“I was born into a Christian home and my father was a clergy. Not only was he a clergyman, he was a very strict, disciplined man. He was the “old time religion” kind of Christian – no trousers, no makeup, no earrings etc. Growing up, we were not allowed to have friends in the neighbourhood; we were always at home, locked in. Since my father’s work as a clergyman always took his time, my mom was always monitoring us. So really, I didn’t have friends while growing up.
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In 2011, I lost my mother – at that time I was at the Polytechnic. It was such a devastating incident that changed my life forever. With my mom dead and my father away due to his work, I was saddled with the task of taking care of my siblings and even my dad. I became the small mommy of the house. With my dad always away and my mom gone, I began to hollow-out. I was empty inside and there was no one around to fill the void. Remember, we were not raised to mingle and have friends in the neighbourhood and so I had no friends. In other to get my mind out of the doldrum and be happy and again, it felt like not a bad idea to consider being in a relationship.
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Three men were asking me out at the time: a guy from Delta State whose stubborn traits really put me off, another guy who worked in Lagos and was very comfortable; and then the medical student in UCH. In my interactions with the comfortable Lagos guy, I realized that he never really cared about me and just wanted to sleep with me, always requesting me to come to Lagos and spend time with him. Even when I explained to him that I couldn’t because I had to care for my siblings, he dismissed my reason and said I should leave them and come to Lagos and that they’d be fine. It was in those early stages that I decided that I couldn’t be with him.
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Then there was the medical student – we began to have conversation and gradually our friendship grew. Sometimes when we interact, he’d ask me why I chose to attend a polytechnic and not a university – he would always rubbish the polytechnic. I didn’t take his comments to heart and so the friendship continued till, one day, he asked me out.
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Considering the dreary state of things at the time, and my urge to get out of the funk that came with losing my mom, I overlooked the condescension of the medical student and accepted request for a relationship. I chose him because he was someone I could see physically, not a long distance thing and I also knew one of his friends. That friend and I became close enough to have simple conversations – I could call him and talk to him if I was unsure what his friend was about. Above all, of all the three men interested in me, he seemed to be the least harmful.
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I was in school one day when a lady accosted me and asked me if my boyfriend ever mentioned to me that she was his real girlfriend and not me. It was a shocking experience. The lady was also a student in my school; she went on to advise me to steer clear of her boo who also happened to be my boo.
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Immediately after, I confronted my boyfriend. He admitted knowing the lady but denied having a relationship with her – he said she was just a friend to him. I didn’t stop at that, I went to his friend and narrated what had happened. I wanted to know if my boo was being truthful with me. In an interesting twist, the friend confirmed that my boo was also the other lady’s boo. For me, I was flustered. Still, I held on to hope against hope that my boyfriend wouldn’t lie to me. I began to think my boo’s friend had conspired with the lady and so I wasn’t so eager to believe him.
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One day, my boo’s friend called me and requested that he needed my assistance with some things; he lived in a room in UI. As I entered his apartment and asked what he needed my help with, he slammed the door and began to grope my body….”
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“I still remember very well the events of that day. I was wearing my usual SU dress: shirt and long skirt and so I really couldn’t fight freely, I was constrained already. When I began to fight him off he told me straight up that all he wanted to do was have sex with me and that there was no one around to save me if I should shout; he added that even if anyone came along, no one would believe me.
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Apart from being constrained by my skirt, I had a really small stature and so he had the advantage of strength over me. After struggling for a while and calling for help, I got weak and just gave in to him. He slept with me twice and the two times he wore condoms.
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I left his place devastated because while I was coming over to see him I never thought that my boyfriend’s friend would do something like that to me. I left his place and I couldn’t tell anyone; if I wanted to report it as a rape who would believe me? At that time, rape and #metoo movement hadn’t become a thing.
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There’s a road that connects UI and Polytechnic Ibadan, I cried all the way till I got to my hostel. It all felt like I was out of myself and I was just drifting homeward. I couldn’t believe what I had just undergone. I got to my hostel and my roommate was in. I couldn’t hide my tears and so she pestered me about what had happened till I eventually told her.
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My roommate called my boo to get him to come over so that he could console me and she put it on speakerphone. When she began to persuade him to come over, my boyfriend did not beat about the bush at all – he said it straight that he knew about what had happened. According to my own boo, he said his friend told him I was enjoying it and so I couldn’t call it rape.
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His argument was that I went there by myself when his friend invited me and that I shouldn’t have done so. He also argued that there was a bottle close to the bed and that if I was really being raped I could have used the bottle as a weapon of self-defence. While we were still wondering how he knew all the details including the bottle, he said boldly that he was the one who set me up for his best friend to have sex with me. He said it was a test and that I failed.
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As the call came to an end, he told me that despite what had happened he still loved me and that he would come around so that we can discuss how we could ‘heal’ and focus on our relationship. My roommate put her feet down that I should end the relationship and forget about him completely considering that he had set me up.
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I reminded my roommate that I had no friend and she (the roommate) was also hardly ever around. I let her realize how the loneliness and the grief of my mother’s death and the stress of looking out for my siblings were taking a toll on me and I needed someone.
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Apart from that, I felt that my past was horrible and that it was better to stick with someone who knew that past and was still willing to stay with me. For me, at the time, if my boo was willing to have me back despite all that had happened, I would take my chances.
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In my stupidity, I chose to forgive and overlook what had happened, believing that he truly loved me and that the relationship was going somewhere. Our relationship continued and a few weeks after, my boo asked to have sex with me. I rebuffed him vehemently.
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He kept asking and whenever I refused, he would make reference to the event of the past. He would say if his friend whom I didn’t love could forcefully get sex from me, why would I deny him sex even after respectfully asking for it. He made it look like I was a terrible person for turning down a polite, respectful demand for sex with me. Still, I never gave in.”
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“We were on the matter for a while and because it had festered and lingered for so long, I reasoned that, perhaps he was right; maybe it would be a different and better experience to have sex with the person I really loved. So eventually we had sex and he refused to use a condom.
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After my HND1 first semester, the school decided to rush our exams and so our schedule was hectic. Though the schedule was hectic, I realized that I always had energy and there was no problem at all. Exams ended, the hectic schedule fizzled out and that was when I realized that I was always getting weak. My menstruation was on point but only that it wasn’t flowing as it normally would.
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There was a nurse in our neighbourhood whom we always went to for health interventions whenever we were sick and so when I told her how I was feeling, she gave me an injection to normalize the menstrual flow. This was almost two months after my boo and I had sex.
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It was right about this time than an incident occurred in the house we lived at the time. After my mom died and I had to return to school, our neighbour always checked on my siblings and always ensured that they had all they needed. Besides being neighbours, we also attended the same church and so that deepened the relationship between both families.
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However, our relationship with our neighbours was a symbiotic thing. Both husband and wife had no bank accounts at the time and so whenever the husband needed to receive money from anyone, he would give my bank account to whomever was sending the money then I’d cash it and give it to him and it was no big deal because the man was like a father to us. Unknown to my own family, the couple had been having some issues in their marriage.
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One day, while I was still battling with the strange fatigue and erratic menstrual flow, the man’s wife came up to our house and publicly accused me of having an affair with her husband. It was all strange because her husband was a very decent, respectable man who never crossed his boundaries so everyone wondered what she was about. When asked if she had proof, she said she saw her husband make love to me in her dream and that I got pregnant and that her dreams were always right. The drama became a big scene; and because the church we all attended was in the vicinity, word got to the church and the church had to intervene.
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The drama became a serious allegation and eventually the church heard about it and had to intervene. My father was informed about the allegation and he stood staunchly for me – vouching that he knew his daughter was not one to lure any man let alone have sex. The leadership of the church mandated me to take a pregnancy test to prove that I wasn’t pregnant for our neighbour.
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The neighbourhood nurse who always took care of me was married to a doctor who ran a clinic and so it was at their clinic that I did the pregnancy test. Blood sample was drawn and when the result came out, the nurse told me that I had typhoid. Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she announced that I was pregnant. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to do.
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I called my roommate in school – she was the only one I could tell. She had left the hostel for the holidays and so she wasn’t at hand to sit with me and hold my hand all through that devastating phase. She asked me who was responsible and when I told her, she told me to call my boo and tell him. I did a scan just to confirm what I had always known – it revealed that the pregnancy was two months old which correlated with when I had sex with my boo.
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“Se eekan ma n d’oyun ni?!” that was what my boo said. I was so disappointed that he would say that considering that he was a medical student. How can a medical student speak those words? Obviously, he wasn’t going to take responsibility for the pregnancy.
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“I told the nurse and her husband, the doctor, everything that had happened. The nurse accused me of not giving her sufficient facts earlier on when I had visited her regarding my menstrual flow. The doctor reminded me of the condition of my family, the fate of my education and the impact that having a baby would have on my younger ones and advised that I terminated the pregnancy and that it would be D&C. I did a scan and it revealed that I was about 6weeks in. If I was going to evacuate the foetus, I had to make a move quickly; it was a race against time.
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Considering that it was my first pregnancy I didn’t buy into the idea. I had become an absolute mess; I was a young girl who was lost and was desperate for a way out. It was barely a year that my mother passed, and with my father being a clergyman I troubled me how devastating the news would be for him when I tell him I was with child considering that he was hypertensive at the time.
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I also considered how I’d raise the baby when – at that time – the family was still struggling to get by. Above all, I worried over what would become of my academics – I was still in HND2 at the time. If I should keep the pregnancy, that would be the end of school for me. I reasoned with the doctor in the end and agreed to get rid of the pregnancy.
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The D&C was done in the house and I couldn’t scream. It was such a painful and horrible experience and it was so bloody. After the D&C was done, I would go to church and I’d be riddled with guilt. At that period, it felt like the heavens were closed over me and that my prayers were unheard, I knew what I had done even if no one else knew and I could mock God.
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In the end, I moved back to my hostel and prayed Psalm 67 vigorously and I trusted God that I had been forgiven. Since a test result had to be submitted to the council of elders, the nurse invited me over to do another blood test – just to be double sure that I was in the clear.
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The result of the test showed that I was still pregnant! That meant the test could not be submitted to the church because it would serve as false evidence – a good man would have been judged wrongly; and even if they believe me that the pregnancy didn’t belong to our neighbour there would be a scandal considering my dad’s position in the church.
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I had to undergo another D&C. This second one was now worse than the first. When it was all done, I cried profusely till I got back to my hostel. Three days after the evacuation, I did a third scan that now revealed that there was no more pregnancy. That last test was the test that was submitted to the elders in church eventually. The matter was heard by the council and since the test showed no pregnancy, the matter was dismissed but my neighbour’s marriage completely fell apart. I totally cut off my relationship with my boo too.
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I began to spend more time in school after the whole thing was over till I was done with my HND program. The environment at home had begun to affect me and so I knew I needed to change my environment. I left Ibadan once school was over. After this whole incident had blown over, I found that the girl who had come to confront me saying I was dating her boyfriend had also got pregnant for him and had given birth to the child.
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I met my husband many years after these events happened and when he insisted that he wanted to marry me, I sat him down and explained all that had happened to him. If I was going to get into a union with any man, I felt compelled to let him know about the past especially given how the whole D&C had panned out so that if for any reason there was a drag in childbearing, he won’t say he never knew or that I deceived him.
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I didn’t think he’d stay but when I was done, he said every man has a past and that he also had his own past too and so he couldn’t judge me. He said all that mattered to him was me settling my issues with God and that he still wanted me nonetheless.
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It’s many years since this all happened look back on it all now and I see it was my mistake – I was in a haste to have someone to give me attention and be a companion that I became blind to the signs that should have been red flags. I’m sharing this to serve as a lesson and, maybe, a guide for someone out there who feels so alone and is desperately seeking companionship.
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(Ibadan, 2021)
