not the general plates at home.
She was supposed to wear black for one year. No makeup or partying for the whole year, and she had to seek express permission from her in-laws to stop wearing black, or dark clothing after one year, and then the clothes she wore were burnt.
As her children, we were also not allowed to see our friends off because, according to the family, it would bring bad luck.
My father’s family held on to these ‘customs’ so much. Once, I asked them if a man whose wife died would be put through the same thing. They said no, a man was to mourn for just 3 months because he’s a provider or something like that.
***
The military never paid my father’s pension. In fact, some members of the pension board issued a death threat to my mother when she tried to push the issue.
***
I no longer communicate my emotions properly. I hate pity, and at that point in my life when I lost my father, pity was the only thing everyone wanted to give me.
I remember now, how a close family friend called us immediately after my dad’s funeral.
“You all should remain close to each other now,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And, please, be vigilant oh. You know how your father’s siblings can be.”
“Yes, sir.”
And then he called me to one side and said, “Take it upon yourself to ensure that your siblings stay away from alcohol, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Always talk to them oh.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
This man had good intentions, but the entire conversation was poorly timed. And yes, I was so scared of alcohol but life works in mysterious ways.
I’ve been thinking about talking to a gambling addict for Naira Life for some time now, but I haven’t found someone who’s willing to share their story yet. Two weeks ago, while looking for people to interview for this article, a lady reached out to me. She wanted to tell me how she broke off her engagement with her fiance because he was a gambler. It’s not the Naira Life I’m looking for, but it’s the closest story I’ve gotten. So I had a long conversation with her and wrote this story.
Jide* and I didn’t hit off when we started talking in 2012. We met on a social media group for prospective university students, and we were trying to get into the same university. On the group, we argued about something, and I thought his response was rude— I didn’t think we could ever be friends or that he would become the man I wanted to marry.
A few weeks after our spat, he got my BBM pin from a friend and texted me to apologise, which I didn’t see coming. We made up, and so our friendship began. We eventually got admitted into the same university we applied to, and we remained in touch in the following months until we resumed school. While nothing romantic was down the line, I thought he was really interesting.
We were in our first year the first time he told me he liked me, but I was in a relationship at the time. Things changed less than a year later. ASUU went on strike, and we got closer during that time, having more interesting conversations and texting more than usual. I had begun having issues with my partner. I was beginning to realise we wanted different things. I broke up with my partner in January 2014.
Jide still wanted more, and he didn’t hide it. He continued to ask me if I would be interested in a relationship with him. In February 2014, we started dating.
I liked Jide, but there were so many things I was oblivious to in the following years.
What I did know, however, was that he wasn’t as religious as I was. Also, he had a fraught relationship with his family. I’m big on family and religion, but I didn’t think they were dealbreakers. Besides, he knew how much I loved acts of service, and he pulled his weight in the relationship. When he graduated from university in 2017 — a year before I did — we had become so ingrained in each other’s lives and getting married was already on the table.
He served in the north and was hoping to be retained by the company he worked for. I had no plans to relocate, but I was open to the idea. We were going to get married after all. But he wasn’t hired as a full staff, so he returned home.
***
I graduated from university in 2018 and got a job immediately. I studied a medical-related course, so there was an internship waiting for me. After that, I went for my National Youth Service. I was working and had a steady flow of income, but Jide had nothing. The jobs he got offered so little, so he didn’t take them.
Everything was set for us to get married. The only thing that remained was a job.
He finally got a job at a bank in the middle of 2019. He was accepted into a trainee program. As part of the requirements, he was supposed to get 10 new customers for the bank and had a target of ₦2m. He got 10 people to open accounts with the bank easily, but the problem was the money to put in these accounts. Family members helped, but he was still short of his target.
This was where I came in. My parents had opened an account in trust for me when I was young and had been putting money in it. I was older and had access to it now, so I took ₦700k out of the account and gave it to him. I wasn’t going to tell him about the money, but I thought the job was slipping away. Also, I got a friend of the family to loan him ₦200k. The plan was simple — he would spread the money across these accounts to meet his target and return everyone’s money when his appointment into the trainee program was confirmed.
When it was time to return the money, he didn’t. There was always some excuse about how there was a problem with the accounts and how he would have to go to a bank branch to sort it out, but he couldn’t because he risked losing his job if he missed a day at work. It didn’t make sense, but what could I do?
The family friend that loaned him ₦200k was on my neck to return the money, and when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I paid that debt myself. Now, Jide owed me ₦900k.
The trainee program paid him ₦50k every month, but he said he couldn’t pay me out of it because of his financial responsibilities. His dad had died earlier that year, and he claimed his family now depended on him. According to him, he was paying his mum’s medical bills and also paying his younger sister’s school fees. This didn’t make sense because his older brother and sister had good jobs. But when he told me that they weren’t pulling their weight, I believed him.
On some level, I resented them for putting so much pressure on him.
Every month, he always called me for money even though he owed me close to a million naira. If his mum wasn’t sick, something else always came up. I wasn’t earning a lot — I got ₦19800 from the federal government and ₦25k from the hospital I worked at — but his obligations were costing me a lot of money. At this point, I was getting irritated, and I felt guilty for it.
Jide finished his trainee program in December 2019 and was promoted to full staff. His salary also increased from ₦50k to about ₦130k per month. This was supposed to be the moment everything got better, but it got worse. I continued to bring up the accounts he opened a couple of months earlier and the money he owed me. But he said that he couldn’t access those accounts yet. Again, I believed him.
Things started to go downhill in January 2020. I was at work when he called me and started crying over the phone. He said he had a confession to make and would like to tell me to my face. We agreed to meet the following day at my house.
When we met, he first made a big speech about how he wanted to do right by me. Then said something about how he was in trouble and needed my help to get out of it. Finally, he went, “I’ve been gambling, and I owe some people money.”
He told me that he started gambling after he finished his NYSC in 2018 and was out of a job. He had been borrowing money from his friends, and now, he was in more than ₦250k debt.
It was quite a revelation, but I gathered myself. The first thing I did was to grab my laptop and create an excel sheet. I got the details of everyone he owed money and made a plan about how to return their money from his salary. I was going to be in charge. The plan was to keep his interactions with them to a minimum.
That’s what we did in the first and second months. When he got his salary, he sent the money to me and I contacted the guys he owed and paid them. We cleared half of his debt in two months. I also signed him up to a free anti-gambling support group online and started reading up on psychotherapy, so I would know how best to help him. For the first time in a long time, it felt like we would actually make it.
***
Our families met each other officially in February 2020 to talk about our wedding plans. I was applying to schools abroad at the time and the plan was that if I got the offer, we would do a small wedding ceremony before I travelled. That didn’t happen because I didn’t get the offer. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a blessing.
In March, the pandemic forced his employers to cut his pay, so we suspended paying back the money he owed. One morning, he called me, crying over the phone again. He said that his friends were threatening to embarrass him at his place of work, so he took a ₦200k loan from a co-worker to clear that debt. I didn’t know what to make of that. His debt profile kept rising. I could’t believe it.
Things came to a head in June. I got a call from his sister. He had been arrested by the police on his way from work for violating Covid-19 curfew. His family sent some money to him, but he was asking for more. When I called him, he said he was in the back of a police van and needed ₦30k, which I sent to him.
His sister was livid about what happened, so she lodged a complaint at his office. The bank launched an investigation as to why he was at work when he shouldn’t have been. What they found culminated into a tipping point that made me doubt everything he ever told me.
The bank found some inconsistencies in his work. But the biggest thing they found was how he had been gambling with some of the bank customers’ money. He’d call them to tell them that they were eligible for an investment opportunity, and because he was their account manager, they trusted him. He would then send them a payment link and ask them to authorise the payment. He got away with it for so long because the money wasn’t running directly through his account. When the bank found out, they fired him.
The bank didn’t take further actions against him. One of those people he scammed arrested him, but he was released later. They agreed that his family would sell their home to offset the debt he owed.
More information started to come to light. I found out that he had been lying all this time about sending his family money. They never asked him for anything. Also, he had been asking one of my brothers for money and making it seem like I knew about it. There were other revelations too, and I realised I didn’t know a lot about him.
My parents took this harder than I did. I mean, this was the man their daughter was going to marry. They called his mum and told her that the relationship was over. That’s what I wanted too, so I broke off our engagement.
After he lost his job, he was at a low point, sought out help himself and got a therapist. When the therapist heard the whole story, she insisted on speaking to me. I offered to remain in contact to get him through it. The therapist had told me that he was suicidal.
But I couldn’t. It was almost like I didn’t know him anymore. For starters, he was unapologetic about the mess he made. He was only sorry that he got caught. Also, he would call me randomly to make money demands even though he owed me money. He was being manipulative too, trying to make it seem like my parents broke our relationship and not all the things he had done in previous years. At the end of the day, the decision came down to me choosing between my sanity and the money he owed me. I chose my sanity and cut him off.
It’s been a few months since all of this happened. Right after it happened, I couldn’t bear the thought of a new relationship. In November, I met someone, and things are going really well. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we’d gotten married when we wanted to. It would have been messier, but I know that I would have used everything I had to leave the marriage. It was a good thing that everything came to light when it did, and I’m happier for it.
I have always had big breasts, and I have always hated them. I remember my breasts being bigger than the rest of my body as early as ten. I was the only one in my family with huge breasts and a small butt — the other women have bigger butts. I was often teased for looking like Johnny Bravo. This made me hate it more.
The worst part was that the breasts kept growing. I developed a backache that started from my teens through early adulthood. Sometimes I am unable to breathe well because my breasts were so big they choked me. I wished I got breast cancer so they could cut off my breasts or that I would wake up without breasts.
Shopping was always sore for me. I had to buy clothes a size bigger than my body so my breasts would fit. Most of my clothes were tight around my chest and free on the rest of my body.
I hated going out with my friends because this meant dressing up, and I hated how my clothes looked on me. I hated taking pictures because I hated seeing how big my breasts looked in them. I am a content creator, so I would spend hours filming videos talking about my work and when I watched them, all I saw was breasts.
Getting pregnant and breastfeeding a baby didn’t make it easier to deal with but it didn’t make it worse either. The backaches and choking were nothing I wasn’t already used to.
In 2018, I stopped buying bras because my size 38DDD bra stopped fitting. I opted for sports bras — they were cheaper and seemed to provide some comfort while holding my breasts firmly.
I don’t remember when I first heard of breast reduction surgeries but it became a real prospect when a friend of mine, Yemisi*, did hers. She got a reduction and a lift at a hospital in Connecticut*. She gave me the hospital address and phone number to make an appointment.
I didn’t call until about a month later in the middle of summer 2018. Summer felt like hell — it was so hot and my breasts were choking me. One morning, I got fed up and called the hospital.
The hospital was kind enough to offer a discount so the surgery was about $4000. A few months before the surgery, my sister suggested setting up a GoFundMe account for donations. I had taken a break from work, so I needed as much money as I could get. I shared the link with only friends and family. They donated about $700 which I used for my plane tickets and an AirBnB reservation close to the hospital.
I had the surgery in 2019. I paid for it with my credit card. The doctors and I had agreed to reduce my breasts to a size 36DD — there was only so much they could cut in one surgery. The surgery included a breast lift as well so my breasts weren’t lagging afterwards. The entire process lasted five hours.
Post surgery, I had to stay away from wearing regular bras for about eight weeks — I wore a special surgical bra instead. Laying on my back or any other part of my body hurt for the first few weeks. I couldn’t engage in physical activity for about 12 weeks. After a while, I noticed the constant ache in my back from carrying the weight on my chest had disappeared — I felt lighter. By June, I got a part time job and paid off the credit before the year ran out.
It’s been over a year since the surgery and my breasts have started growing again but I’m not worried because I know it will never be as big as it used to be.
Following the trending conversation on breastfeeding earlier this month, I made a call for African women to share their experiences breastfeeding for an article. Cynthia* was one of the women that reached out to me, she told me her baby rejected breast milk and was sick at birth so I asked more questions. Here’s what she told me.
I met Osaze* in 2015 at the construction firm in Abuja where I worked as an accountant. We dated off and on until 2018 when we became serious. I introduced him to my parents, and he introduced me to his. Soon after, he proposed, and we started planning a wedding for late 2019. I wanted to take things slow, so when we found out I was pregnant in June 2019, I called off the wedding. I didn’t want to be pressured into it. In the end, I was grateful I did.
The first slap came when I was four months pregnant. We had gone to visit a relative of mine, and when we got home, he started shouting at me, saying my relatives were rude to him. I said, “No” and was trying to have a conversation about why he would think that when he slapped me. I left the room and refused to talk to him for the rest of the day. In the night, I told him I couldn’t be in a relationship with him anymore, and I wanted to get an abortion. He started begging me. I agreed to stay on the condition that he would never hit me again. We continued our relationship as usual after that incident.
When our daughter, Hope*, was born, the doctor diagnosed her with hydrocephalus — her head was slightly bigger than that of a newborn baby. I moved in with him so we could manage our baby’s health together. At two weeks old, she had a shunt operation that allowed the water to flow from her head to her intestines. It worked — the size of her head reduced. We had to do a CT scan every two months to make sure the stunt was still draining the fluid from her head. The whole process cost us about a million naira.
From day one, my baby girl rejected breast milk. I tried to force her, but she would just refuse to swallow. I tried expressing the breast milk into a bottle for her to suck, but she didn’t like that as well. The only thing she liked was formula. She knew the difference between breast milk and formula in a bottle — she would spit out breast milk immediately. I kept trying until she was six months old and eventually gave up.
The worst part was that she wasn’t gaining weight even with all the food she was eating. She couldn’t sit or hold her head by herself, so the doctors suggested physical therapy. I don’t remember how much we spent trying to make sure she was okay.
Osaze blamed me for everything. He believed I was the cause of our daughter’s health issues. On some nights, I wouldn’t be able to sleep because I would stay up watching our baby. All he did was complain and blame me. When she was about six months old, he hacked into my Facebook account. He saw my chat with a guy I was talking to before we started dating. He also read my messages to my friend where I told her what I was going through with our daughter and my mental health. The next day was a Sunday. After church, I was setting up to bath our baby when he came into the bathroom and confronted me about my messages then asked me to leave his house. I didn’t argue with him because I knew what could happen. I went to the room and packed my stuff along with the baby’s stuff. He started dragging her with me. He told me I couldn’t go with her. I told him he couldn’t take care of her well. Before I finished my sentence, he slapped me. Blows followed — one after the other. I had to leave the baby with him. I ran to the police station close to our house.
The police wanted money before they made any moves, and when I told them it was a case of domestic violence, they said they couldn’t interfere in family issues. I ran to my pastor. He set up a meeting where he told us to apologise to each other and move on from the matter.
I didn’t want to wait for the third time Osaze would hit me, so I moved out of his house one day when he went to work. I stayed with my mum for a few days before getting my own apartment. He wasn’t surprised I left. He just asked to see the baby, and I never denied him of that. He was always welcome to see her at my house. Sometimes, I dropped her off at his place.
We started physiotherapy as the doctors recommended, but it was a slow process. She could only manage a strong grip, and she couldn’t even hold on to her bottle. Her head hurt sometimes, and she wouldn’t let anyone touch it.
She had such long, curly hair — the kind that any woman would want. I was grateful for little things like that, or when her diet transitioned into solid food and bread and tea was the only thing she liked to eat. I stopped working because she needed more attention. After weeks of physiotherapy, nothing really changed. We continued our routine visits to the hospital and tried to feed her more at home. About six months later, we went for another CT scan and found out that we needed to do another stunt operation on my daughter. Hope was a year and five months old at the time.
We started to raise money for the surgery, asking our families and friends to pitch in if they could. One morning, about two weeks before the surgery, I woke up by 7 a.m. to buy bread for her breakfast because I had forgotten the day before. I didn’t find it in any of my usual spots, so I walked around for a bit. When I found bread, I returned home to feed her, bathe her and coo her to sleep. Since the day was still young, I decided to clean the house and do our laundry. I had my bath when I was done and joined her in the room. On my way in, I banged the door by mistake, and I noticed she didn’t move, which was very unlike her — every sound makes her jump. I rushed to her side and the minute I saw her face, I knew she was gone. I called my neighbour to help me confirm, but he was too scared to touch her. I got dressed and carried her to my mum’s house on a bike. Her body was lifeless. I couldn’t tell my mum anything when I saw her. I just gave her Hope to hold, and she screamed. We called her dad later that evening to tell him. He rushed over immediately. He knew she was struggling to survive, so he didn’t fight it. He buried her himself that night.
I didn’t cry until a month after her death. My cousin invited me to Lagos. We got drunk, and I started crying. Everything hurts; I still can’t believe I lost my Hope. It’s been seven months since she died and I have been struggling with my spiritual life — I don’t pray anymore. I know I need help, but nothing makes sense.
In February, I made a call for Nigerian women to share stories about their best ex. Annabelle was one of the women who sent in a story. When I shared the article on Twitter, a lot of people were curious about Annabelle’s story and she was willing to share. Here’s what she told me:
When I was 18, I got diagnosed with bone cancer. It was tough to deal with because I was in my first year of university. I struggled with pain and nausea at random points in the day. My friends were great. They would help me write my name on the attendance when I had to miss classes. A lot of money went into making sure I survived. Although my mum kept telling me that all I had to do was eat well and rest, I believed my doctors had told her how long I had to live. In the meantime, I wanted my own money. I started looking for jobs that paid students.
I was on the lookout for ushering jobs or gigs as a movie extra when I saw the opening for the role of a talk show host. I rehearsed my lines and anticipated the audition. On the day, however, nothing went the way I planned. I forgot my lines and stammered through the audition. I kept looking at the camera when I wasn’t supposed to. When the crew tried to correct me, I started crying. It was very embarrassing. At the end of it, a man walked up to me as I was arranging to leave. He asked if I knew who he was. I said, “No,” but I was curious about why he’d think I knew him. He didn’t explain himself, instead, he told me his name was Tobi Afolabi* and asked me to Google him. I was running late, so we exchanged numbers, but I kept thinking, “What the fuck is this one feeling like?” At home, I found out that he was a popular media personality in the north, and he was also the producer of the show I was auditioning for.
That night, he called, and we talked. I didn’t like him at first. I thought he was too old — he was 27, I was 19. I imagined that he would be boring, so I aired his texts a lot. Also, I was sick — I didn’t see the need to pursue any romantic relationship knowing it could end in pain for both parties. I had no hair and lost weight every day, so when he texted me things like, “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I was sure he was lying.
When he was done with the show, he came back to town and asked to meet up. One afternoon in June, I went over to his place. He made us lunch and officially asked me to be his girlfriend. I told him I was dying and it would be unfair to date him. At some point, I started crying. He didn’t say much while I spoke. He listened and didn’t interrupt. He looked bored. I started feeling weird — how could he not be moved by my plight?
I went home late that day. My mum started yelling the minute she saw me. She was always shouting at me. I expected she would be nicer to me since I was sick but it was like she became worse. She would tell me, “It’s like you like being sick. You must enjoy the attention that it brings because you’re not even trying to fight it.”
That night Tobi called to ask if I had gotten home safely, and I started crying. I told him about my mother being mean to me and how my sister picks on me. He said nothing about it after I finished talking. He just asked if we could see the next day.
I went to his place the next day and after chilling for a while, I asked why he didn’t say anything about everything I had told him the previous day. He asked what I wanted him to say. I started crying again. He asked why I was crying, and when I told him he had hurt my feelings, he responded with, “Has crying fixed your feelings now?” He then told me that I loved to play the victim and that I think I have monopoly on grief. He said, “So what if you’re dying? At least you know it’s coming. Everyone is going to die eventually. You should take advantage of it and make each day count, instead of crying and whining all the time.”
I was too shocked to say anything to him. I carried myself home to cry. I don’t know how, but the next day, I went to see him again. I told him he hurt my feelings. He apologised, but he insisted that he wouldn’t take his words back. He said I had a rare opportunity to try everything I wanted to do before my time was up. He made me write a list of all the things I would like to do. My diet was quite strict so on my list, I wrote things like “I want to eat 20 bars of chocolate” and “I want to get drunk until I pass out”.
I was scared to travel because I didn’t want to have a seizure or blackout on the way, but Tobi made me travel with him a lot. Whenever he had a movie or wedding to shoot, he took me with him. He got used to my episodes — he could tell when one was coming even before I knew. He would talk to his doctor friend to get me new medication. If I complained of one discomfort, he would throw the drugs out and look for another one. My mum wasn’t like that — she gave me whatever the doctor gave me and didn’t care if they made me puke my brains out or lose my appetite. Tobi wanted to know everything. “Does this make your migraines better? Does your throat itch? Your tongue is a weird colour, let me have a closer look at it.” Soon he found a combination that I was fine with, then I had more energy to do things with him. We went hiking, we had picnics, we went to the cinema to see movies. Whenever someone was rude to me, he would insist I have my say. He told me it wasn’t healthy to hide my dissatisfaction. At first, it was hard for me to do that, but soon enough, when people stared at my hair for too long, I would ask if there was a problem. He made me feel like a different person — a normal, beautiful and happy person.
He introduced me to his family and they were nice to me. It was different because, in my family, we didn’t send each other like that.
He bought me things to help my moods like scented candles, chocolates and ointments. At this point, I was always wearing wigs because I was self-conscious about how I looked, so he bought me a lot of wigs, along with scarfs and hats.
He laced my drinks with painkillers. He introduced me to weed and it helped me feel better. I was in love with him, so I would have tried anything. One time in school, we were asked to read The Lion and The Jewel, but I was too weak to complete the task. It was one of my bad days. I kept throwing up and my body hurt when I moved. I was worried I was going to fail the course.
He came to my house that night with a new hard drive. I was like, “What the fuck kind of gift is this?” But when I plugged it into my system, I found that he made me an animation of The Lion and The Jewel. It’s still the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received in my entire life. Of course, I passed the course.
The sex was the best thing ever. Before him, I was too shy to have sex completely naked. I would keep my shirt on and cover myself with a blanket, but he wasn’t having any of that. He kept emphasizing how beautiful I was. He said my dark skin was flawless, and he loved it.
Being with him made me feel powerful. I found myself trying to be like him — doing things the way he did them or talking like him. I noticed I stopped crying as often. I started going out without my wigs. One night, I returned home late and my mum started yelling at me. I told her, “Look, I have a lot of shit going on so maybe try asking what’s wrong with me and we can talk about it like adults.” As I was talking, my heart was beating. I was expecting one dirty slap, but she apologized. Our relationship improved after that. My sister stopped picking on me when she realised it wasn’t getting to me anymore — she would make a mean comment about my hair and I would laugh or agree with her. Eventually, I brought Tobi home to meet my family and everyone loved him. At this point, we had been dating for 3 years. When I graduated from university and got a job offer that required me to move. The first thing my mum said was, “How will Tobi feel about this?”
Being his girlfriend became my identity. People would send us invites to their events tagged Annabelle and Tobi. He gave me the key to his apartment. I could come over at any time and do whatever I wanted. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, so when I saw a ring in his wardrobe one day, I was overjoyed. I was so excited I called my friends and started screaming. I asked them if they knew about it, they said no. I decided to wait for him to ask me to marry him. I waited and waited but the question never came.
We would be having a nice moment and I would be expecting him to whip out the ring but it never happened. I got frustrated, but I couldn’t tell him what was wrong with me. After a while, I couldn’t find the ring in the wardrobe. I assumed he might have kept it for his friend or one of his clients. I went through his social media accounts, trying to see if any of his friends recently proposed, but I found nothing.
One day, we were arguing, about something so small I can’t remember, and he said, “It doesn’t matter — I’m marrying someone next month anyway.” I was shocked. We weren’t casually dating — we were planted deeply in each other’s lives. I would hear a joke or watch a movie and my first thought would be, “I can’t wait to tell Tobi about this.” So when he told me he was marrying someone else, I didn’t ask who, I asked how. “How did you have time to have a relationship with someone else when I’m with you all the time? Did she not see my fucking pictures everywhere? Did she not care that you’re in love with someone else?” I didn’t cry. . I just said, “Cool.” I didn’t want to play the victim, so I was supportive. He possibly expected a tantrum and when I didn’t give it to him, he didn’t know how to handle it.
I went to his house while he was at work to pack my things. When I was done, I gave the key to his security guard. When he got home and saw that my stuff was gone, he called me. I was casual like nothing happened, “Hey babe, how was your day?” I was having a mental breakdown but at least I was poised and sweet the entire time. When I saw that his wife was light-skinned, I cried. It felt like everything he said to me was a lie. I never asked him why he chose someone else or if I did anything wrong. He is married with four kids now. We still talk. He calls me now and then, but I don’t think I ever forgave him.
A few weeks ago, I made a call for stories on grief and how Nigerians have experienced it, and the way they handle it. The call not only got a healthy level of interest, the first story we published on the subject also reconfirmed my belief in the unifying body of grief. But it is not enough to just say that people feel grief, I am also hoping that these stories — for as long as Zikoko allows me to keep writing them — will bring us closer to understanding how other people are navigating grief and perhaps teach us how to navigate ours.
Today, I spoke to 21-year-old Eliakim whose family rarely talks about the people they have lost and how that family tradition affects the way he feels grief and how he is navigating it moving forward.
For as long as I’ve been alive, my family has lost a family member every other year. My mum had 8 siblings but now, there are just two of them left. They all died of various types of cancer. My mum has also had a cancer scare twice. Being alive is tiring, but I don’t want to die at the hands of cancer; I’ve seen what it has done to my family, and it’s not pretty. You’d think that my family members would be very good at handling grief at this point but no, they never talk about all these people we’ve lost. They just shake it off and move on.
We never bring up their names and it sucks to see. How is it so easy to forget people who meant something to us when they were alive? When I was much younger, I often asked my dad why our family members kept dying and he told me that sometimes, God always calls his favourite people home and we shouldn’t question it. As young as I was then, it sounded weird to me, and since then my relationship with God died a miserable death. In 2015, however, the weight of grief really hit me when I lost my big mummy, God I loved that woman.
She was my mum’s older sister and she suffered a lot while she was sick. I was too afraid to go see her before she died, I regret that. She had ovarian cancer, and two years before that, her younger sister died of breast cancer and that took a toll on everyone’s finances.
So when she got ill, they didn’t want to get it checked and just kept going to church and praying until it got worse. Although her husband was really well to do, he was also a serial cheat who often spent money on his side chicks but never seemed to have enough for his wife’s treatments. He eventually paid for surgery here in Nigeria and it got removed.
But just as she was getting better, they found it again and at this point, it was already too late for them to operate. If only my uncle, her husband, had sent her outside the county. He had the money for that, and if he had used it, maybe she would still be alive now.
It’s been 6 years and I’m still not over it, I talk about her to my baby cousins that never met her. I only got around to seeing her resting place in 2019 and it shocked me, I still can’t believe that she really is gone, she’s not just out of town for a while, she is actually gone.
It was like everyone had moved on and I was there just accepting the reality. That was why I actually started going for therapy. My therapist told me that if I didn’t let myself feel the grief no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, I’d never move on. And so to connect with her in some way, I write her letters and talk to her about things I’d usually have told her before. She is the one person I know would have accepted me for who I am and if she did, no one would argue with her.
I am Non-binary and queer, and when I was younger I declared that I wanted to cut my hair and wear only pants and stuff she forced my mum to let me. Maybe she was just being dotting but I know that I would have been able to come out to her. It’s weird but sometimes I hope I never get over her death. It would feel like I’ve lost her forever, it already sucks that I sometimes forget what she looks like as it is.
To deal with my grief, I also talk to my siblings, share stories about her. When I have money I will definitely open a charity in her name, she was such a giver, I’m not but I try to be.
Before therapy I used to break down about it a lot, I’d smell her perfume randomly or see someone that looked like her and I’d almost lose it. In 2019 they finally opened her room door to clear out her things, when I entered I felt something leave me. It was near empty, her room was never empty, she always had people around, it was dusty and all her clothes and shoes and things were dying. Nobody could bear to keep anything, we gave it all out and just kept the things that we couldn’t part within the room. It’s still closed and I still can’t go near it
Grieving will never really end, it will change you in ways you’ll never understand, but it helps when you allow yourself to feel all of it at your own pace.
Early last month, I saw a tweet on my timeline — Bimbo* had spent a long time in quarantine even though she didn’t have the virus. I have had the virus before so I was curious about her story. I messaged her and our conversation led to this article.
This year started in the wildest way. I work as a wireline field engineer in Port Harcourt. This means I get to travel a lot. My plan for the year was building my competency so I can be promoted at the office. I was scheduled for jobs that would enable me to reach my goal and I was looking forward to learning more about my job. Before we travel, we have routine checks that include running a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test — performed to detect the presence of a virus. That was how I tested positive for coronavirus on the 3rd of January even though I wasn’t showing any symptoms.
I was shocked because I took COVID-19 precautions seriously. I always wear my masks. In the office, I wear it even when I am alone. Some of my colleagues joke that they have never seen my face without a mask since the pandemic started. I have a small bottle of hand sanitiser. I refill it very often. On public transport, I pay for two seats so nobody is in my space. I was interacting with everyone from at least 1m away. I was also sad that I had to stay back while my colleagues went on the job.
I was immediately moved to an isolation centre, which was the annexe of a hotel in Port Harcourt. Since I was unable to go to work and I wasn’t feeling sick, it was easy for me to get bored. At first, it wasn’t so bad. My office paid me an inconvenience allowance so I was a bit comfortable. I tried to get into a routine. I worked out in the mornings. I took virtual courses. I read my bible. I wrote competency exams for work. I also finished all of my work deliverables. That productivity level fizzled out fast. I started watching cartoons — I finished my favourite cartoons on Netflix while I was there. I watched a lot of shit on Youtube. I had a lot of information in my head so I started making videos of my opinions on different topics. I moved to games at some point and then I just started sleeping a lot.
It was like a holiday I did not need. Most of my work is done on the field so I couldn’t do a lot from the isolation centre. I was looking forward to leaving the facility and going back to work but on the 10th day, my second test came back positive. Wahala! At this point, there was nothing particularly interesting to do so I would find myself just staring out the window. It’s interesting how much you can notice when you look long enough every day. I also started taking drugs even though I still had no symptoms. My mum contacted her friend who was a nurse and she prescribed hydroxychloroquine, zinc and vitamin C. I had read somewhere that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t cure COVID-19 but I was desperate. My parents also sent me green tea, honey and ginger.
After another 10 days, I took another test and it came back positive again. This time, I asked to go home since I had no symptoms, there was no point staying there. By this time, I had spent 23 days in that centre. I live with my parents so when I moved back home, my mum would boil ginger, garlic, honey, onions and lime and I would inhale the steam. It was recommended by my dad’s cousin who is a doctor in America. I believed he knew what he was doing plus we were all worried. We did this for about seven days before I took another test.
Guess what? It was positive again. This was my third positive covid test after about a month of first getting diagnosed with it. My dad was quite suspicious because we had been following the instructions given to us by my dad’s cousin – the doctor, my mum’s friend – the nurse and the internet religiously. Also, I still wasn’t showing any symptoms whatsoever and neither of my parents was sick. So I decided to take another test at the government testing centre in Port Harcourt. It was negative and both tests were just a day apart. I sent the negative result to my office and they were sceptical about it because that’s where we had all been getting tested. In a bid to investigate further, I decided to visit a different private centre and take another test. Let’s call it Centre B. Centre A is where I had been getting positive results. Centre B’s result came back negative as expected. In all of this, I was annoyed that I was spending a lot of money and I wasn’t even sick! I spent 30k to print out my government result and the private tests cost me 50k. Luckily, my dad paid for them.
When I went back to Centre A with both negative results — from the government and Centre B, they had an explanation, something about antibodies but I believe that they were lying. I couldn’t chase the case any further because of how grave it would be to accuse a whole health centre of doctoring coronavirus results and I was the only one who had done an external test so far so I let it go. Moreover, I was relieved to not have COVID-19 after 40 days of isolation. Looking back, I feel like I could have utilized my free time better but I have no regrets. My goals are calling me and I have to answer. I may have lost some time but you never know what’s going to come out of that. What’s mine will always find me.
Unlike most emotions, say sadness, restlessness or happiness, there is no single language to sufficiently sum up grief. There is also no template that can tell us how to effectively navigate it. Half the time we have no idea what to do with grief, how much or how little of it we should feel, or whether or not we should even allow ourselves to feel it at all.
But what is certain, however, is that grief binds us all together in interesting ways. And since we all experience it differently, the most we can do is wonder how the next person is navigating this tough emotional process.
So on that note, we spoke to 29-year-old Isabelle on how their obsession with dead bodies helps them cope with the grief of losing their mother four years ago. Read their story below.
Before my mother died, she had been sick for a while. Nobody knew what exactly was wrong with her, but the doctors suspected cancer. One day, she just fell very ill and had to be admitted to the hospital. At first, it was nothing serious. She even called me one morning while she was at the hospital and her voice was clear. So I figured it was just something mild and the admission was precautionary.
The day she died, my sister was the one who called to tell me. When I saw her call, I just knew the worst had happened. The call was brief. My sister said, “Our mother is dead”. I didn’t say a word. She asked me if I heard what she said. I said “Yes”. Then the call ended.
The next day, I woke up, bathed and went to work. I still had not processed what had happened. I hadn’t told anybody. The day kept passing listlessly, but towards the end of the workday, my boss asked me what was wrong and why my demeanour seemed off. And that was the first time I told anyone my mother had died.
I couldn’t finish what I was saying because I burst into tears. I think saying it out loud pushed me over the edge and made me realize that it had actually happened.
Up until that point, nobody close to me had ever died. So I was not quite prepared for grief. And the fact that I didn’t know what killed her made me mad. It still does. How can someone die in a hospital and you can’t tell what killed her?
I need the closure desperately, but I know deep down I’m never getting it. When you’ve never experienced grief like that and you lose someone close to you, it is indescribably jarring. It leaves a huge mental scar. It has totally changed who I am and how the rest of my life will pan out. Added to the fact that I didn’t get to spend the last moments of her life with her makes it all worse. I was her favorite, and I wasn’t even there when she died. She never got to see me one last time or anything.
When I went to see her at the mortuary, she looked like she was sleeping. As though she could wake up if I reached out and touched her. This is when my curiosity about death started to become a coping mechanism. It began with the smell of the chemicals used for embalming corpses.
It’s a very foul and inhuman smell. When the smell hits your nose, you just know this is something different from anything you’ve ever perceived. Some weeks later, I went to pick her body up from the mortuary along with other family members. When we got there, we had to transfer her from the body tray to the coffin. When I grabbed my mother by the arm, her body felt stiff. She didn’t feel like a human being. It is simply not something I can describe.
We are so used to the warm and soft touch of living people that nothing ever prepares us for how inhuman embalmed corpses feel. Tears came to my eyes all over again. I can’t articulate it very well but there is something cruel about the fact that people die and have all traces of their humanity sapped out. I will never be able to get that feeling out of my mind.
After the burial, I started googling stuff. At first, I was curious about why bodies feel stiff after storage and embalming. Then I started reading up on morticians, undertakers, embalming, etc. Things soon escalated. I became obsessed with death and, specifically, dead bodies. Decomposition, burials, autopsies, eviscerations, etc. For the past 4 years, I have consistently dug up and looked up pictures of corpses in various stages of decomposition. Pictures of embalmed people and all of that. I read, in full detail, Kobe Bryant and his daughter’s autopsy. I downloaded the coroner’s reports. I know how their bodies were mangled and torn apart. I looked up Emmet Till, although that one is quite popular. Eva Peron, Abraham Lincoln, some baby who was preserved in Italy, Maradona. I am obsessed with dead bodies.
It is a compulsion, I cannot help myself. I don’t know what I am looking for but it has become the only way I can cope with my mum’s death and the fact that the last thing I got from her was that cold and inhuman feeling of death. Maybe seeing these corpses helps me feel better about my mother, I don’t know.
Another thing, I still wonder how her body is faring now that she has been buried. I read that embalmed corpses take anywhere from a few months to several decades to skeletonize. Is she like that Italian baby who has barely decomposed? Is she a skeleton now? Is her skin dried? Does she look like a mummy? Is her coffin waterlogged (yes, this is a thing, and it is very common). It’s been a horror show, and I am well aware that I may need therapy to get this out of my head. There is a page on Reddit where people can ask funeral directors questions about dead bodies and stuff. Been on it for a few days now. I read about 3 or 5 posts before I go to sleep. Reading them helps me feel better about my mother’s death. Anytime I try to stay away from reading or looking at pictures, I feel haunted and tormented. But whenever I read, maybe about how someone’s dead body was autopsied or look up the picture of a corpse, I feel better and can get my mum out of my mind for a few hours at least.
Looking up death makes me feel better about her death and the factors surrounding it. Knowing all the processes that happen during and after death helps me cope with the fact that I didn’t know what killed my mum. I wonder if this makes sense. The fact that I am at least aware of how she may be doing in the grave right now makes me feel a bit better.
During my first week at Zikoko, I wanted to write an article on how body dysmorphia affects women. I made a call for women to share their stories with me and Fisayo* messaged me. I eventually found that a similar article had been written but the conversation I had with them led to this article.
I was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, but I identify as a trans non-binary person with they/them pronouns.
One day, when I was about ten years old, I cut off all my hair with a pair of scissors and told people I wanted to be a boy. At the time, I thought those were the only two genders available. My dad was actually pretty cool with it — I guess because he always wanted a son. My mum, on the other hand, tried to force me into acting more feminine for a while. She made me wear dresses.
In secondary school, I mingled with other girls more and tried to emulate their hairstyle and their makeup. I always knew it wasn’t my thing, but I wanted to make my mum happy. As I got older, I found that I was more comfortable wearing masculine clothes. I think I’ve finally found a balance that everyone is cool with. I’m fine braiding my hair, and I don’t mind wearing makeup, but at the same time, I don’t feel like myself in traditionally feminine clothes.
Sometime in 2018, I came across a TikTok video on being genderfluid, and it sparked something in me. I started to read more articles and watch more videos to learn about myself.
The only person in my family that truly knows who I am is my younger sister. I’ve been having discussions with her about people who aren’t boys or girls because they’re not happy with it, as well as boys who like boys and girls who like girls. It’s something we’ve always talked about since she was like seven years old — she’s nine now. These days, she asks if I’m okay with being called things like beautiful because she knows it’s typically for girls. But I know a couple of people who think I’m just confused, on social media and in-person too. The people I interact with at school are quite understanding. My family doesn’t exactly know I’m non-binary yet because I haven’t figured out how to explain it to them.
My relationship with my body depends on the day. Sometimes, I absolutely love my body and other days, I do not feel masculine enough or feminine enough. For me, body dysmorphia is tied to gender dysphoria because even though I was assigned female at birth, I don’t identify as female. So at times when I feel distressed about my body, it affects how I feel about my gender identity. For example, being on my period just reminds me that I was assigned a certain gender.
I am used to people misgendering me especially because I live in Nigeria — most people don’t understand it, including queer people. I intend to go on hormone blockers and probably testosterone someday, so hopefully, the way I feel on the inside will match how I look on the outside.
If I were to rate my life living as a trans nonbinary person in Nigeria, I would give it a six. At first glance, when you see me, I don’t look non-binary because I present extremely feminine even in masculine clothes. I think it’s more obvious in my personality than in my physical appearance. It took a while for me to know that non-binary doesn’t equal androgyny. It’s kinda fun when strangers have to wonder about your gender. I’d like to cut my hair at some point when I’m ready. Try some protein shakes and start working out as well, but I can’t right now due to some health issues. I also want to get a whole new wardrobe of clothes that would aptly represent who I am.
Last week, I asked women who have received marriage proposals to share what theirs was like — did they like it or not? I had a lot of entries but one stood out to me. Tomi* wasn’t sure if she had been proposed to or not because the first words her husband (at the time) said to her when they met were “I don’t like how your hair is uncovered as my wife”. She said she married him three months after that and if she were to try marriage again, she wouldn’t want a formal proposal. I asked what her marriage was like considering the unconventional proposal and our conversation led to this article.
Meeting my ex-husband, Tosin* was the most random thing.
It was 2008. He called my line and opened with, “Hi! Can I get to know you?” I asked how he got my number, but he couldn’t give me an answer, so I ended the call. He kept calling. Sometimes I would pick, and we would do the same dance — “How did you get my number?” “I don’t remember.” “Goodbye.” This went on for weeks.
One day, I was on leave and bored at home, so when he called, I didn’t hang up. We had a long conversation. We discovered we are from the same state and I went to secondary school with his siblings. That got me curious. I wanted to meet him.
I suggested we go out for drinks, but he said he wanted to come to my house instead. I refused and insisted on a public place. When he saw me, the first thing he said was, “I don’t like how your hair is uncovered as my future wife.”
I don’t remember what my response was, but I know we didn’t have drinks that day anymore. We had drinks two days later.
Some days later, I was at home when Tosin called that his mum would like to talk to me. I spoke to her, and shortly after, she sent me some gifts. I didn’t think much of it. One day, my dad asked when I was bringing my husband home. I said I didn’t know when, but I was talking to someone.
When I told him about Tosin, it turned out he and my mum already knew his family. My dad said I should invite him to the house. I did, and we had lunch with my dad. They talked. I was indifferent about the whole thing.
My leave ended and I went back to work, which was out of town. After a few weeks, I called my mum and there were drumming sounds in the background. I asked what was going on, and she said, “Your husband’s people came.” I was like, “Which husband? I never introduced anybody to you as my husband.” My dad said, “You shouldn’t have invited him for lunch if you didn’t want to marry him. They came with a letter, and we have responded. The next thing is to agree on a date for the solemnisation.”
I was 22 at the time. I had never actively thought about marriage before then, but I knew it was expected of me. It didn’t seem like a bad idea if it would get my parents off my back and possibly make them happy.
But you see, marriage was nothing like I expected it to be. First of all, I lost my freedom. I used to wear tiny dresses and skirts, but when I got married, I had to cover my hair. Even though I am a Muslim, I hated that shit. I loved travelling, but marriage meant I had to take permission for my trips. Sometimes, he would make me feel bad for even going at all. I had to give up everything that made me myself to be acceptable to everyone — my partner, my parents, my in-laws.
I think I was too young. Tosin was six years older than me. I didn’t centre my needs in making the decision to be married. If I had, I would have chosen better. Before I knew it, kids started coming into the equation. The first child was born in the first year, the second child was born in the third year and in the seventh year, we adopted the third. I think the kids made the ten years we spent married bearable. Tosin and I had nothing in common, but we were able to bond over caring for the children.
Tosin liked me as a person but hated me as a wife. We would have made good friends, but being married to him caused me pain. In the first year of our marriage, he started cheating.
Four weeks after I had our first child, I discovered he had gotten my best friend at the time pregnant. I saw the conversation on his phone. I confronted him, and he couldn’t deny it. He begged me to forgive him, and I did. We had only been married for about 11 months.
As time went on, I discovered that he would try to sleep with my housemaids, and when they did not agree, he would get abusive or send them away. This time, I threatened to leave him. He apologised and got our families involved. I gave him another chance to be better.
In the ninth year of our marriage, I went out of town for work one day, and while I was away, he tried to have sex with our maid again. When I came back, he had already sent her away. That was the final straw for me. There was no coming back from that. As if that wasn’t enough, I found out that he had been trying to sleep with my cousin and my younger sister. The worst part for me was his utter lack of remorse.
Our parents tried to mediate, but it was a done deal for me. I couldn’t look at him without swelling with rage. He left one day after I refused to let him touch me. He picked a few clothes and left. He came after a few days, said nothing to me, picked more clothes and left. After a couple of weeks, I got a place and moved with the kids.
I was not surprised that he did not try to reach me. I was wondering how we would have survived if we were actually dependent on him. The kids were exposed to some of the toxicity towards the end, but I am glad it did not affect them. I noticed that since we left, they are better at expressing themselves. My first son decided he wanted to grow his hair out and cut it in a specific way. His dad used to force a particular style on him. They choose their own clothes and style now. They are learning to make decisions that affect their daily lives. I think I am doing a great job.
He called after seven months. He said he was in town and would like to spend time with the kids for a few days. I told him they can visit, but they can’t sleepover. I gave him an address to meet us at. We didn’t say anything to each other; the kids just switched cars.
It’s been 15 months and I would like to finalise it in court, but I am not ready for that journey yet. I am just happy to have left. His presence sucked my joy. Now, I wear my hair however I like. I wear whatever makes me happy. I spend my time in places that give me joy. There is no pressure to do one thing or the other. So far, I have no regrets. I love my life the way it is.
Last year, I thought it might be interesting to talk to a student cultist for Aluta and Chill, the flagship series I was writing at the time. I put the word out, but it was futile. I was about to give up my search when a friend told me there was a guy at his church who had just left a cult and had started rehabilitation. Let’s call him Philip.
Philip agreed to talk to me under one condition: I had to meet him at the town where he was hiding out. He wouldn’t do the interview over the phone. On March 7, 2020, I travelled from Lagos to this town, also in the South-West, with no promises that I would get the story I was chasing.
Luckily, he decided he could trust me. We talked for close to two hours, and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. After the conversation though, I realised it wasn’t an Aluta and Chill story. The question I asked myself in the following months was if I still wanted to write it; if it was even safe to do so. Last weekend, I decided that I wanted to. And I got to it — I retrieved the recordings and started writing. And now, I’ve written it in the as-told-to format.
My grandmother always wanted a son, but she had four daughters. When I came along, my mum thought I could be the son her mother had always wanted, so she shipped me off to live with her. I was just one at the time.
At four years old, I started hawking fried fish on the streets of Ibadan for my grandmother. If I didn’t make enough money in a day, she would send me back out to make more. Sometimes, she locked me out of the house and made me sleep outside. I don’t remember much from that time, but I know that because I was always out on the streets, I was running errands for the boys in the neighbourhood, getting them packs of cigarettes or wraps of weed.
I returned to my mum when I was seven. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 10. By the time I turned 15, I was experimenting with weed and drugs. It was about that time that I decided that I’d had enough of school. Not that we had enough money, anyway. Things were tougher than ever at home because my dad had died, so I dropped out of school and went to live with a cousin who sold phone accessories. The plan was to learn the business from him and go out on my own, but he wasn’t exactly the model teacher.
He would buy fake phone accessories at cheap prices and sell them at a ridiculously high rate. He was also the first person that introduced me to girls and clubs. In fact, he facilitated my first sexual experience. I was 16.
***
I left my cousin when I was 20 or 21 and went to work at a hotel as a housekeeper. One night in 2018, this group of guys came to party and lodge at the hotel. I was immediately drawn to them. They were all the things I wanted to be: rich and lavish. I knew what not having enough money meant, and I wanted what they had.
I served them until it was time for me to go off-duty. One of them asked me to sit with them for a while, and I agreed. Let’s call him B — he will come up in this story again. We partied together all night and when they were leaving, they gave me ₦15k, promising to come back.
They did come back. The more I talked to B, the more I wanted to be one of them. A part of me knew that they belonged to a cult, but they had what I wanted — wealth or some semblance of it. I was disappointed when B told me that they were leaving town in a few days, but I quickly got over it and asked if I could come with them. He said I could, but I had to be ready to leave in three days. I was ready to leave anytime. The way I saw it, if I was with them, I’d never lack.
***
We left Ibadan on a Saturday and travelled to Abeokuta. They were students in a school somewhere in Ogun State. The first thing they did was throw a big party to welcome me. That felt very nice. Around 1 am, they said it was time to meet other members of the gang, and we left the house. I was going to my initiation.
The other guys accepted me into the fold. There was something really weird about a part of the initiation process. They dug the ground up and asked me to lie in it. The deal was that I’d be there until I had an orgasm. I was confused, but B calmed me down and told me it was easier than it seemed. All I had to do was think of someone I liked a lot and imagine myself having sex with her. For some reason, it worked, and they congratulated me. They scattered something over the wet patch before covering the ground up. Afterwards, we went to a club to celebrate a successful initiation.
I got into a new world of debauchery, but I quickly became restless. I had everything I wanted, but they weren’t telling me anything about where the money came from. Yahoo would have been my best guess, but they weren’t doing anything like it. B was like my teacher and mentor at this point, and every time I brought it up with him, he told me to calm down. Oh, I should say something about B: his most distinguishable features were his fingers. He was missing a thumb.
They eventually thought I was ready and began the next phase. This time, we drove to a part of town to a herbalist of sorts and told him I was a new recruit. The herbalist asked if they’d explained everything to me, and they said yes. That was a lie. The man got down to business and prepared this thing inside a bowl wrapped in white cloth. I opened it and found the heart of an animal inside. Then he handed me a bottle of gin and asked me to eat.
After that, they revealed that I’d been sworn to secrecy. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone if I didn’t want to risk my life. Also, I had to return every three months to renew the process.
Now, the gang told me what they were really up to. They worked for ritualists. And now, I was one of them.
Their targets were girls, but they didn’t kidnap them. All they had to do was sleep with them and clean them up with a handkerchief. Their masters needed only the used handkerchiefs.
The girls who were involved either became barren or died a slow death.
I was baffled at first, but I got over it. Now, it was time to prove myself, and I wasn’t about to mess it up. I pitched the idea of returning to Ibadan — I grew up there. I knew how the town worked. They agreed after a few months, and we relocated.
I don’t think I processed what I was doing for a while. There wasn’t a lot of time to even think about it — we had a target of three girls per week. I also didn’t know who exactly we were working for. I just know they were rich and powerful. I also never received a payment. They only provided whatever I wanted.
There was this immunity that came with our crimes. It didn’t matter how badly we messed up, we always got away with it. There was a time the police stopped two people in the gang and found two bodies in the trunk of their cars. I thought that was it, but they were out in two weeks. And that was the end of it. The only way things could go sideways was if we clashed with a rival cult. We were practically invincible.
***
One thing I didn’t understand about myself during that time was that even though I was quite brazen about a lot of things, I was always interested in listening to conversations about religion. One day, I went to this pharmacy with my girlfriend at the time to buy a bottle of codeine. The woman at the pharmacy must have thought we were kids who had lost our way. Before we left, she asked us if we knew the use of what we wanted to buy. My girlfriend was livid, but I calmed her down. Then the woman asked if we had a bible. That was it for my girlfriend, but I answered the woman and told her that I didn’t have one. She said if I came back the following day, she would have gotten me one.
I actually went back the following day but something had changed in her. I think she had time to think about what she was about to do and decided that it was best to stay away. I noticed her reluctance to talk to me and cursed her out before I stormed out. On my way back home, I saw a church I’d never been to before and decided that I would go there the following Sunday. My plan was simple and heinous: find church girls to sleep with.
When I got to the church on Sunday, everyone’s attention was on me. I didn’t fit into the category of the people who usually came to worship there. My hair was blond, and I was high as a kite. I was uncomfortable throughout the service. When it ended, nobody came to talk to me. The same thing happened the following Sunday. I decided not to go back.
I would later meet the pastor’s son on the street. He started a conversation, and we exchanged numbers. Nothing happened for some time after that. He only kept in touch.
On my own part, I was growing disillusioned with the cult activities. It wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped it would. Sure, they gave me whatever I needed, and I wasn’t hungry anymore, but the other guys had things going for them. Things they had bought or built. Gifts were where it ended for me.
Shortly after, a beef with a rival cult culminated in the death of a friend who died from gunshot wounds. I think that was when I began to get more clarity on what could also happen to me. It was inevitable.
One day, I called the pastor’s son I had met months earlier. We’d kept in touch. He asked if I wanted to meet up at the church, and I agreed. The moment I got into the church’s premises, I felt this calm I hadn’t felt in a long time — possibly ever. Then I burst into tears. It was as though the events of my life up to this point were replaying in my head and the things I saw weren’t pretty. I told him the same story I’m telling you now, and we prayed.
When I returned home, I told the others that I was coming from church, but they didn’t answer me. It wasn’t important at the time, I guess. But when they noticed that I wasn’t giving them my 100% anymore, they chalked it down to my recent interest in church and told me to stop going. They gave me two options: leave the church or leave the house. Leaving the house could be dangerous for me, so I stayed.
Eventually, they kicked me out. When this happened, I returned to the church and told them what happened. They took me in and got an apartment for me.
After that, things got a little difficult. A week after I was kicked out, three people in the group were murdered and there were no traces of who could have done it. That was a problem for me because they thought I set them up. They found me and told me they knew what I had done, but they would let it go. The point of that conversation was to let me know that I could never leave them as long as I’m alive. It was practically a threat to my life.
The next time I saw them was December 31, 2019. They stormed the church during crossover service. I had a tight feeling in my stomach when I saw them. They must have come to cause trouble. When the service ended, they beckoned me to come out to talk. The reason they came was to let me know that I was still in their grasp and they could always find me. Besides, it had been three months since I last ate the concoction thing and it was time to do that again. They reminded me of my duties and what would happen if I refused to do them. They actually said that they were going to commit a crime and blame me for it.
After they left, I told the pastors at the church what happened. They decided that it was time for me to leave town. The problem there was that I had to tell the cult that and they had to agree to it. If I fled town without informing them, they would take it as an act of war and come after me. I tried appealing to them and luckily, they agreed. The agreement was that I would travel for a while and return to them. I think they were sure that they could always find me, so they didn’t think too much about it. I left Ibadan and went into hiding. I haven’t been back since.
The last thing I heard about them was that B had fallen terribly ill, and they were looking all over for me. B didn’t survive — he’s dead now. When I joined them, there were 15 people in the gang. Now, there are only eight. Am I out of this? I don’t know. I’ve started my rehabilitation. But again, I took them to that town. That’s going to be on me forever.
Editor’s note: This conversation was had in Yoruba and was translated to English and edited for clarity.
Weeks ago, I was intrigued by the notion of being initiated into witchcraft through food, so I put out a call for stories. I honestly thought I wouldn’t get any responses because, really, who would boldly come out to say they had been initiated?
But I did get stories: people who had eerie dreams after eating food offered to them by classmates, people whose housemaids confessed to being witches. It was by far the scariest and most exhilarating thing I have ever written.
And then I got this DM from a lady who had a witchcraft story to share. No, she didn’t eat food offered to her by a stranger, neither did her housemaid confess. Instead, she was accused of causing her uncle’s sickness. What happened next is an experience I don’t think anyone should go through.
TW: Abuse.
My name is *Linda, and I’m from Oron in Akwa Ibom State. I am the fifth of the six children my mother gave birth to. Not long after my mother had the last child, my father abandoned her, and she was faced with the burden of providing for six children alone. As a way to lighten the burden, I was sent to Lagos to stay with my uncle, my mother’s only brother.
My life in Lagos was fine. My uncle was a senior staff at NNPC. He enrolled me in a private school and took care of me like I was his child. The only problem was his wife. She treated me like the typical Nollywood evil stepmother, but I didn’t let that get to me. I’d come from a place where basic necessities were hard to come by. But here I was in Lagos, enrolled in school and living well. I wasn’t going to let her treatment get to me.
But then I turned seven, and my uncle became sick. It started gradually: dry cough, rashes and all. They took him to several hospitals yet there was no improvement whatsoever. Back then, TB Joshua was the trend and his church (the old site) was very close to us, so they took him there. He was given a handkerchief and special plates, but he never got better.
Instead, he became leaner. Then, they took him to another church around Ikotun Egbe. The pastor and some members of the church came to our house to pray. It was during their prayers that they told my uncle’s wife that I was a witch and that I and my grandmother, who was 70 at that time and was suffering from dementia, were responsible for my uncle’s sickness.
The next day, my uncle’s wife came to pick me up from school and took me to that same church. I was there for over a week. I wasn’t given any food, just water and olive oil to drink. Every morning, the pastor would flog me and ask me to confess. I was innocent, but he wanted a confession from me, so I started making up stories from the movies I had seen just so they would let me go.
Fortunately, one of the family’s bigger cousins heard what was happening, so he stormed the church and took me away. I stayed with him for a few weeks before his wife also drove me away saying I was a witch because I was very inquisitive. I had to return to Akwa Ibom.
If you’re from Akwa Ibom or you’ve been to Akwa Ibom, I’m sure you’ve heard stories or seen young boys and girls, who were driven away from their homes all in the name of witchcraft, roaming the streets. It happens in Oron where I am from, and it is still very much in existence today. In fact, it is a common thing in my village to murder people who are perceived to be witches or wizards.
Because of what happened in Lagos, I was branded as a witch, and my Uncles wanted to kill me. There is something they give to those who are perceived to be witches. It’s believed that if the person isn’t a witch, they would eat and vomit it, and if the person is, eating it would would kill them. But our bodies are different, and that stuff has killed many innocent people. When they gave me to eat, I vomited, and they concluded that I was a “strong witch.”
Very early the next morning, my mother smuggled me out and took me to one church. From there, I was taken to a home for kids who were driven away by their parents. The home is disguised as an orphanage, but it really isn’t. I can’t mention the name because so many kids are still there. The home is located in Abia state and the founder goes about picking up street kids. She often travels to Akwa Ibom to get these kids that were driven out of their homes; she brings them back to her orphanage where she cleans them up and gives them out to those looking for house helps for a specific amount.
I stayed at this ‘orphanage’ for a couple of weeks and then I was ‘sold’ to a couple whose children were all abroad. In the one year I was there, I was abused continuously by my adopted father. I eventually ran away and went back to the orphanage where I was scolded and resold to another couple who wanted a house help. I stayed there for six years, started and finished my secondary school there, and eventually ran away when one of their older sons started abusing me sexually.
After I left, I stayed with a few friends I made on Facebook, started working, and was able to save some money to further my education. I’m currently a student of the University of Benin.
And now, here’s the most surprising part: last year, I discovered that my uncle actually died of AIDS.
After I wrote the story about the guy who attended a church that was essentially a cult, my appetite for telling stories of everyday people and their most random experiences increased even more, and I decided to go out in search of these stories. I didn’t find anything. Well, not until my friend reached out to me and said she had a friend who, between 2017 and 2019, made a shit ton of money writing.
A lot of people make a shit ton of money writing, I thought. What made his experience special?
The answer: He was writing wedding vows for people.
That caught my attention, so I contacted him, and we talked about how he went from being a regular UNILAG boy to making people cry at weddings.
“I used to write on my WordPress blog a lot in 2017. It was mostly poetry. I would think of some cheesy lines, write them and publish them. The feedback I got was always fantastic. People would always talk about how great a writer I was and how my words moved them. Sometimes I’d get on Twitter, find one of my followers who was also a writer and do a joint project with them. Those were fun times, but I was broke. I was constantly looking for ways to turn my writing into money-making opportunities, and I wasn’t finding any. I was getting frustrated.
Then one day, I got an email. At first, it sounded like one of my fans just being “extra” and sending their love, but I soon realised that this was different. The tone was different. This person was telling me she loved my body of work, but she was also advising me to try something I’d never heard about before: wedding vow writing. She sounded like she knew what she was saying and, at the end of the email, she asked for my phone number. I sent it to her.
About a week later, I got a call. The woman on the other end sounded like she could take away all my problems at the snap of a finger. I’d never heard such a beautiful Hausa accent before. You can hear money in people’s voices, you know. She was inquiring about my wedding vow writing services. Her sister had given her my number, and she wanted to meet to discuss plans on how I’d get it done for her. She was getting married soon. We made plans to meet up and set a date.
The meeting venue was the Lagos Oriental Hotel. I’d never been somewhere like that before, so I was anxious. My anxiety worsened when a front desk employee walked up to me, asked me for my name and took me to a reserved table. When I looked at the menu, I laughed. This place wasn’t for me. A few minutes later, the front desk employee came back and told me that whatever I wanted had already been paid for and that I should make my order. I didn’t want to overdo anything, so I ordered a glass of wine. I was early, so I had to wait a while.
About 20 minutes later, my client arrived. She looked exactly the way she sounded. Let’s call her Maryam. Maryam was gorgeous, I can’t lie. I didn’t even mind that she pronounced my name wrong. She spoke and moved with the grace of angels, but I digress. I had never done this before, but I’d planned for how the conversation was going to play out. It was simple: I’d ask them for information about their partner, record them speaking, and write something out of it. And that’s what I did.
She spoke for two hours. You could tell that she wanted to do something amazing. She told me why: her husband-to-be was a hopeless romantic, and she wasn’t. He loved public proclamations of love, and she didn’t know how to do any of those things. But she wanted to pull something off at the wedding that would blow his mind. I understood.
When we finished, she asked how much I charged and it was at that point I realised that that was the only thing I hadn’t thought about. So I panicked and said N50k. She laughed. I wanted to enter the ground.
“Do you want to pay now, or later?” I asked.
She wanted to pay now, so I gave her my account number. N100k. That’s how much she sent. And it wasn’t a mistake, Her reason: “You can’t put a price on creativity.”
So I went back to UNILAG and took my friends out that night. I was rich. I spent the next week putting all my best efforts into delivering the best wedding vows I could. She needed me to deliver it in person, so we met at the same hotel again. By the first read, she was in love with it. I’d done a good job, but now I needed to finish the job. She needed me to teach her how to say it to convey the message the best way, so she got a room for me and we spent the whole weekend together in the hotel doing drama lessons. Best weekend of my life.
When that was done, she gave me an invitation to her wedding in Abuja and paid for my flight ticket. A black Prado picked me up at the airport.
At the end of her speech, her husband was crying. Everyone was crying. And I sat in the back thinking, “I did this, and I love it.” It wasn’t about the money. It was about seeing people happy.
In the next two years, starting from Maryam’s circle of friends, I got referred over and over again. After some time, people started having me sign NDAs. I was charging between N150,000 and N200,000, and getting flown out for weddings.
The first man that ever contacted me was extremely rude. I’d suspected that he was a jerk from the way he spoke to me on the phone, but I met with him anyway. When I told him to tell me about his partner, he flew into a rage, talking about how I was a young man who should have been doing better with his time than scamming people into paying me so much for just writing wedding vows. I was so confused. Till today, I wonder what he said at his wedding.
Maryam and I still stay in touch. Sometimes she randomly sends me money because she remembers her wedding and wants to appreciate me again. Sometimes she gives me writing jobs. I’m super glad I met her.
Referrals started dwindling as 2019 came to an end. By 2020, they were non-existent. I think the pandemic had something to do with. In any case though, I’m honoured to have brought a beautiful spark to so many marriages.”
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a justifiable fear that underdeveloped countries like Rwanda will experience a rise in cases of human trafficking due to an increase in unemployment.
According to research, unemployment is the most significant factor that facilitates human trafficking in Rwanda, with about 80% of the victims being women and children between the ages of 16 and 40.
*James, 29, and his girlfriend, *Dami, 27, had lived in Nigeria for most of their lives before relocating to Rwanda for work in 2019. While there, they decided to spice up their relationship by finding a Rwandan woman for a threesome.
James thinks that decision almost ended in his girlfriend being trafficked.
East Africa has some of the most beautiful women in the world. Rwandan women, in particular, are the cream of the crop. My girlfriend feels the exact same way, and that’s why we came up with the idea to try a threesome when we had settled in Rwanda.
The first thing we needed to do was find someone we both liked, so we went straight to Tinder because the people there know exactly what they want. We decided to use her picture because I doubt there are many women who would be interested in hearing a threesome proposition from a random guy on a dating app. After we set everything up, we started swiping for potential candidates.
This was actually how I found out that Rwanda has a thriving lesbian community; well, gay and lesbian community. We were looking for a Rwandan woman who was nice, looked good, smelled good and was interesting. They also needed to be willing to take a bunch of STD tests before anything happened. We were able to find a few people who seemed to fit the bill.
For the first woman, Dami went to meet up with her, but she wasn’t feeling her — she didn’t smell very good and was a bit shallow. The second woman didn’t seem too eager to get tested. She also lacked the unmistakable Rwandan features we were both hoping for: ridiculously thick and stop-in-your-tracks stunning.
The last woman we picked was really nice at first, but then she quickly became very forward. I mean, it’s weird to say someone is too forward on Tinder, considering what the app is for, but she was a bit much. After Dami told her exactly what she was looking for, this babe proceeded to send her a bunch of unsolicited nudes.
At first, we were like, “This person is super excited,” but little red flags started popping up. For starters, the nudes she sent were of different people. The skin tone was pretty similar across pictures, and they were all taken from the torso down, but I could tell they weren’t taken by the same person.
Then she sent a raunchy video of two women fondling each other in public, and when we asked if she was one of the people in the video, she said it was a friend, not her. In our heads, we were like, “Why are you sending us a video you’re not even in?” That was another red flag.
Still, Dami and I decided to meet her in a public place to decide if we wanted to go through with it. So, we set a time and a date. When we tried to call her to confirm the meeting, she didn’t answer the phone. She tried to call us back and was conveniently inaudible. She said her network was bad, so we just continued texting. That was another red flag.
When we finally got to the restaurant, she wasn’t there yet. We ordered food that took about 45 minutes to come out — welcome to Rwanda — and she still hadn’t arrived. We reached out, and she swore she was on her way. A few minutes later, a very cute lady walked in and sat down. The babe had also sent us a bunch of pictures of her face, but we didn’t want to assume we actually knew what she looked like.
Dami and I kept checking this lady out, but she only seemed interested in ordering food. We figured, if she was the one, she would have texted or called us the moment she got there. Dami was getting a bit anxious, so I decided to walk up to her and ask if she was waiting for anyone. She said she wasn’t, so we had to keep waiting.
After about half an hour, a man, who Dami later realised used to work out at the same gym as she did, walked in. He went to the table right behind us and sat down, giving him a full view of us and the restaurant. A moment after, we got a text from the babe saying she was outside, so we told her to come in. I should point out that this person had no idea I was with Dami — she thought she’d be coming alone.
Five minutes later, she still hadn’t come in, so Dami hit her up to ask where she was. She said she needed her to come outside and escort her into the restaurant. It was a strange request because the farthest distance between the parking lot and the entrance was 2 metres at most, and it was already pretty dark outside. This was another red flag.
There was optimal lighting in the parking lot, but it was also quite scanty due to the pandemic. So, I decided that I should go out and scout the area since she didn’t know what I looked like. We asked her to describe herself, and she said she was in black RAV4. I went out and walked around, pretending to be on a call, but I didn’t see anyone inside or around the car. It wasn’t even warm. There was absolutely no way someone had just driven it.
I decided to go back in, and as I was entering, I saw the guy from my babe’s gym sitting with her and talking. As he saw me, he quickly wrapped up the conversation and left. A few minutes later, the babe texted, angrily asking why Dami sent me to get her. This was when it clicked that something sketchy was going on because I didn’t see anyone outside. I’m guessing, this person was lurking somewhere in the dark, waiting for Dami to come out, so they could pounce, throw her in a car and drive off.
We immediately called a cab and headed to a hotel. Obviously, we couldn’t drive home in case we were being followed. After we were safe, I took the pictures we’d been sent and did a reverse Google image search. That’s when I found the person that was being impersonated — a nice family woman, recently married with kids.
Her social media accounts were open, so they just took a bunch of her pictures. As for nudes, I’m guessing they just sent a bunch of random porn. Most of these red flags that seem really glaring now only became apparent after the fact. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
I don’t think a threesome will be happening anytime soon. Hopefully, something more organic and less life-threatening comes our way, but for now, we are just going to have to make do with each other.
When I try to picture what the practice of cultism looks like, I imagine people dressed in red wrappers, gathered around a T-junction, sacrificing goats and speaking incantations. Maybe I’ve watched too many Nollywood movies or maybe I just have an overactive imagination, but after a conversation with an old friend who is convinced he almost joined a cult a few years ago, I decided to do some research about what cultism really is. I found that a cult is a religious organisation with unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, and “with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guardian of an authoritarian and charismatic leader.”
So I called my friend and asked him to tell me about the story of his church-cult experience. Here’s how the conversation went:
“I grew up in a Christian home and all through my formative years, I went to religious schools. In university, I had a period where I was skeptical about religion, faith and God. That period led me to have a lot of questions that I couldn’t ask because of the type of environment I was in. You see, I went to a university where if I asked a question about tithing, for instance, people would rather judge me for not wanting to part with my money than open the bible with me and show me what I needed to know.
A few years later, I was serving somewhere in the North, and I met this really cool guy, Peter*,who was also doing his NYSC there. We became friends almost immediately. He was fun to be around and whenever we talked about spiritual stuff, he always had a bible verse to back his points. He was a spiritually sound guy. He’d also always quote a Pastor Michael* whenever he spoke and so, one day, I asked him who this pastor was and why he hadn’t taken me to his church. I was tired of going to my own church, and I thought it was time for a change. He obliged.
The first thing I noticed when I got to the church was that there were only about 10 members around for service. I thought, “Okay, maybe this is just a small, close-knit church.” The service was good. After church, the pastor and his wife came to say hi. They were really cool people, so at that point, I was thinking, “I could really get used to coming here.”
After a few services, I got my first red flag. This man started bad-mouthing a member who had left the church. He got on the pulpit and started insulting someone because they had the audacity to leave. I didn’t have any context, so I decided not to think too much about it. And then other issues started springing up. I realised that every single service ended with two things: fund this ministry and honour me. Every single service. Even if he was talking about something unrelated, he would find a way to bring it back to those two things. That seemed really weird to me too.
A woman in the church was taking these instructions very seriously. You see, Pastor Michael didn’t have a job, and his wife just sold small items, but he had a nice car and lived in a nice neighborhood. How? One church member funded his livelihood. She basically paid for everything he wanted and so, he made her the church secretary.
Then all the brainwashing started unravelling in front of my eyes. I wish I could explain how bad it was. The thing is, the people being brainwashed, like my friend Peter, didn’t even know how bad it was until they left. You know what? I’ll call Peter now.”
“Right now?” I asked.
“Yes.”
After a few tries, we successfully reached Peter. They caught up on old times and laughed about the days of Pastor Michael. And then, Peter spoke about his experiences. Here’s what he had to say:
“I met Pastor Michael at a bible school I was attending. He told me he had a church and invited me.he first service was good. I invited my girlfriend at the time, and we became steady members. He wasn’t so old, the pastor. He’d always talk about how he was a cultist before he met Christ. He was a cool guy.
My first bad experience in the church was when my girlfriend and I got to a workers’ training meeting about three minutes late and he told us to kneel down, raise our hands and close our eyes. Omo, as we knelt, I was just quoting scriptures about honouring one’s leaders in my mind to justify the madness that was happening. He always made his sermons about honouring him.
A few months later, my girlfriend started making plantain chips and they were really good. She took one to him during one service and just like that, it became a tax. Whenever she didn’t bring one when we came to church, he would call her and scold her. I remember thinking, “We’re NYSC corpers earning N19,000 every month and trying to survive. How can you demand so much from us?” It was getting really weird, but we stayed.
Whenever I remember my time at the church, I try to convince myself I wasn’t brainwashed. But then, I remember the time here was a program coming up, and he told us to contribute some money towards making it happen. I told my girlfriend, “Let’s drop N10k each”, and she looked at me like I was crazy. This feels like a good time to point it out again that we were earning N19,000 and that was all. I eventually managed to beg her to drop the money and when we gave it, he looked at us, and the reaction on his face was like, “Is this all you could bring?” He managed to successfully make us feel terrible about giving almost all we had. And here’s the thing: I didn’t give all that money, or convince my girlfriend to give all her money because I wanted to contribute to the program. I did it because I knew that if I didn’t, he would be disappointed, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. Look how that turned out.
I remember the guy who played the piano in the church. He had no money, and he was just struggling to get by. This pastor treated him the absolute worst and spoke to him so poorly. It was terrible seeing someone get treated like that.
When my girlfriend left and my other friends left, I realised I was going to be there alone and so I left as well. I heard from other church members that he was saying terrible things about us behind our backs too. It’s people like this that make people lose faith in God and leave Christianity. I hope he’s no longer there brainwashing people and making them fear him, but I’ll be honest, he was really good at it.”
Recently, I asked people to tell me about the food issues in their relationship. I wanted to know what food-related compromise they had to make, what arguments. The result was this article 8 Nigerians Talk About Food Issues In Their Relationship.
Of all the stories I got, this one stood out: a talking stage that ended because of food. I thought it was interesting, the idea that a relationship might have happened if food didn’t change things.
I think you’ll find it interesting too.
I met this guy on Twitter, and we had been talking for a couple of months or thereabouts. Let’s call him Bolaji. We had an amazing connection, great chemistry and we literally used to talk 24/7. We even went on a couple of dates. He always said he liked me but even after going on dates, he didn’t make any move to take the relationship further. We were just stuck there. After a while, I typed up an epistle in my Notes, ready to end the talking stage which was dragging on forever. But then we had sex. Twice.
The first time it happened was a Thursday. I had something to do in his side of town; I told him earlier in the day that I would be in his area, and he said to please come visit him. It was dark when I finished up my work and I was already tired, but I’d promised him that I would come, so I went over. This was around 8pm.
He offered me a drink, but no food. I assumed it was because of how late it was, so I took the drink like that. The sex was amazing, and I knew I’d be back for more. By the end of the week, I went back. This time, the cab surge was ridiculous, so I used a BRT. It was already filled up, and for the entire duration of the journey—almost 2 hours, I stood. By the time I got to his place at about 5pm, my ankles were aching.
Again, he offered me a drink but no food. And just like the first time, I took the drink like that. After the first round of sex, he asked if I had eaten. I told him I ate a doughnut in the morning. He said okay, but still did not make any offer of food. 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, nothing. All this time, he kept mentioning how he needed to make some food for himself, but he never did anything to indicate that he was actually making the food.
I wanted to order food, but I thought it would be weird. By 9pm, my tummy was rumbling and I was planning to go back home. The surge was crazy, and I was on the app, struggling to find a cab. It was then that he stood up to go make his dinner and told me to call him if I needed anything. Eventually, I found a cab around 10pm. The fare was absurd, and the driver was annoying, but I needed to get home.
I got home around 12 midnight with mad hunger pangs. That was the trigger I needed to end it all. I sent that note the following morning.
