My Dad's Life Fell Apart. When He Died, I Logged On To His Email And Made A Shocking Discovery.
Our father’s body lay on a plinth the color of gunmetal. He was covered by a simple white sheet up to his collarbone, above which his shaved head was supported by a stone headrest. Looking at him, it was as if his body had shrunk in tandem with his dissembling life.
I shivered. The visitation room in Omega Funeral Home was as cold as a meat locker, while outside the rainy season had turned Lagos into a sauna. When I grabbed my brother Femi’s hand, I was reminded of the pain that flooded me when he called with the news of our father’s death.
“Anike,” Femi started.
“I was just about to call you,” I began. “Anike,” Femi interrupted, firmer this time.
“Yeah?” I replied.
“Daddy passed away last night,” he said, “at 3 a.m.”
I asked nothing. I said nothing. I dropped my phone and slumped forward, burying my face in my hands. I felt pain so excruciating that I could not cry.
Our father, Joshua Kayode Adepitan, had been hospitalized with a fever for one day and was dead the next due to a blockage in his colon, a condition we later found out was treatable. It had been only three months since I last saw my father, during my annual visit following the New Year.
For years I arranged for my father to fly out to visit me in the U.K. to attend celebrations and to spend time with me. However, the day before he was due to arrive, he would always call to cancel with excuses about some business deal in progress or warnings from his religious prophets, who warned him about his safety and urged him to stay home and fast. So instead I traveled to him.
After his death, Femi and I had flown from our respective homes in London to Lagos to oversee the daunting task of laying to rest a once accomplished and respected man who lost everything he loved and lived the last two decades of his life as a recluse in the darkening shadows of failure and disrepute.
“We will honor him with a traditional Yoruba funeral,” Femi said, trying to console me. “We will celebrate the man he once was.”
My father was my hero growing up. He was a proud Yoruba man who clawed his way from obscurity and poverty in rural Nigeria to a life of success and respect. A natural storyteller, he commanded every room he walked into with his presence and delighted audiences with his wit. I loved listening to his tales of growing up in the colonial era, of winning scholarships to universities abroad, of meeting my British mother in Sweden, and his triumphant return home to set up two successful businesses and build a beautiful home in the affluent suburbs of Lagos.
I cherished the times he let me accompany him to his furniture factory to inspect newly completed orders waiting to be delivered to offices and hotels. I loved how he took time to explain how to identify the different types of wood by the smell and the patterns etched into the grain or when he let me ride shotgun on his speedboat as he floored the engines along the Atlantic coast, and all the times he recounted my favorite story about his grandmother, who encouraged his ambition by telling him, “You can do anything you put your mind to.” Our small family unit revolved around my father. He was our source of stability, security and fun. All I ever wanted was to be like my father.
After Nigeria’s economy collapsed under the strain of decades of military dictatorship, my father’s charter airline business was shuttered by the government, and his furniture business began to fail due to the sharp decline in demand. He stopped going to his office, playing squash at the Metropolitan Club, and traveling the world with our mother and their friends.
My father withdrew from the world, spending hours on the phone with faceless “business partners” over distant, crackling phone lines. Threatening strangers appeared at our gate at all hours of the day and night demanding money. Our mother, fearful of his new, suspicious business dealings, divorced him and fled the country, swiftly changing her name and severing all ties to him. Our father became a recluse, breaking off all contact with his large extended family and all his friends. By then, Femi and I were in our early 20s and studying abroad.
He talked of business deals in India and Switzerland involving huge sums of money that seemed implausible. He met with so-called prophets who accused his relatives of conspiring with voodoo men to cast spells on him from a distance. The permanent twitch of his jaw altered his facial expressions, and his famous laugh rang shallow. Even his clothes were different. Gone were the custom-tailored Saville Row suits. Instead he took to roaming the house in dashikis that swished along the floor, gathering dust.
“I am coming into my fortune,” he said often when I visited over the years. “I will once again emerge into Lagos society.”
“But how?” I always replied, taking in the dilapidated state of the house and the cobwebs crisscrossing the ceilings. “Who are these business partners? How can these deals be done from home?”
With each passing year, my father receded further and further from me, drawn deeper into the clutches of people I did not know. By the time of his death, at 81, my father was living hand-to-mouth in a dimly lit motel room in one of the shantytowns of Lagos.
After his death, Femi and I stumbled across his Yahoo email password scribbled on a piece of paper. Thousands of densely written messages tumbled forth when we logged on to his account — relentless communication between my father and a single individual, referred to only as World Wide World Wide. The entity had no digital profile — a virtual ghost. In those emails I discovered my father had been the victim of a most insidious long-con.
For 20 years, World Wide World Wide meticulously groomed him, luring him into upfront payment deals with a promise of phantom riches while systematically using religious radicalization and fear of voodoo to isolate him and turn him against the people closest to him. They exploited his vulnerabilities and greed, and scammed him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He lost his home, his businesses, his family and his soul. Finally I had answers to some of my pressing questions. Criminal manipulation had robbed my father of his ability to reason, to love and be loved.
The day we discovered the truth, I cried for my father ― the man who somehow found himself disjointed from his values, from his ethics, from everything he taught me to be. But most of all, I cried because I didn’t recognize the man I had unearthed from those years of emails.
None of this ― the painful memories and revelations about the con men who victimized him ― would help Femi and I with the pressing matter of how to lay him to rest. The funeral of an elder in the Yoruba tradition is not a mournful, modest affair. It is an exuberant celebration of the deceased’s life. Gorgeous outfits, sewn from the finest aso oke fabrics, must be tailored for the entire family for the occasion. Coral beads are worn to ward off evil spirits, and drummers and dancers accompany the hearse to the church. Friends from far and wide come to pay tribute, to reminisce about their departed loved one, and afterparties thunder late into the night.
When our father cut off contact with his family and friends, and our mother left Nigeria, Femi and I found ourselves adrift ― biracial children gradually losing connection with the rich fabric of their Yoruba heritage. How would we arrange a traditional Yoruba funeral for a man who had been a recluse for 20 years? Whom would we call upon to guide us?
We turned to our childhood friends, enlisting the help and counsel of their parents and contacts. For two weeks we planned our father’s funeral, taking care to align with the elaborate rites and rituals befitting a Yoruba elder. Having no contact details for our father’s extended family and friends, we put an advertisement in the Punch newspaper, which listed details of the funeral and suggested that people wear royal blue, his favorite color. Still, we fully expected to be greeted by the sad sight of row upon row of empty pews.
When the day of the funeral arrived and we neared the entrance of the church, we saw a small group of our friends had already congregated. I spotted the mothers of two of my childhood friends. They were both dressed in embroidered aso oke, trimmed with gleaming diamante. Heavy jewelry dripped from their wrists, ears and necks. They smiled as we approached in our own elaborate aso oke, their expressions bearing a look of approval. Then I spotted my father’s sister, Aunty Shola, and our cousins and relatives. They had traveled from all over Nigeria to attend the celebration, dressed in their best aso oke, accessorized with caps and head ties of royal blue. A new group appeared ― the strangers from the shantytown motel ― dressed in fashionable styles tailored from a simple brown-and-orange Ankara fabric.
As the drummers and dancers who led the funeral procession approached, everyone joined in the dancing, doling out crisp Naira notes with abandon. They threw Naira notes at us and then the dancers and drummers in turn. It was strangely joyous ― the booming music, the dancing, the smiles, the laughter ― and so at odds with the solemnity of what we were about to do.
As we made our way through the throngs of dancing well-wishers to the front of the church, the pallbearers hoisted the coffin onto their shoulders and danced it over to the entrance, swaying perfectly to the beat of the music. When the pallbearers put the coffin down, Femi and I were nudged by one of my friends’ mothers.
“Oya, put money on the coffin,” she whispered, nodding her head in the direction of the coffin. “That’s the tradition. They are expecting it.”
Femi and I dug our hands into our envelopes, retrieved Naira notes, and laid them over the coffin — note after note, until the wood paneling was completely covered. The music and dancing continued to swirl around us as others came forward to add their own Naira notes to the coffin.
“We are so happy to be reconnected with you,” my Aunt Shola said, hugging me tight. “It’s been too long.”
Inside the church, we sang “How Great Thou Art,” my father’s favorite hymn. At the reception following the burial, we danced as the Afrobeat band sang my father’s name over and over again, the beautiful call-and-response reverberating around the room.
“You did very well,” my aunt said to Femi and me later that night as she looked around the reception hall, taking in the royal blue decorations and the posters featuring our father’s smiling face. She told us how all our relatives were at a loss as to what had happened to their long-lost brother, desperate to understand what mysterious force had possessed him, thereby altering him beyond their recognition.
I wanted to say something, to offer some answers to my aunt’s questions, to describe the horror that Femi and I uncovered just days before in our father’s emails. But as I watched her sway to the call-and-response of her brother’s name, I decided against it. Our father was her older brother, someone whom she, like us, looked up to and adored. I wanted her to remember him the way he was before he disappeared into the fog of a con that destroyed him ― her beloved, accomplished, respected brother.
“Your father would have been so proud,” my aunt said finally, nodding. She reached over to Femi and me and squeezed our hands tightly.
For a long moment, we sat together in silence, watching the band as they danced perfectly in sync and continued to sing our father’s name:
Baba Kayode o
Baba Kayode we miss you
Baba Kayode we love you
Baba Kayode o
I thought of all our failed attempts to reconnect with our father. I thought of all the celebrations he missed ― graduations, weddings and births ― over the years. Time and time again we had been shut out. In death, however, Femi and I were able to finally reclaim the man we knew and loved, to honor him one last time and show him the love that we so longed to show him during his life.
Anike Wariebi is a British-Nigerian writer. She received a master’s in creative writing from Oxford University and recently completed a memoir about her estranged father, who was the victim of a decades-long scam. She lives in London with her husband, two daughters and dog. You can learn more about her memoir and writing journey here and follow her on Instagram at @anikewriter.
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