After We Left, My Stepfather Tried to Snatch Me From Church

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Angel Nwankpa was six when her mother married the man who became her stepfather. She remembers a fight at the wedding, years of violence at home, and the times her mother took the children away only to return. When they finally left in 2016, Angel was 16.

This Is Angel’s Story As Told To Zia

Before my mum married, it was just the two of us. She and my biological father had dated for a long time. When she got pregnant, he said he wasn’t ready and didn’t want anything to do with the pregnancy. My mum told him she was ready, and he could go. She raised me as my sole parent. He came around my naming ceremony, and maybe once when I was four, and again, but beyond that, he never contributed anything. I only really got to know about him as I grew up.

We lived in a comfortable family house with my grandma, my auntie and my cousins. My mum was big on family, and she supported them a lot. Life was good, and everything was okay.

My mum had been doing well for herself before the marriage. She was a Lagos big girl, if I could say that. She joined her church in her early 30s, when I was a few months old, not even a year. Before then, she wasn’t really religious. She could go to church for a crossover service, but she didn’t have to go every Sunday. She found a place where she felt she belonged and became deeply involved, especially with the leaders. They were men, and she was friends with them and did business with them. They became family friends and came to the house for religious duties, and just as friends.

In that church, they believed marriage is the best thing you can do for yourself, and the talk about settling down never stopped. She didn’t feel like she was getting old, but with everyone saying it, she thought, since they’re saying this, I might as well look for somebody. They set her up with a couple of people. None of them worked out until the man she married, who was from the same place as one of her close friends. It took a while for them to wear her down. By then, she was in her mid-30s.

I was six when my mum married my stepfather in 2006. I came into that family with her, and my earliest memory of his behaviour is from their traditional wedding. He got into a fight with my mum’s cousin. The party had to end, and I remember the tension afterwards. My mum tried to calm him down before they left. Even as a child, I could see how aggressive he was. I didn’t know then that this was what life with him would be like.

When they married, he told her to stop working. That mattered later, because when she left him, she didn’t have her own income to fall back on. Her siblings supported us, but money was one of the reasons we went back.

He was violent towards my mum from the beginning. The physical violence is what I remember seeing, but there were other forms of violence, too. Usually, we kept what happened inside the family, even though people knew. One day, when he was beating her, I got so scared that I ran out to bang on our neighbours’ door. Their flat was only a couple of steps away, across the staircase. I could see shadows moving inside and even see people peeping, but nobody opened the door. I think I was nine then, maybe ten.

He came after me, dragged me back in and held me by my throat against the window. He lifted me off the floor. I can’t remember what made him stop. My neck hurt for days; it was painful to swallow, and my mum made me pap because she didn’t want me struggling with solid food.

Afterwards, our relationship went back to what passed for normal. He would say sorry, hug me, kiss my cheek, and everybody would carry on. When daddy’s back, you’ve got to be happy. It wasn’t that nothing had happened. We just suppressed it.

There was a pattern in the house. Something he said my mum had done would create hostility for a few days. The pressure would keep building until there was an outburst. On one occasion, he threatened to kill himself, my mum and all of us.

He is the firstborn of his family, and one week, he and my mum had travelled to his village for his lastborn’s wedding, where he had firstborn duties to perform. As usual, he couldn’t control himself. He chased somebody with a dagger, a much younger guy. In Igboland, that is an abomination. He ended up scattering the wedding. It didn’t hold because of him.

My mum made them leave the village quickly, and it’s a good thing she did. His uncle later told him that if he had not left when he did, they would have stripped him naked and all the youths of the village would have gathered to flog him at the town square. That was their tradition.

When they got back to Lagos, the village sent him a letter excommunicating him. For a man who prided himself on being a real Igbo man, a traditional man, it was a deep shame. And the best way he knew to express his shame was to threaten to kill himself, kill my mother, and kill all of us. My mum begged him, and he said he wouldn’t kill us, only himself. He told her to take the children and leave.

We started packing quickly. My mum kept telling us we needed to go, but when it was time to leave, we couldn’t find the gate or the car key. We were stuck there while he was making these threats. Eventually, he calmed down, cried and apologised for scaring us. After the usual hugging and making up, the keys appeared. The gate key had been in his pocket, and the car key was in his wardrobe. Then life went back to normal again.

Another time, I didn’t feed his dog when I was supposed to, and he beat me so badly that my hand was injured. This was around 2014. People kept asking what had happened, so I said I’d cut myself in the kitchen. One woman we bought tomatoes from didn’t believe me. She pressed until I told her the truth, and she and her husband were sympathetic. All those questions made me so self-conscious that I bandaged my hand to stop people from looking at it.

Through all of this, my mum and I became closer. We were like sisters in arms, fighting on the same side. When she was expecting my siblings, she would buy baby books for herself and her husband to read. But it was usually the two of us reading them and talking about what we’d learned. I was the first child, and I noticed things. In many ways, it was my mum and me together.

My mum always tried to leave, but we always ended up going back. In 2015, she left while pregnant with our lastborn. At that time, it looked final. She rented an apartment and was getting it ready for us. She took everything she could: the car and its keys, the furniture, the properties. She was on her way to furnishing the apartment. And this was close to her delivery date when she had a car accident, and that is what made us go back. The reason she left was the same as before: the violence, the negligence, and his mental instability. returned to him, and the violence continued.

We finally left in November 2016. He had gone to work, and my mum took my three siblings and me away. We were practically running, looking over our shoulders and hoping he wouldn’t come back before we got out. This time, we didn’t clear out the house. We took only a few clothes and left so much behind. I still remember my favourite red shoe. I will never forget that shoe. It was left in the spoils of war.

We went to stay with my mum’s elder sister. It was a full house: my aunt, her daughters, her grandchildren, my grandma, my mum, my siblings and me. After we left, my stepfather started saying my mum had taken his children and his family away. I didn’t call him. I was glad my mother had taken us out. Why would I reach out to him?

In December, I went to church with my aunt, my cousin and my cousin’s children. My mum, grandma and siblings stayed at home. It was a different branch of the church we had attended as a family, though we’d been there before. In the middle of the service, someone came and tried to drag me away. I saw my stepfather, and I saw that another man was with him. I refused to go with them. The chaos caused people in the church to look, a crowd formed and started asking what was happening. Everyone could see these men trying to take me in broad daylight.

Afterwards, people from the church went after them, but my stepfather got away at first. We ended up at a police station, and someone called my mum. She came immediately. I can’t tell you the exact sequence of everything the adults did that day. I was there, but I had zoned out. I think I was in shock.

What I remember clearly is coming back into the police station after going outside and hearing one of the policemen shouting. That was when the fear finally reached me, and I started crying. He shouted at me for crying, which didn’t help. My mum came and took me away from him. I can’t remember how the case ended or what, if anything, was done to my stepfather.

That was not the last time I saw him. He still came to where we were staying to see my siblings. I remember walking past him in the sitting room once without greeting him. He stared at me, but by then I had checked out of whatever relationship we’d had. I haven’t spoken to him since the incident, as far as I can remember. I think the last time I saw him was in 2017, before I went to school.

Leaving didn’t take away the closeness between my mum and me. With him gone, we could talk about my future without him interrupting, and my mum has always been the one who told me to do whichever path I liked. She studied the arts herself.

He was the opposite. He put me in science class throughout secondary school, with the mindset that science is the best one, where level-headed, better people and careers are found. He used pressure and violence to push me on that path. I had always been interested in the arts, but I ended up studying microbiology, partly because of him.

I went to university about a year after we left, or not even two years. That was where I started to see that what happened had really affected me. As outgoing as I am, I was still very timid. In church, I was a good public speaker, but I was always nervous because if I didn’t do my church talk well, he would come home and berate me. After we left, I realised I had taken on some of that timidity. His shouting, his violence and his coercion had gotten into me.

It also made me avoidant. I couldn’t navigate conflict, and I didn’t want to go back to spaces where I felt conflicted. In my first year, my first time living in a hostel, there were six, seven, or eight of us in a room. If four people were fighting, I would leave. I couldn’t deal with it. I like it when everybody is happy. I don’t like seeing people frown.

Sometimes I felt like I was her co-parent, along with my siblings. I don’t know whether growing up that fast helped me, but it happened.

Living with my stepfather for so long also made me alert to patterns in other people. I keep my eyes open, especially in my relationships with men. I don’t think you have to believe there’s one Prince Charming and stop paying attention to what someone actually does. But I’ll be honest: it didn’t protect me completely.

I got married in 2023, and the man I married was one of my closest male friends from church. If you had asked me years ago who my close male friends were, he would have been one of the first names I would have given. When I was about four months pregnant, we went to court. By five months, it became evident that he wasn’t really who I thought he was.

The switch-up was so fast. It became, “I have you here; we got married because you’re pregnant; you don’t want shame to come to you.” He also played on the fact that I wouldn’t want my child to come from a broken home, because I came from one. He even said it: I had no choice but to make it work, or everyone would see me as a failure like my mum.

My mum is not a failure. I have never seen her as one. If she hadn’t left, either she would have died, or one of us would have, or all of us. It’s the general patriarchal thought that makes the parent who stayed and kept the children safe look like the one who destroyed their children’s lives. When I left, he told me I was going to spoil my daughter’s life the way my mother spoiled mine.

By the time I gave birth, I had postpartum depression. He was neglectful, verbally abusive, financially abusive and emotionally abusive, too. The only one he didn’t get to was physical abuse, but he had violent traits, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he started hitting me. I did not want to wait for that.

I think I’m even a little thankful to my stepfather, because he made me spot the signs fast. When he was angry, he would break doors and bust locks. In every house we lived in, the doors were never the original ones. They were refurbished, replaced, or the locks were. We nicknamed him Buster Rhymes. It’s our code word for him even now, and nobody calls him by his real name anymore. One day, my ex did something like that. I felt like six people slapped me at once, and someone dumped a bucket of ice blocks on me. If I was in a trance before, I woke up that day. My daughter was a month or two old.

My mum had seen where it was going, and she reminded me: Angel, give yourself a timeline. I didn’t pull you out of where we were before, so you’d have to go through this again. When my daughter was about two or three months old, I told myself I would stay until she was a year, so I could have his support with the baby before I found my feet. I couldn’t. As soon as she turned six months, I left. We hadn’t even gotten to a year of marriage. It was 11 months.

My mum and I had sat down and gone over what she did wrong or could have done better as she was leaving. So I knew what I needed to do. I knew I had to cut off the church people and not entertain any explanations or mediation efforts, because they’re all manipulative. I needed to keep my wits. So I cut everybody off. People were angry. How dare Angel? Who does she think she is? He had his excuse: because I was refusing mediation, he didn’t provide for my child.

Even when I was leaving, my mum did not know I was leaving for good. When I got to her place, I told her, Mummy, I’m not going back, and she said, ” No problem, I respect your decision. Then I started telling her things I had hidden because I didn’t want her to worry. I’ve experienced less interference than she did when she left because I knew what to cut off and who to cut off. I haven’t heard from him in over a year. I’m the sole provider for my daughter, and I really don’t care. My peace is more important.

Before my ex, I would say I recovered from what my stepfather did. After my ex, I never recovered. That was 2024, and I haven’t been with anybody romantically since. I have no plans to. I used to brag that no boy had ever broken up with me, because I always broke up with them first. I was very strict with men.

But I underestimated the influence of religion and the church, and that’s how I let him in. He knew my background and my mum’s background, even though I never told him everything. I felt he had abused my trust and broken the most important thing. I only started recovering this year. I’ve never really been to therapy because it’s expensive, but I’m getting into it this year. I realised I never fully healed in my relationships with men.

I don’t really trust men now. In my spare time, when I have money in my pocket and my belly is full, I wonder when I’ll trust them again. On a normal day, I’m too busy hustling to take care of my child and myself.

Now I’m pursuing my passion in the arts. My career spans both the arts and marketing. I still like science, and I may go back to it in my master’s, but it’s not a priority. I don’t want to suffer for money in a role I don’t enjoy just because it pays more. I’ll be 26 this month, and I feel like I’ve lived 40 years on earth through those 10 years alone. I just want to do fun things, meet fun people and enjoy life. I’ve been through enough, and I don’t want any more traumatic experiences.

What happened also put advocacy for women at the front of my mind. All the things we had to fight after we left- financially, psychologically, health-wise and mentally- I’ve not done up to 1% of what I want to do for women in abusive homes and relationships. It’s one of the things that fuels me to work as hard as I do. I want enough money and connections to give women, children, and anyone in that situation the help we didn’t have.

I hope anyone in a situation like ours can find a way out, whether on their own or with help. The earlier you get out, the better.