Atinuke* (32) grew up under the care of her wealthy father, but her childhood was marred by being cut off from her mother, accusations of witchcraft and verbal and physical abuse from her dad.
This is Atinuke’s story as told to Betty
My earliest memories are of me, my older brother and our mum in a little apartment in Ibadan, struggling to make ends meet. My mum’s salary as a secretary could barely cover even our most basic needs, but she did all she could to make it work.
I didn’t meet my dad until I was five. After years of emotionally and physically abusing my mum, he threw her and my older brother out of his house while she was pregnant with me. She built a small but stable life for us in Ibadan, doing a great job for almost five years. Then, in 1998, my dad decided he wanted his children back.
I’m still not sure what made him change his mind. I remember my mum telling me how she took me to his house when I was born, and he didn’t even bother to come outside to look at me. He also hadn’t made any attempt to find us in the five years that followed. Still, after intense pressure from both her family and his, my mum gave us up. Everyone believed my father’s wealth would offer us a better life. Looking back, nothing could have been further from the truth.
I remember the drive into his massive house in Ibadan, the compound lined with big trees, a wide lawn and two dogs — but we didn’t spend a single night there for months. Before we left, my mum packed some of my favourite clothes and toys to take with me. But as soon as we arrived, my father burned everything we’d brought from her home.
That was the first of many traumatic experiences. My dad was convinced that my mum had used witchcraft to set traps for him, using us as the conduit. So for the first six months after we arrived, we didn’t go to school. He took us to a parish of the Cele church he attended and made us live there, hoping the prayers and holiness of the place would chase out any evil spirits in us. He would leave for work but always came back to sleep with us on the church floor. He would bring us new clothes when he came to see us, but we were constantly being prayed over and watched closely.
My brother was born with a clubfoot, which my dad saw as another manifestation of my mother’s supposed witchcraft. Although it could have been easily fixed with a surgery he could afford, the parish prophet claimed to have a vision of my brother dying on the operating table, so it was never resolved. This led to my brother being shamed and ostracised by other children as we grew up. I found myself subconsciously trying to compensate: I would purposely fail in school so that my brother could shine as “the bright child.” but this only created another source of tension between my dad and me.
My father was a man of contradictions. When we finally moved from the church into the house, he kept it stocked so we were never hungry and sent us to quality schools. But the tradeoff was that he had no patience or softness. He was very hard on us, yelling or hitting us at the slightest provocation. I’ve blocked out a lot of the bad memories, but I remember shaking with fear every time he helped me with a school assignment because I knew I would get slapped multiple times. He was also generous with verbal insults, calling us everything from useless to stupid.
At some point in 1999, my dad got transferred from Ibadan to Lagos for work, but he was reluctant to have anyone watch over us in his absence. So, for about three months, we woke up very early each morning to travel from Ibadan to Lagos. My father would then drop us at school in Yaba, head to work in Ikeja, and then we’d make the long trip back to Ibadan in the evening. It eventually became clear that this wasn’t sustainable, so we moved in with one of his friends at the Yaba barracks for eight months.
We weren’t allowed to talk about my mum, and we had no way to contact her, so I was naturally drawn to the mother of the family that took us in. I saw her as my mum and treated her as such. One day, she bought a bale of second-hand clothes to share with the children of the house. Her biological kids got a new wardrobe, while my brother and I got two items of clothing each. The way she shared the clothes made it clear we weren’t her kids, and that shattered the “mother” pedestal I had put her on. I knew in my heart that my mother would never treat me like that.
During one of my dad’s visits, I told him about this and he quietly took us from that family and moved us to Lagos. It turned out that he had been paying the family a big sum to house, feed and clothe us, but the woman took most of the money and spent it on her kids.
In 2000, my father began allowing strict, supervised visits from my mum. This went on for a very short time. She wasn’t allowed to visit us at home so we would meet at the Lagos Country Club. We also weren’t allowed to talk to her. We were supposed to sit quietly so she could see we were doing well. I never listened. I missed her so much that I was always talking to her and telling her what was happening in our lives. Each time, when we got home, my father would beat me for talking to her.
The visits stopped that year when my dad started dating Yetty *, a woman who attended our Cele parish. With no cell phones at the time, we were once again completely cut off from my mum. Yetty was kind to me at first, but became increasingly wicked as she struggled to conceive for my dad. She believed I had witchcraft powers, which I was using to stop her from getting pregnant. She raised this issue so many times that my dad made me undergo multiple deliverance sessions.
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These sessions were uniquely traumatic. They would whip me with brooms for hours and make me shower with a mix of salty ocean water, perfume and holy water. The mixture would run into the welts and wounds caused by the brooms and sting for hours. I was in an incredible amount of pain for weeks because these deliverance sessions were held several times back to back. I finally got some respite when Yetty got pregnant in 2006, but I was still treated like I had evil powers. It made me act out in school, and I took my studies even less seriously while my brother outclassed his mates.
Like his previous relationship, my dad eventually became physically and verbally abusive to Yetty and my step sister, and they moved out of our house in 2008. When I was 15, I began to rebel and act out as a way to get back at my dad. My teachers noticed and decided I was a girl who needed her mum. They somehow found a way to contact her even though my father had threatened to raise hell if that ever happened.
Reconnecting with my mum soothed something in me. It was great to finally speak to someone who didn’t think I was an evil witch or useless. She got me a small phone I used to stay in contact with her till I wrote and passed my final secondary school exams.
Unfortunately, we lost touch again for a year after I finished secondary school. This was because my dad took everything away from me to put me through another traumatic round of deliverance sessions. I was so depressed and hopeless till I realised the only way I could escape his clutches was to go to school.
I missed JAMB the year I graduated because of the deliverance sessions, so I sat for the exam the following year. But that time, I failed it on purpose; something I never told anyone. Although my brother had graduated at the top of his class with an outstanding WAEC result, his JAMB scores were withheld three years in a row.
I couldn’t bear the thought of passing and ending up in the same class as him. I still carried guilt over his disability, and academics were the one thing he had that set him apart. So, in 2011, I deliberately wrote wrong answers and failed, while my brother passed and went on to study computer science.
In 2012, I managed to get my hands on another small phone and reconnected with my mum. She helped me pull through that awful year with a lot of kindness and encouragement. With Yetty gone and brother in school, I was facing the full brunt of my dad’s unpredictable anger and constant beration. My mum would call me every day — calls I had to take in secret— and encourage me to study. She would reassure me of my intelligence and her belief in me. It really helped me push through. I studied as hard as I could, passed my JAMB and got in for my dream course: pharmacy.
By that time, my father had retired and squandered his retirement money on businesses that didn’t pan out. This made funding my degree very difficult because my father was unwilling to help with the little he had left. My mother stepped up, combining her efforts with mine to see me through school. It was a tough journey, taking odd jobs, interning and studying at the same time, but having my mum back in my life kept me going through my darkest hours.
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