Sometimes, life puts you in messy situations where you’re not sure if you’re doing the right thing or not. That’s what Na Me F— Up? is about — real Nigerians sharing the choices they’ve made, while you decide if they fucked up or not.
This week, Demola*, 37, tells us about the father who abandoned him at birth and the family now pressuring him to forgive. When you’re done reading, you’ll get to vote: Did he fuck up, or not?
This is Demola’s predicament, as shared with Betty:
I remember my uncle from father’s side always hating me. Every time he visited — and he did so often — he wouldn’t look me in the eye or engage at all. When I tried to talk to my mum about it, she told me to ignore it. She said that some people didn’t like children because of how playful they are. I wanted to accept her explanation, but my uncle behaved very differently with my younger siblings.
When he brought us gifts, he would shove mine into my hands and send me away, but he’d sit and play with my siblings, watching them open theirs. To make me feel less left out, my dad would usually play with me when my uncle was around. I eventually accepted that my uncle simply hated me, and I hated him right back. I thought it was a bit funny because we looked like twins, but I figured that was why he didn’t like me.
I learnt why when I turned 16. I had just graduated from secondary school and was preparing to head to university. My uncle was visiting during that vacation after SS3, and my father called us to a special meeting. It was just him, my uncle — his younger brother — and me at our dining table. He finally told me the truth.
The man I grew up calling “daddy” was actually my uncle.
When he met my biological mum, she was a young woman in Lagos who had just started a small provisions business. For almost a year, he wooed her with stories of love, marriage and starting a family together. But when she told him that she was pregnant with me, he ran away to Bauchi, where his older brother lived with his wife.
Worried that something had happened to him, my mum became depressed. I was told she spent her entire pregnancy searching for my dad, refusing to believe that he would abandon her and her baby. She eventually gave birth, but passed away from birth complications.
For the first six years of my life, I was raised by my grandmother. We lived in Oshodi in Lagos state. I barely remember those times, but my adopted mum said I used to play with the street children, and my grandma was worried I would fall into bad company. One day, without notice, my grandma told me to get ready because we were travelling. She packed up all my clothes and shoes, but only took a change of clothes for herself and a fanny pack.
It was a long road trip. I remember falling asleep and waking up several times on the hot bus, only to see we were still on the expressway. I didn’t realise my grandma was taking me to Bauchi to confront my father for abandoning me and ultimately causing the death of her daughter. When she got to my uncle’s house, she asked to see my biological father, but he wasn’t there. When they told her that he was living like a nomad — hopping from home to home, squatting with extended family members — she kind of lost it.
For all the years she raised me, my grandma had always been very respectable and level-headed. But at my uncle’s place that day, something cracked. She started screaming and tearing off her clothes. I had never seen her act that way. She said she wouldn’t move a single step unless they provided my father immediately. My uncle was at work at the time, but he rushed home when they sent over a messenger.
He tried to calm her down, but she wasn’t hearing it. She opened the fanny pack on her waist and brought out a long strip of what looked like discoloured paper. She said it was my placenta, and when her daughter died after giving birth to me, she kept it and used it to place a curse on my biological father. She swore that he’d never have peace unless he took responsibility for me like he promised my late mother.
My uncle was visibly frustrated. Apparently, my biological father had a reputation for getting into complex situations and leaving the mess for him to clean up. He offered to raise me like his own since he and his wife didn’t have kids of their own. My grandma was reluctant at first, but eventually, she accepted his offer. She revealed that she had recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness and needed to know that I would be well taken care of.
My uncle reaffirmed his promise, and that’s how he adopted me. My grandma went back to Lagos the next day, but died of breast cancer a year later. We attended the funeral, but I didn’t fully understand how final death was at the time; it just seemed like an owambe to my young mind.
The information my dad gave me turned the food in my stomach into hardened concrete. My dad said that he was only letting me know because I was about to head out and become my own man. I was in shock. I looked at my “uncle,” but he couldn’t even look me in the eye. I became angry and said the only father I know is the one who had raised me and sent me to school. My “uncle” quickly agreed and said we should end the conversation there. We did, but the tension between us started to grow.
From that time, I developed a deep hatred for my biological father. I couldn’t believe that I had spent all of my youth in such close proximity to him, and he had never raised the topic or even gone out of his way to connect with me the way he did with my siblings.
My mum kept trying to use the tenets of our religion to guilt me into developing a deeper relationship with him, but I wasn’t interested at all. My biological father eventually got married and had four kids. When he visited with my half-siblings, who were also my cousins, he would tell them that I was their older brother and that they should respect me as such. I didn’t mind it; all my little cousins refer to me as their ‘ẹ́gbọ́n’ or older brother anyway. What I hated was that as I became more established, he kept wanting to be identified as my father.
When I graduated from university, I didn’t call him, but at the convocation party, he started acting upset. He said, “O kọ̀, o pọ́n mi lé bi ọmọ yẹ kí ó pón bàbá rẹ̀ lé.” (You don’t respect me like a son should respect his father.) I told him he wasn’t my father, and all hell broke loose. He called me names and said loudly at the party that nothing would change the fact that I was adopted, and that I wasn’t the real son of my parents. It ruined my day. My parents tried to intervene, but the damage was done.
I started keeping away from home if I knew he was visiting, blocked his number and stopped reaching out to him. In 2023, I started getting calls from strange numbers. Around June, I picked up one of the calls and found it was my biological father. He said one of his kids was sick and urgently needed money to buy some medicine, so I sent him the money. A few weeks later, he called again to say that he was having issues paying school fees, so I contributed some money for that too. Then, a little while later, he called me to ask for money again, but this time, I refused. He said that I was trying to run away from my responsibilities, and he wouldn’t let me. That actually made me laugh, coming from the king of running away from responsibilities.
In May 2024, I attended a wedding where many of my extended family members were present. The day before the ceremony, the Olori Ebi called everyone for a family meeting. At the meeting, after discussing how the traditional rites of the wedding would go, they started discussing my biological father and me. My biological father had gone to report my dad to the Olori Ebi for poisoning my mind against him and his children. He said that I only took care of my father’s children but never extended any kindness to his own. He told the Olori Ebi that his health was getting worse, and it was harder to take care of his family. He asked him to make my father “give him back his son” so I could help take on some of my half-siblings’ responsibilities, like school fees and other payments. Before anyone could respond, I said I would be doing no such thing, and that’s the source of our current friction.
The Situation Today
My adopted parents are on my side; they think that if my biological father wants a relationship with me, then he should beg for my forgiveness and try to build one with me. My extended family sees things differently. They think I should let bygones be bygones since I already got a stable childhood and schooling out of the situation. They say I should make peace with my biological father for the sake of keeping the family intact.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about the family staying intact. I love and care about the parents who raised me, and I love my siblings. But those relationships didn’t happen overnight; they were built over a lifetime of experiences together.
This man, who keeps rearing his head now that I’m a little bit successful, can’t tell me he has good intentions, especially after years of shirking his responsibilities. I see his desperate attempts to connect with me as him finding a new way to transfer the responsibility for his children to me, and I won’t fall for it.
This has been troubling my family since 2024. I haven’t been able to attend any large family gatherings because everyone keeps trying to pressure me to do what I don’t want to do. I’d rather stay away and keep my peace of mind.
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