What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Amara Ogara, a 32-year-old Nigerian businesswoman, storyteller, content creator and filmmaker known online as Amara the Lesbian. She talks about growing up Igbo in the North, the complicated love she carries for parents who hurt her and shaped her, meeting the woman who became her wife, and reclaiming a word people once used to silence her.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is Amara Ogara. A lot of people call me Glory now because it is my first name and my work name, but Amara is what I respond to instinctively. Sometimes I forget I am Glory.

I am a businesswoman. I am a storyteller. Many people found me and connected with me through my stories. I believe in using stories as a medium to raise social awareness and drive impactful change in society, because what people see, they believe. What they believe, they can become.

I am a multidimensional creative, although I am currently working inside the corporate system in America. I recently completed a master’s programme and am now in the workforce, but I still identify as a creative. A storyteller. A filmmaker, because I know that at the end of everything, I will be making films. I still share my stories through my social media platforms.

And I am a lesbian. A married one. My wife is Nigerian, too. We have been together for eleven years and counting.

Where did you grow up?

I am the second-born and first daughter of an Igbo man and an Igbo woman, and I always mention that because being Igbo adds a specific layer of context to your Nigerian experience.

My parents met in Kano. I was born in the North. My dad was born in 1960, which means he was seven years old when the Biafran War started. My mum was born in 1970, the year the war ended. They were babies during that time. I never really understood what that meant until I became an adult and started reading and understanding my Igbo history, and what war leaves behind in the hearts of children, fathers and mothers who survive it. I feel like I was touched by that war even though I was not born during it. In some ways, because of my father. That trickle-down is real.

What was your father like?

Complex. My father struggled enormously with his anger, his temper, and his temperament, and I was a huge recipient of that struggle. He believed in spare the rod, spoil the child, so my dad would not spare the rod. He would spoil the rod, and so many rods were spoiled on me. I went to school with scars on my back. There was one time there was a scar on my face from the rod. I had so much anger toward my dad growing up. So much.

But I also want to say this, because it is the truth: my dad is a beautiful man, too. He was an artist. He would make our hair, plait it, relax it, and massage my mum’s feet. He created artworks. He taught us how to soak paper in water, let it soften, pound it, and then use the pounded pieces to make sculptures. He was a fantastic artist with a fantastic mind. He has had a stroke for the past fourteen years or so, and he is different now, but the person I grew up with was both. Both things are true at the same time.

What kind of child were you in all of that?

A pendulum. Going from one end of rebellion to one end of people-pleasing.

When I was in people-pleasing mode, I would not wait to be told to make the bed. If I knew Mummy liked the bed made, before she came back from the market, I would have already done it. I wanted her to feel good when she walked in. I wanted her to laugh. I wanted her to be happy.

But I was also the kind of child who would steal money from my parents. Because you beat me yesterday or last weekend, I am going to school now, and I want to buy minerals for my friends and eat shortbread, but I do not have the money for that, so I will take it. I cannot talk about my childhood without talking about how much I stole from them, and I say it honestly because I remember that child. That child struggled deeply with powerlessness and hated it. My mum had a restaurant and was bringing in cash daily, so I would take 200, 100, or 50 naira. Just enough for Coke and shortbread for my friend and me. That was the whole deal.

Underneath all of that, though, I was carrying a deep sadness. I was very depressed growing up. Some days, I would be crippled in bed and just crying, or wake up in tears like I had been running in my dreams, running from my father and his cane. I struggled with intense darkness for years. There was a period where I genuinely did not think I was going to make it to 30. Not that I was going to act on it, but it lived as a quiet background thought: “I am not going to live long anyway. Let me just experience what I can and then go.” It took growing up and fully understanding myself to realise where all of that was actually coming from.

But I was also a loving child. I loved my siblings. Something about experiencing my father’s anger made me want to be everything he wasn’t. I learned very early to communicate my frustration without raising my hand because I had experienced what it felt like to be on the receiving end, and I never wanted to pass it on to anyone smaller than me. My siblings called me a crybaby. Every small thing, Amara is crying again. But funny enough, they would do anything to avoid seeing me cry.

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What values came out of that upbringing?

Hard work, above everything. We would wake as early as 4:30 am to handle our responsibilities. My elder brother and I were in charge of opening the Santana leather, the ones used to roll eba and semo, getting them ready before the cooking started. Food was leaving for the shop by 6 or 7 am, so everyone was already in the process before the sun was properly up.

My parents also raised us to understand money very early. If the mai ruwa would normally be paid to fetch water, my mum would offer to pay us instead. So even as small children, we were calculating: let me go and fetch this water and make this money.

I had my own farm at eight years old. My father had unused land around the house. He said I could farm whatever I wanted, so I bought aleho (the Hausa name for a fast-growing leafy vegetable widely known as African spinach) seeds, planted them, harvested them, tied them into bunches, and hawked them. I had my own system for making money while also earning from my parents’ system.

Everywhere I go, I introduce myself as a businesswoman because I am constantly looking for money-making opportunities. When I walk into a room, trust that I have already found the demand and the supply chain. That comes entirely from that childhood.

What were you like in school?

A storyteller. If you ran a public poll and asked people who knew me from secondary school what they remember, I guarantee you would find someone saying, “That senior who would always tell us stories.”

After prep class, I would ask, “Who wants to hear a story?” And junior students would gather around my bunk, scatter into corners around me, someone calling from the top bunk, “Senior Amara, talk louder so we can hear from here.” I would make up stories on the spot. I still do this with my wife. When she is feeling a certain way, I say, “Should I tell you a story?” and I just create something right there.

I was also known for generosity. I am a big believer that nobody should starve around you. If there is food, share it. I was known for that, stories and trouble. I was mischievous and goofy. Still am. Just slightly more reserved now, if I do say so myself.

You mentioned feeling a deep sadness growing up, like something was off, but you couldn’t name it. When did you start to understand what that was?

Not until my early twenties, genuinely. Growing up, I was not exposed to anything that gave me that awareness. My siblings and I watched Diego and Paloma, When You Are Mine, Esmeralda, Super Story, and Nigerian movies my mother rented from the shop. Nothing that explored same-sex relationships. It was completely outside my radar until I was about 19 and I watched Blue Is the Warmest Colour.

That movie stayed in my mind, both conscious and subconscious, for almost a year. The character Ad竪le had so much of me in it. I had always gotten along well with boys, had good friendships, and had good banter. But once it came to romance, it always felt like I was giving them an upgraded friendship. I did not understand the disconnect.

I started learning about boy-girl relationships around 13 or 14. I even set a rule for myself that I would not date until I was 18. On my 18th birthday, there were boys waiting, and I had to pick one. Even after I did, it always felt like a weird chore. Every time I thought about the future, I did not even know what to think. Looking back, that depression was wrapped up in everything I had not yet understood about myself. I was carrying so much that I could not yet name until I got into university.

What was university like?

I went to Eastern Mediterranean University. That distance from my family and from Nigerian culture genuinely helped. It created space for things I would not have had space for back home.

In the first semester, I was out with a friend. We went dancing, drank, and on the way back in the Uber, we were cuddling into each other, and it felt so natural to look at her and ask if I could kiss her. She said yes. I asked if she wanted to come back to my dorm. She said yes. That was my first physical, sexual experience with a woman.

The next morning, she woke up, and we went straight back into friend mode. We never spoke about it. Not once. Not until thirteen years later did we finally have a proper conversation about what had happened between us. In the moment, it was just something that lived between us in silence. What we do in the darkness we do not talk about in the light. During the day, I was her friend, she knew my boyfriend, I knew her boyfriend, and that was that.

You had a boyfriend at the time? How were things with him?

He was actually one of my closest friends. We were like best friends. We talked about everything, including non-monogamy and my feelings for women. It was not like I was hiding things from him. He knew me in ways that most people did not.

When I met my wife for the first time while still with him, I came home and told him I had met this person and I really, really liked her. He understood. Our relationship ended because of how much I liked her. I eventually lost that friendship because he couldn’t just be my friend anymore, but I have never regretted the choice.

Can you tell me about meeting your wife?

She punched me on the school bus by accident. Every time we ran into each other after that, she would say, “Oh my God, I am so sorry about the other day!” This went on for about a year. One afternoon, she came to find me while I was sitting outside the department and said she just wanted to say sorry again. I told her, “Girl, you need to find something new to say to me. You cannot keep saying the same thing all the time.” We laughed. We talked.

She had grown up queer in Nigeria. She had dated women since she was a teenager. She was the first real-life lesbian that I ever actually experienced, and I was completely mind-blown. She had so many stories, so many experiences.

And then one day, we were taking a walk, and I asked her what she thought about marrying a woman. She stopped walking, looked at me, and said something about how some things are sacred and should stay sacred, that marriage is not for people like us.

And I stood there thinking, wait. I understand the world is against you, but why are you not on your own side?

That conversation changed everything for me. I walked back to my dorm with this conviction in my heart that I wanted to shift the world for this person. Even if I could not change everything that was wrong with it, I wanted to change the way she saw herself in it. The next day, I started talking about her. I told my friends. I talked about her on YouTube. I made a video about kissing a girl. I just started talking, and I did not have a game plan. All I wanted was for the idea of being with a woman to feel as normal as being with a man. Years later, I started going by Amara the Lesbian.��

When did you become certain you are a lesbian?

Before I met Yinka, my wife, I had been telling myself I was pansexual. I like people. I am attracted to people. That is what I kept saying while I was still dating boys.

Then I remember the first time Yinka and I were intimate, and I thought, yo, this is exactly what it should feel like. That was also, coincidentally, the very first time I had an orgasm in my life. And I lay there thinking, my body is not actually broken. I can feel things. I can actually feel things. Because before that, I had genuinely wondered: Is something wrong with me? Is my body broken? Did my father break my body with all those canes? It had always felt like a chore with boys. Something I would do to reward someone, or run away from when I could.

With Yinka, I understood. I stopped saying pansexual and started saying what I actually was. You like women. You like women, women, women.

You mentioned you had started making YouTube videos about this around this time. Did your family ever find them?

I wasn’t really hiding. I was documenting my life on Snapchat, bits and pieces. I hosted a River9ja Network event where I talked about having a girlfriend. People back home heard, and somebody told my parents. To this day, I do not know which video they found or exactly how they heard about it. I just know they heard while I was still in Cyprus.

At the time, I was working so hard to sustain myself. From the day I landed in Cyprus, I was looking for ways to make money. I brought two bags from Nigeria, one full of foodstuffs and another full of hair attachments, human hair, relaxers, and combs to sell to girls in my dormitory. I made enough to save 500k to 600k in my GTB account that first semester without touching the money sent from home.

Later on, I started cooking for students, especially Yahoo boys who were my primary customers. I was cooking for them like mad, making $200 to $300 a day. I also wrote academic papers for students before ChatGPT existed.

By my fourth semester, I was paying my own school fees out of pocket. I even enrolled in a master’s program in film in Cyprus, paid the first instalment to renew my residence permit, and then realised I would rather use that tuition money to buy land and build a business back home. My wife and I pooled our money together and bought land in Nigeria.

Because I was paying my own way and sending money back home, I was the breadwinner. And I have learned something very clearly in my journey as a lesbian: Dem no dey challenge breadwinner. Everybody moves accordingly around a breadwinner. My parents did not say anything directly to me until I came back to Nigeria in 2019.

What happened when you came back to Nigeria?

I built a poultry farm in the village, about 15 minutes away from my childhood home. I bought land, fenced it, built the structures, and bought birds. I was running a real commercial business. I was showing up at my farm by 6 am, feeding my birds, doing the physical work alongside my workers, supplying eggs to airport caterers, and selling meat to slaughterhouses.

Because I had tools, resources, security, and a small farm car, money shielded me inside that village. I was oblivious to much of the gossip about me because I was so focused on calculating feed costs, managing supply chains, and poaching customers.

But my cash flow had changed since I had been abroad, making dollars. When that financial interaction changed, the resistance surfaced. Instead of people being honest and saying, “You are back home now and not sending as much money,” they started saying, “Oh, your sexuality, we don’t accept your sexuality.”

And I was not taking it lightly. We trended because I was not going to absorb it. There was a day my mum was saying what she was saying, and I just picked up my phone, recorded my goodbye saying I was not coming back to that house, and posted it. That video went viral on Instablog9ja and everywhere. That was the height of our falling out.

Half the time, most people do not actually care what you are doing with your life. What they care about is what they can benefit from you. When it is beneficial to be associated with you, they are. When it is not, they will use any available excuse. Sometimes that excuse is your sexuality.

I���m sorry you went through that. You mentioned calling yourself Amara the Lesbian publicly during that period. Where did that name come from?

People had been using that word to try to silence me for years. My housemate in Cyprus called me a bloody lesbian during an argument. My elder brother, during a disagreement, said at least his own was better because he was not a lesbian. Every time someone said that word to me in a high-energy moment, I would go quiet because they had called the word that was not supposed to be called.

Then one day in Nigeria, I was walking and heard children whispering, “That is her, that is Amara the Lesbian.” And I heard that name, and I thought: Amara The Lesbian? That is such a powerful name.

That was the beginning. I changed my YouTube name. I started saying it constantly. At first, the word tasted funny in my mouth. Now I say lesbian so much it sounds like my surname. It sounds melodic and sweet. Sometimes, with my friends, I just say “l-lesbian.” I love the way my tongue does lesbian.

I took the power from the word by becoming the one who called it first. So before you can say, “Oh, you’re a lesbian,” I have already said it. No be for my page you hear am? You cannot use it to insult me anymore. And funny enough, since then, nobody has tried.

That���s truly empowering. After you moved back to your farm in Nigeria, was there a specific moment that made you realise that living here was becoming unsustainable?

It happened gradually, especially after the farm closed down and I had more time to feel. But #EndSARS was the turning point.

During #EndSARS, my wife and I were unemployed. News started circulating locally via WhatsApp that my partner and I were instigating youths to fight for queer laws, when we were fighting for EndSARS. Local clickbait headlines made us scapegoats in a community that didn’t even understand the mainstream Twitter conversations.

Things became hostile fast. One night, we went to dispose of our trash and met vigilantes who were usually friendly, but that night, they were stubborn. A local man drove up in his car and tried to confront my wife. When she ignored him and walked away, he started his car and drove directly toward her. The next thing I saw was Yinka on the bonnet of his car. I completely froze in terror, reaching out and pulling my wife close to me.

After #EndSARS, our daily experiences became openly confrontational. We started escaping to town or travelling to Lagos for weeks at a time just to be away from the village’s hostility.

When Yinka left Nigeria in September 2021 to finish her PhD, I went completely underground. I stayed inside my gated compound, planted crops, made self-care videos, and minded my business. My heart was broken from being in the public eye without boundaries.

By 2023, I told myself, “Guy, you either pour yourself into work or you kill yourself.” So I poured myself into making an independent short film. We produced it, screened it in Lagos and Abuja, and got selected for the Lift-Off First-Time Filmmakers festival in the UK.

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How did you end up leaving Nigeria, and how did your wife become your wife legally?

In April 2023, my wife called me from the US in tears. She was lonely and terrified of facing another winter alone. I promised her right on that call that I would be with her by next winter. That same day, I started applying for master’s programs in the US. I got accepted, did my interview, and left Nigeria on December 22, 2023. I graduated with my master’s in December 2025, and six months later, I entered the corporate workforce here.

When I landed in America, the transition was so freeing. I felt like a human being again. I could walk around, arrange our home, shop at the supermarket, and drive.

We had been talking about getting married since 2023, but we both had fairy-tale ideas and didn’t want to rush a legal process out of pure necessity. But by January 2025, we looked at each other and said, “Why are we not married?” It would make a lot of things easier for us. We know we want a fairy tale, but we can���t afford that right now. That doesn���t erase the love. So on February 15, 2025, we gathered our close friends and signed our marriage certificates. We are legally married now, though we still plan to have our big fairy-tale wedding ceremony someday when we are ready.

That���s beautiful. You recently posted a video tapping your wife out at her military graduation. What did that moment mean to you?

It took so much to get to that point! My wife is an incredible person who loves to challenge herself. She already has a BSc, two master’s degrees, and a PhD, but she wanted a new challenge and decided to join the US military.

On the day of her tapping-out ceremony, I thought she was going to be the one crying, but I started crying on the drive there. I was in complete awe, thinking, “Look at me, the Nigerian lesbian Amara, driving onto a US Army military base because my wife is being tapped out as a US soldier!” It felt completely surreal. I will frame that day in the wall of my heart forever.

What has this freedom you have outside Nigeria taught you about yourself?

I had to learn how to hold joy. In Nigeria, I was constantly on guard, waiting for the worst to happen. I used to associate myself only with power, never beauty. When I looked in the mirror, I only checked if I looked powerful enough to step outside.

Here, I had to learn the necessity and responsibility of beauty. Beauty is a testament to self-devotion and self-care. I built strict discipline for myself. I wake up at 4:00 am every single day for my workout classes, whether it is Solid Core, Jungle classes or Saturday runs. I limit myself strictly to one weekend cocktail, I watch my sugar intake because I realised sugar makes me sad, and I treat my body with care.

I also do deep inner child work. People see a hard guy on the outside, but when I take off my clothes at night, there is a little broken girl sitting in the boardroom of my mind. I commune with her, I talk her through my day, and I protect her fiercely. For the first time in my life, I have the privilege of loving myself, spreading out, and genuinely feeling like a human being.

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I���m happy for you. Is your relationship with your family different today?

Not once, but twice, has my father apologised to me for my childhood. Apology does not change the scars or the memories, but I am grateful that I am now dealing with an evolved mind. My mum also tries. When I bring something up and say it was painful, she says, “I’m sorry.” Back in the day, she would have said, “You don’t see what we sacrificed for you.” Now there is a real conversation. Now there is an acknowledgement that where they were was not okay.

I am experiencing restoration. I am experiencing forgiveness. I am experiencing what it feels like to choose healing. And my parents are a part of that. I am genuinely grateful for that.

You mentioned your community of friends earlier. What has that community meant to you?

It is great to be a lesbian with lesbian friends, I am telling you! It makes everything so much more navigable. Even right now, being a married Nigerian woman married to another Nigerian woman is a foreign concept, but having lesbian friends who are on their way to getting married or are already married makes you feel understood.

Amara, the Lesbian brought so many incredible friends into my life. I had to learn boundaries, discernment, and emotional regulation along the way, but having that community saved me.

What do you think the version of you who was still in Nigeria would say if she could see your life now?

I think she would say thank you. Every version of me that came before did her absolute best to take care of this house we live in and contribute to the journey. None of them tried to destroy my temple. I look back at the version of me in Cyprus and the version in Nigeria, and I say, “Thank you, really, thank you.”

What do you want people, especially queer Nigerian women, to take from your story?

Stay focused on your empowerment. Look out for yourself. Protect your retirement. Think about who you will be as an older woman. Invest in things that will take care of you.

My sexuality is a constant reminder to hustle and stay financially independent. ���Na lesbian you be o! Lesbian.��� I remind myself. It���s also made me more intelligent and more aware. I think from a more refined and seasoned place than I did when I did not yet know I was a lesbian. It has been a lot. I have learned so much. One day, I should gather my thoughts into a book. But in all things I know this: I am capable of my life, and I stay capable.��

And if someone has used a word to shame you or silence you, take the word. Wash it. Bathe it. Remove the shame from it. Carry it so loudly that they can never use it against you again.

That is what I did. I became Amara the Lesbian so fully that the name now sounds like the most natural thing in the world. Because it is.

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What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Temi*, a 39-year-old project and product manager based in Lagos. She talks about the women who came before her, the sister who raised her and died too soon, a marriage she rushed into and walked out of two years later, and the decade she spent building a life so solid, but loneliness still found a way in.

Can you tell me about yourself?

I am thirty-nine, I live in Lagos, and I work in project and product management. I started out as a civil servant, which I don’t talk about much because it feels like a different life now. When my marriage ended in my late twenties, I needed something to hold onto that was entirely mine, something that answered only to me, and I used that need to rebuild my career from the ground up. I pivoted, studied, pushed, and have been rising steadily over the decade since. Work has been the one place where the effort I put in has reliably come back to me. I cannot always say the same for other areas of my life.

I travel when I can, mostly across Africa. I have built some financial stability. I have a life that looks, from the outside, like something a person should be grateful for. And I am. I am genuinely proud of what I have made of myself. And I am also very lonely.

Why do you feel so lonely?

I think it comes from wanting to share something with someone and realising there is nobody to share it with. I have people in my life. I have friends, family, and colleagues I respect. But there is loneliness that has nothing to do with how many people are around you, and to understand why I am sitting here at thirty-nine feeling this way, you have to understand where I come from and the women in my family.��

Tell me more.

My mother was seventeen when she had my older sister, the product of a marriage to a man who eventually abandoned them both, leaving her with my sister and a son who later died. She eventually remarried almost 10 years after and had my brother, then me. That second marriage lasted five years before she walked out after fights that left emotional and physical scars on them and us, the children. For the next eleven years, she raised us mostly on her own, making a life from whatever she could gather and her teaching, with my brother and me going from her house to our father’s across the years, until a third man came and turned out to be something she had probably stopped believing existed.

This man was kind to her. Genuinely kind. He noticed things and remembered them. He showed up without being asked, which makes a woman feel loved and like she has a true partner rather than someone who has simply assigned her a role to fill. He was even romantic with her. My mother, in her forties, after everything that had come before, finally had the love she deserved. She had two more sons with him. Then he died. And she had to begin again, a single woman with five children, her oldest grandchild already the same age as her second-to-last child, her last-born only two years older than her second grandchild, both of whom were my sister’s children.

My sister, that first daughter my mother had at seventeen, had her own first daughter at eighteen and went on to have four more daughters for a man who had money and used both the money and his hands to remind everyone in the house who held the power. He was abusive, and he was unfaithful, and he was the kind of man who made himself indispensable while making everyone around him smaller, and my sister spent over a decade with him, leaving and returning and leaving again in the exhausting rhythm of women who love men who hurt them and feel like they have no choice because of the children they have for them do, until she finally left for good.

Can you tell me more about your sister?

She was eighteen with her first baby when I was eleven years old. While she was inside that man’s house, his money put me in school, kept food on the table for me, kept me safe and comfortable for the years she was with him. She helped raise me. She was my big sister in the fullest sense of that phrase, the person who stood between me and whatever was coming next.

She was there when I got pregnant at 21 and didn’t know what to do. She sat with me through the abortion without a word of judgment, just presence, just her hand and her voice and the absolute certainty that I was not alone. She was there through every man who damaged me because I was young and still learning what I was worth, through the heartbreaks and the cheating and the slow accumulation of disappointments. She was there after I was tricked into an audition that turned out to be something else entirely, something that stripped us literally and figuratively, something that took a long time to shake from my body. Every time, she was the first call I made, and she always answered.

She eventually left her husband. And then she died. The man who killed her was not the one she had spent almost 2 decades with; he was the one she found after she finally freed herself from that one. She survived the man who hurt her for years and was killed by the next one. He beat her so fiercely that she was in a coma for weeks before she passed. I do not have a way to make that make sense, because it does not. It is just what happened.

I had been planning my wedding with her. She knew every detail. We had talked through all of it together; she was supposed to be standing next to me at the front of that room. She died 10 months before I got married.

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I���m so sorry. It must have been a horrible weight to carry. How did it affect your wedding plans?

I still got married, and I want to be honest about everything that was driving it, because it was not simple.

The whispers had been getting louder for years, about the women in my family and what followed us, about how we could not hold onto men, about a curse that was being passed down through our blood. I had heard about my grandmother’s life and her struggles with marriage. I had watched my mother. I had watched my sister pour herself into a man who did not deserve a single drop of her, only to then die at the hands of another man. I was terrified of becoming another chapter in that story, and I was also grieving my sister in a way that made me want to hold onto what we had been building together, as if finishing the wedding she had planned with me was a way of keeping her present in my life.

The red flags were there. Looking back now, I can see them clearly. I was 28, he was in his mid-forties. The whole thing moved too fast, but he was performing so well for everyone around me, putting money in my younger siblings’ hands, showing up for my nieces, and being entirely available and enthusiastic.

What happened after the wedding?

Less than a month in, the performance stopped, and I started seeing who I had actually married.

It began with things I was not supposed to find: video calls, names I did not recognise on his phone, and a husband who was physically present in our home while emotionally somewhere else entirely. It got to the point where I started following him, and I found exactly what I had been afraid I would find. There were women who reached out to him, women I tracked down myself, a husband whose attention and energy had apparently always been distributed across multiple people, none of whom was his wife. We fought about it constantly and resolved nothing because you cannot resolve anything with someone who was never genuinely with you to begin with. Every argument ended where it started, with me holding the evidence and him giving me just enough reassurance to keep holding on.

I held on for two years. I held on because leaving felt like confirming everything people were already saying about the women in my family, like becoming another chapter in a story I had married specifically to escape. But the marriage was what it was from the beginning, and nothing I did inside it was going to change that, so eventually I left. I walked out childless, with nothing from those two years except a very expensive education in exactly what I was no longer willing to accept from anyone.

What haunted me most in the aftermath was not the cheating. It was the question I could not answer about my own body because all the tests said I was fine. I had not been able to get pregnant in that marriage, and I did not know whether the abortion I had when I was young had quietly closed something inside me that I would never be able to reopen. The church offered its own explanation, a spiritual husband blocking the natural one, and when you are raw and desperate for a reason that is not your fault, you will accept almost any story that removes the weight from your own chest. I held that one longer than I should have.

What happened to the whispers when you left?

They stopped being whispers. People said it plainly and directly, and to anyone who would listen. The women in that family, they said, something follows them, something is wrong with them, they cannot hold a man. I was 30, divorced and childless, and I had just handed everyone who believed in the curse the freshest evidence they could have asked for. It felt like the story had always known how it would end and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What did you do with that?

I built. I threw myself into work, into becoming financially independent, and into a version of myself that did not need anyone to hold her up. I pivoted my career, I studied, and I rose through every role I took on. I traveled. I invested in myself in every way I knew how.

I had men over the years, various men in various shapes of disappointment. Unfaithful ones, unavailable ones, men who were already married and had simply not mentioned it, men who wanted everything I was offering while offering as little of themselves as they could get away with. Each time one of them failed me, I added another standard, another line I would not cross, another thing I had decided I was no longer available for. I built the boundaries carefully, and I was proud of them, proud of the clarity they gave me, proud of no longer being the woman who accepted things she should not have accepted.

What changed?

Nothing dramatic. Just time, and the loneliness that time brings when you have been alone long enough.

I am thirty-nine. I have built more than most people I know personally, and I mean that without arrogance, just as a fact. I am financially stable, I am rising in my career, I travel when I want to, and I take up space in my own life in ways I could not have imagined when I was 30 and walking out of a marriage with nothing but my dignity. I am proud of all of it.

And I am lonely. It’s not about being without company but about wanting to share something with someone who is genuinely yours, and realising there is no one there to share it with. And I want a child. I have wanted a child for longer than I have let myself say out loud, and I have been lying to myself about it by calling it a future thing, a when-the-time-is-right thing, a thing that could wait. It cannot wait the way I have been pretending it can.

Do you believe the curse is real?

I think about my mother finding love in her forties with a man who was kind and romantic and who saw her fully. And I think about how he died, and she still had to keep going anyway, still had to raise children and make a life without him. By the end, my mother had done everything ‘right,’ and it was still hard. Maybe the curse was never a curse but just the specific difficulty of being a woman who loves in a world or society that does not always handle that love with care. Maybe the women in my family were not marked by anything supernatural. They were just women, surviving men who were not worthy of them and building whatever they could from what was left.

I do not know if I will marry again. I genuinely do not know. What I know is that I am not willing to take apart the standards I have spent ten years building, not even now, not even with the loneliness this close. The boundaries I have built are not the reason love has not found me. They are what I constructed precisely because I know what it costs to love without them. Men have spent years suggesting that I am the problem, that I have made myself too much, too unwilling to bend, too difficult to love, the way I insist on being loved. I have spent more time than I should have wondering if they were right.

At thirty-nine, I am choosing to believe they were not. What I am looking for deserves to come to this version of me, the whole version, the one who has been through everything I have been through and is still standing and still wanting. Not a smaller version or a more convenient one.

If that takes longer, it takes longer. But I will not undo a decade of becoming myself just to make the waiting end sooner.

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Names have been changed*

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Adaeze*, a 35-year-old events planner who splits her time between the UK and Nigeria. She grew up with two younger brothers and a girl she considered her sister for almost 20 years. Today, that woman is engaged to her father.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is Adaeze. I am 35. I plan events for a living, mostly in the UK, but I also work across Nigeria and West Africa. Port Harcourt is where I am from, but the UK is where I live now and have lived for most of my adult life.

I studied International Business at university. When I graduated, I went straight into my master’s, and after that, I worked in business consulting for a couple of years. Eventually, I realised I was very good at organising people, spaces, and experiences, and that I enjoyed it more than everything else I did, even finance and the payoff. So I transitioned into events. I built my clientele slowly, mostly word of mouth at first, then corporate clients, then weddings, then larger productions. Now I do both. 

I have two younger brothers, twins. I lost my mother when I was 11, and they were 4. In many ways, I became their mother before I was ever an adult.

What was life like after you lost her?

My father was a different man when my mother was alive. He was kinder and more present. After she died, he became someone we had to learn all over again, and what we learned was not easy. He grew hard. He was emotionally unavailable, and it hurt. Sometimes he would get physical when he dealt with us, especially when he was frustrated or angry. He was not a monster, but he was not the same man. Grief does strange things to people, and I was 11 and trying to understand it while also trying to make sure my four-year-old brothers were fed and okay.

We moved a few times after she died. He was restless, like someone who could not outrun what was inside them. Eventually, we settled in one of his apartment blocks. He is in real estate and has other business interests. That is where we stayed, and that is where I met her.

Met who?

Someone I have called my friend for many years. Let���s call her Erica*. I was turning 13. My father and some family friends had invited the neighbours for my birthday, and she was there.  She was two years younger than me, so she was 11, and she lived with her parents.

From there, things moved the way friendships between children move. We started spending time together outside, visiting each other, and playing. Before long, we were inseparable. We did not go to the same school because her family did not have the same kind of money my father had, but that did not matter to either of us. I had no sister. She had no sister. We became each other’s borrowed one. Eventually, my father started including her whenever he was taking us somewhere. Her mother sometimes began looking after my brothers, too. She became my actual sister. 

How did things progress?

When I was 15, she lost her father. I was there for her through that grief, completely and without question. During that period, I noticed her mother speaking to my father frequently. Long conversations on the phone, long conversations when they saw each other. I thought nothing of it. Her mother was a widow now, and my father had resources and influence. He was helping her navigate things. That made sense to me.

Then, within a few months, my father transferred Erica to my school. I was thrilled. My best friend would now be at the same school as me, even if we were not in the same class. She started staying at ours more and more until eventually she was practically living with us. She would sometimes go home to her mother, but our house was as much hers as it was ours. My father put her on an allowance. He bought her things. He made sure she had what she needed. At the time, I thought it was an act of generosity. I thought it was him doing what good people do for children who need looking after.

What was she like as a person?

Erica was warm when she wanted to be. She could be very funny and very magnetic. But as she got older, she  always gravitated towards men with money, even when those men were clearly dangerous or unkind to her. Yahoo boys, men who already had wives or girlfriends, men who left marks on her in different ways. It never ended well. I was always there when it ended. She had three abortions during the years of our friendship, and I was present for every single one. It happened during her late teens and our early to mid twenties. I did not judge her, I was just there because that is what sisters do.

My father continued to support her financially well into adulthood. Beyond the allowance from when we were teenagers, he bought her a car and put it in her name. She wanted for nothing from him, and yet she was always chasing more from places that hurt her. I used to worry about her constantly. Especially the first time I had to leave Nigeria for university in the UK.

When did you leave Nigeria?

At 18, after I got my admission. I went, I called home regularly, I FaceTimed my brothers, my father, and her. My father continued taking care of me financially throughout university. In my third year, he came to the UK on holiday with all of them, including Erica and her mother. He paid for everything. Flights, accommodation, activities. They were family, so at this point, it was lowkey expected.

We stayed close through all of it. Her messy relationships, my university stress, her eventually getting into a private university in Nigeria, me finishing my degree and going straight into my master’s. Years passed. By 26, I was done with all of it. I was established, employed, and building. Then I went back to Nigeria for my NYSC.

You came back for NYSC?

My father asked me to. He wanted me to do my service year in Nigeria, and honestly, a part of me wanted to come back anyway. So I did.

And that was the first time I noticed something had shifted with Erica. She was cold towards me, like she had never been before. Also sharp and guarded. It was like I had done something, and she was still deciding whether to forgive me and had not told me what it was.

Looking back now, I can see exactly what it was. But at 26, coming home after years away, I just saw my best friend acting strangely, and I did not know why.

What was she doing exactly?

Small things that accumulated. She would borrow my car and return it with an empty tank, never refilling it. It sounds minor, but the casualness of it and how frequent it was bothered me. She would tell my father things out of context, things I had shared with her in confidence, and he would bring them up in ways that put me on the defensive with him. There was one evening when I invited her to dinner with a group of her friends and co-workers, mostly men, clearly wealthy, and she spent the whole night performing for the table to get attention and in a way that made me look small. From cutting remarks to laughter at my expense. It was nothing you could easily confront, but all of it was deliberate. I was humiliated and sad because I could see who she was becoming with these people, and it worried me.

I pulled her aside afterwards and told her what I observed. She cried. She said she had missed me so deeply while I was away, and when I came back, she felt a distance between us she did not know how to close, and it surfaced as ugliness. She was jealous, she said. Insecure about where she stood in my life now that I had built a whole world that did not include her. She said it would never happen again.

I believed her. She was my sister. You believe your sister.

Did things improve?

On the surface, but I started noticing other things.  My father was different when she was around. His laughter came more easily. His eyes were brighter. He was physically warmer with her in small ways, a hand on her shoulder, leaning in when she spoke, giving her his full attention in a way he did not give to much else. I noticed all of it, and I told myself a story about it that made sense to me. She had been in our lives since she was 11. He was fond of her. Of course he was. He had practically helped raise her. That is what I told myself.

After NYSC, I went back to the UK.

The year after, my brothers started university in the UK and came to join me. Everything was moving forward. I met the man I would eventually marry after three years of building something. We all went to Nigeria for the introduction and the traditional wedding. Both families had weeks of celebration, a full and joyful time.

Erica was my maid of honour.

She was present. She performed the duties. She was cordial when she needed to be, but she was distant. I kept noticing. I caught her looking at me throughout that week with this expression I could not read, heavy and complicated, and every time I asked her directly if she was okay, she would say yes, congratulate me, and change the subject.

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What happened at the white wedding?

We flew back to the UK and had the white wedding a few weeks later. She did not smile once. Not when I walked in, not during the vows, not during the reception. She did not clap, did not get up to dance, did not celebrate me. She sat with this expression on her face, as if she were attending to something painful, and at some point she stopped being present altogether. Just slipped away from her duties and left me to manage without her.

If it were not for my brothers, my closest friends, my sister-in-law, and a college friend who had been with me through years in the UK, I would have been completely adrift on my own wedding day. That friend stepped into the maid of honour role without being asked and held everything together. She is one of the most important people in my life to this day.

What I felt watching my sister sit cold and absent at my wedding is not something I have fully found words for. I had done nothing to her. I had given her everything I had. And she could not even pretend to be happy for me for one day.

She never explained and never apologised. She and the people who had travelled with her left a few days later, and that was effectively the end of our direct contact.

How long did the silence last?

Almost two years. I tried for the first several months. From messages to calls, checking in through mutual people. Nothing. Eventually, I stopped reaching. My brothers were furious with her and had been trying to tell me things for years, things they had noticed when I was away at university, behaviours and moments between her and my father that had made them deeply uncomfortable. I had not listened. 

When did you finally understand?

My father came to visit, and he brought her with him. After two years of silence, she appeared at my front door with my father. She was carrying a baby.

I stood in my kitchen watching my father with that child. Watching how he held her, the way he looked at her, the way he spoke to her. And she was watching me watch him. And she smiled.

Everything that I had refused to understand for years arrived all at once. Every warm look and bright eye I had noticed and explained away. Every cold shoulder and heavy stare at my wedding. Every strange shift in behaviour from the moment I came home for NYSC. Everything my brothers had tried to tell me. It all became one clear and terrible picture in the space of a moment.

I didn���t know when I charged, grabbing her by the neck.

I remember the shouting and people trying to pull me off her, and my own voice somewhere in the noise and everything we had ever been to each other flashing through me. Every birthday, every abortion I had held her through, every secret she had kept of mine, every secret she had kept from me. And she was laughing through all of it. While I was losing my mind, she was just laughing.

I let her go and turned to my father.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What did you say to him?

I told him to take her and find a hotel for the rest of their stay. I told him her name was never to be spoken in my home again. I asked him directly and clearly whether he had been doing this while she was a child. While she was living in his house. While she was my underage friend whom he had clothed, schooled and fed. A girl younger than his own eldest child.

He told me my mother would want him to be happy and that it was natural for a man to move on. That a younger wife of childbearing age was not something I should be surprised by.

I reminded him of my mother’s family’s contribution to his business in the early years. The seed money, the existing agreements, the documents with names on them. I reminded him that my brothers exist and that I know how inheritance disputes work, and if he plans to use this woman to disinherit them, he does not know who he is dealing with. I told him that very clearly.

Then I asked him to leave my house.

What happened after that?

He left. We have not spoken directly in three years.

The engagement announcement came through family gossip. Someone mentioned it on a call without realising I did not know. My father is engaged to a woman who was 11 years old when she came to my birthday party. A woman I called my sister for twenty years. A woman whose abortions I sat through and whose heartbreaks I carried and whose silence at my wedding I spent two years trying to understand.

I have said what I needed to say to my father. I have said what I needed to say to myself. I have nothing to say to her.

Has she reached out? 

She has been sending messages to my husband. We don���t know how she got his number. He shows me everything. I do not know what she is looking for. Acknowledgement, maybe. A reaction. Some sign that she still has access to something that belongs to me. I think she has always defined herself by what other people have and what she can find her way into. I genuinely do not know how to explain a person like that.

What I do know is that I am almost due with my first child. I have waited years for this pregnancy, and it is here, and it is mine, and it is good. I have a husband who shows his love fiercely. I have brothers who have been my backbone and my truth-tellers through all of it. I have a business I built with my own hands that takes me across countries and gives me a life I love.

I am choosing to protect what I am building. And I am choosing to let what needs to fall, fall without my help.

What do you want women reading this to take away?

Boundaries matter. Even with people who feel like they are bone of your bone. Especially with them.

I do not regret the love I gave her. I regret nothing I offered. But I want women to understand that the depth of your love for someone is not a guarantee of who they are or what they are capable of. I thought I knew her better than I had ever known anyone. I was wrong about the most important thing.

Know who has access to your life. Know what you share and with whom. And when people you love show you something that does not sit right, even something small, please do not do what I did and build a story around it that protects them instead of you.

I had to lose a sister, a father and twenty years of a version of my family to learn that lesson. I hope whoever needs it can learn it for less.

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Names have been changed*

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Zima*, a 27-year-old mother of two based in Kaduna, Nigeria. She talks about years of proving herself at a non-profit that advocated for women’s rights, the subtle ways her workplace began to sideline her the moment she got married, and what happened when she got pregnant.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is Zima. I’m a 27-year-old mom of two children living in Kaduna, Nigeria. I’m a Northern woman, and I grew up here, so this is mostly the world I’ve known. Growing up, there were a lot of expectations around what a girl should be, especially when it came to marriage and family. But I’m grateful that my parents never made education a battle for me. They valued it, and that gave me the freedom to pursue my own career. 

Before I got pregnant, I was a full-time advocacy officer at a non-profit organisation that worked to advance women’s rights. I had spent years building my career there, proving myself and doing work I genuinely believed in. Then I got pregnant, was sent on maternity leave, and was fired shortly after. 

There has always been a gender bias attached to my work because I’m a woman working in the North. When I’m working late into the night, my male colleagues will always say, ” You should go home. Let this guy take over and finish up the task. Just go home.���

There’s this mindset that we are not equal. You hear words like, as a female, you’re not supposed to get involved. It’s a man who’s supposed to get involved. I’ve heard that several times at work.  When we go for community engagement, only the guys are allowed to greet the village heads. We can’t. Which is ironic considering my line of work.

What was it like navigating that environment every single day?

Exhausting. Because you have to constantly prove that you belong there. You’re doing the same work, sometimes more work, but there’s always this invisible ceiling reminding you that some people in the room don’t fully believe you should be there.

I remember moments where I would complete a task, and the feedback would go to a male colleague. Or I would make a suggestion in a meeting, and it would be ignored, and then a man would say the same thing five minutes later, and everyone would nod. You learn to keep going anyway because you believe in what you’re doing. But it wears on you over time.

Did you ever try leaving?

I did not because I believed in the work. I was academically the most qualified person for that role, and I genuinely cared about the impact we were making on women’s lives. I thought if I kept showing up and performing, the bias would eventually matter less. I was wrong. It got worse when I got married. 

What was the biggest thing that changed the moment you got married?

I never realised that my marital or motherhood status could change my life so dramatically. It started with my colleagues giving me a little more respect than before, which sounds positive, but wasn’t.

It’s just something I noticed over time. No one addressed me by my name anymore. I saw a shift from Zima to Mrs Ahmad, and I wasn’t cool with that, especially since that respect wasn’t given to my other female colleagues who weren’t married.

Then they started making comments like, Zima, you can’t go on this work trip because of your husband. And I have never given them any reason to think I need my husband’s permission to travel.

How did that show up practically in your work?

Sometimes, if I worked hard on a proposal and it was time to present it to partners who had requested it, another person was selected to do it because Zima is married. There was a time I worked hard on a proposal for three weeks. They found a single female colleague to present it, and nobody asked me whether I was comfortable with it.

Then I got pregnant, and somehow, things worsened.

How so?

There was a younger lady who was employed, but I had no idea she had been brought in to replace me. Thankfully, she was honest enough to let me know that was the plan.

At the time, I was working on a grant application for the organisation. A lot of work had gone into it, and the whole time, I had no idea that there were plans to replace me. It was so bad that even after the grant was successfully secured, nobody told me anything. I only discovered it by accident. Eventually, they notified me that they wanted me to hand over all the information about the grant and the project it was supposed to sponsor to the other lady.

All the months of work I put into securing thousands of dollars were dismissed and casually handed off to someone else.

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What did that feel like, watching your work handed over like that?

It broke something in me, honestly. I could sense that they had lost confidence in my ability to lead, which is crazy because I had spent years proving myself. I was still the same person. I was just pregnant.

I loved that job. I loved the impact I was making. When funding started to dry up because of Trump’s restrictions, I even offered to work without pay because I cared that much. They never responded to that offer.

When did things officially unravel?

A few months later, I received an email from HR mandating that I go on maternity leave, and someone else relieved me of my duties. It was unpaid maternity leave because they said the organisation didn’t have money to cover the cost. In their words, they wanted to give me enough time to prepare for delivery. They said they wouldn’t want a staff member who is pregnant to be subjected to stress.

I said, ���Okay, no problem.��� Then I received another email from HR telling me I needed to have a one-on-one with her to address my expectations. At the meeting, I was asked to submit my laptop and my ID card. I did, and stopped going to the office.

Nigerian law grants women a minimum of 12 weeks’ maternity leave. During these 12 weeks, the minimum pay they are to is 50% of their salary.

What happened next?

Surprisingly, I received an email from my work email, which was still functional, telling me I needed to work on the final reports for some projects they had given to someone else to take over. My friends asked me not to, but I worked on it anyway because I cared. Because I still felt responsible for what I had built.

During the process, I realised that they had more money for those projects than they had initially claimed. According to them, I didn’t need to know about the financial stuff. I had even used my personal funds to execute some parts of those projects. It was during the final closeout meeting with the donors that I realised how much they had hoarded. I tuned in for the phase-out delivery for those projects and went back on leave.

What happened after your maternity leave ended?

On December 31, HR reached out to me informally via WhatsApp, saying she had forgotten to tell me I would no longer be recognised as company staff.

So I went into the new year knowing that I was officially unemployed. They never even informed my colleagues that I had left the company. For months, all of them believed I was still on maternity leave. One of them still reached out recently to ask when I am resuming. According to her, HR has been saying that whenever they have a new project, they will call me back.

A WhatsApp message on December 31st! How did you receive that?

I remember the first time I saw that message, I cried. I didn’t want anyone to know. I walked into the restroom, called my husband, and I just broke down into tears.

It broke me down. Losing your source of income when you’re about to give birth isn’t something you can prepare yourself for. No one checked in. I was treated like I didn’t matter at all.

What has life looked like since then?

It has been an adjustment. You go from having a career you built over years, a title, a salary, a daily sense of purpose, to suddenly being at home with nothing confirmed about your future. And you’re also a new mother, which is its own enormous thing to navigate. The two things together are very heavy.

What made it harder was that I had given so much of myself to that place. Not just professionally but emotionally. I believed in what we were supposed to be doing for women in this country. So the loss wasn’t just financial. It was the loss of something I had genuinely cared about building.

It���s more painful to know that this was an organisation that advocated for women’s rights.

That is what stings the most. This is an organisation that swears it is fighting for gender equality, yet enforces unpaid leave on a pregnant woman. I was leading campaigns on breastfeeding, yet they had no private area for workers to breastfeed their babies. If you’re expecting women to resume work three months after birth, you are supposed to create an environment where they can easily breastfeed.

They created spaces for prayer inside the office, but a private space for breastfeeding is where they drew the line. During meetings, you’d hear them say things like, ���We don’t discriminate. In this place, we don’t give any form of tribal or religious sentiments. We are all one���.

But you’re saying those things, and what I’m seeing is not what is happening. This company had only one woman in leadership. We cannot advocate for a better Nigeria while workplace issues like this remain acceptable.

Experts have reforms to Nigeria’s parental laws to guarantee 16 weeks of fully paid maternity leave and at least 14 days of paid paternity leave, reflecting the modern demands of the corporate world.

What do you want women to take away from your story?

I think I accepted a terrible form of discrimination that no woman should ever have to deal with or accept. Pregnancy should not be treated like a character or professional flaw. I left that place feeling so defeated and powerless, but I think there is more that can be done instead of just accepting nonsense.

I hope more women choose to fight for the benefits they deserve.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today���s #WhatSheSaid is Boma Dokubo, a 30-year-old creative strategist, model, founder, and advocate from Bayelsa State. Miss Grand Nigeria 2023 and now representing Oyo State at Miss Universe Nigeria 2026, Boma talks about being drugged by someone she considered a friend, rebuilding her career, starting her own agency, and everything life did to her in the three years between her two crowns.

Tell me about yourself. Where are you from, and where did you grow up?

My full name is Boma Dokubo, and I am 30, which I still can’t believe I’m saying out loud. I’m from Bayelsa State. I was born in Lagos but moved back to Bayelsa when I was about six, so that is really where I grew up. At 12, I moved to Rivers State and spent a few years living with my oldest sister, then moved back to Bayelsa. I went to university in Edo State, and immediately after university, I moved to Lagos. So different parts of Nigeria have shaped very different versions of me.

I was actually quite a popular child, which is funny because I don’t think I admit that to myself enough. I’m the sixth of seven children, but people in church, around our compound and in the community would call my parents Mama Boma and Papa Boma. I wasn’t the loudest child, but I was the child who did everything. I won prizes at birthday parties because I could dance. I was put into the adult choir when I was about 10. I started playing keyboard around that age and picked up guitar a few years later. I was in every church programme, every dance recital, every cultural performance.

Then, around 12, something shifted. I became much more inward. I started experiencing what I now understand was probably my own share of depression and insecurity. I remember being extremely uncomfortable with my body changing. That was also when writing really began for me. I started to journal literally everything I was thinking. At the same time, I had a complete turnaround academically. From around JSS2 until I finished secondary school, I don’t think I ever came second in class.

Faith was also a very big part of my childhood. I grew up in a very conservative church environment. I was the girl in the longest skirt. I didn’t wear trousers, earrings or makeup. Even though I had always been interested in fashion and beauty, I didn’t really get to explore them until university. Music, dance, writing, academics and faith probably defined me most. But there was also this very creative part of me that took much longer to have permission to come out.

With all your intellectual and creative skills, what career did you think you would pursue?

I honestly never had one straightforward answer. At one point, I decided banking was it, then accounting, partly because every time I walked into a bank, everyone looked so smart and successful. But at the same time, more than anything, I was Boma the musician. I was singing, writing, making covers, and starting to see that art could become something more than a hobby. I also somehow stumbled into baking and turned it into a really successful little business that helped me financially through my final year at university.

The engineering I studied was much more my parents’ choice than mine. Their argument made sense: I’m from Bayelsa State; I was good at maths and physics; petroleum engineering was a professional course; and oil and gas were lucrative. And ultimately, they were paying my school fees, so I thought, fair enough, let’s do it. Pageantry was absolutely never part of the plan.

How did pageantry come into your life?

My older sister had done pageantry, Miss Nigeria, but I was quite young and mostly just remembered seeing pictures. I never imagined it for myself. Growing up with four sisters, I genuinely thought I was the least attractive girl in my house. My sisters had what society would probably describe as softer, more feminine features. I had much stronger features and strong cheekbones. Beauty felt like something that belonged to my sisters.

I had already been modelling for a few years before pageantry even came up. I met another model who was also a pageant girl, and she casually suggested I should consider competing. My immediate response was basically, definitely not me.

Then, I had just left my corporate engineering job. I was exhausted and depressed, and trying to figure out what came next. A few days after that conversation, I thought, What exactly do I have to lose? And that was genuinely how pageantry entered my life.

Can you tell us more about your early experience in pageantry?

The first pageant I had originally applied for was Miss Universe Nigeria. But while preparing, I started to realise through conversations with my coach and chaperone that I probably wasn’t financially or emotionally prepared for that competition at the time. Then the opportunity came for me to represent Nigeria at Miss Grand International instead. Which sounds reasonable until you remember that I had never done a pageant before.

I was literally learning how to walk in six-inch pageant heels, how to catwalk, how to move in an evening gown, how to walk in a bikini, and how to present myself as a queen. And then suddenly, I was preparing to fly across the world and compete against more than seventy women. I had barely a month. It was one of the most ridiculous decisions I had ever made, but once I said yes, I knew I was going to give it everything I had.

I finished in the Top 20, won Best National Costume and placed highly in the Grand Voice competition. Those things meant so much to me because they became evidence that I could walk into something completely unfamiliar, feel terribly unprepared and still rise to the occasion.

What was life like behind that first crown that people didn’t get to see?

Behind that first crown, there was a woman trying very hard to prove that her life wasn’t falling apart.

I had just left a job that looked perfect on paper because I was deeply unhappy there. My family didn’t even know at first. I had spent years hearing that I was too emotional, that I took things too deeply, and I had genuinely tried to become less like that. I tried to stay in jobs I wasn’t passionate about. I tried to exist in environments that did not fill my spirit because that seemed like the sensible thing to do.

But I’m an artist. I feel things deeply. I think deeply. And eventually, I had to accept that constantly fighting that part of myself was making me miserable. So when pageantry came, there was a part of me that desperately wanted to succeed at something after making this terrifying decision to leave the life everyone expected me to live. People saw the crown. They saw the looks, the preparation, the international stage, the achievements. But underneath it, there was a woman trying to rebuild her confidence in her own choices.

At the time, I think I was trying to prove a point to the world. The biggest difference now is that I think I’m trying to prove one thing to myself.

Why did you return?

For a while after Miss Grand, I genuinely thought I was done with pageantry. It was incredible, but it was also hard. But over the years, after everything else life brought, loss, grief, drastic career transitions, healing and rebuilding, I started to miss what pageantry represented to me. There is something about pageantry that gives women permission to shine very loudly. You can shine in fashion, in how you speak, in your career, in advocacy, in creativity, in the way you represent where you come from. It creates this very interesting space where womanhood itself is allowed to take up room.

And then, when I actually began seriously considering Miss Universe, that familiar voice came back. Who do you think you are? You’re not prepared enough. Life has happened to you. You’re too broken. You don’t have what you need. Suddenly, I realised that the message I keep trying to put into the world, that you get to decide whether your circumstances have the final word on your life, was a message I needed to live myself again.

So this time I’m proving a different point. Not to the world but to myself. What has happened to me does not get to define me. I can be afraid and still move. I can feel unprepared and still show up. And I am allowed to begin again.

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Very inspirational. It���s not always easy to come back. Can you walk us through the three years between these two pageants?

I���d like to start with the traumatic experience that actually happened three years before Miss Grand Nigeria, in August 2020.

I was drugged by someone I considered a friend at the time, someone I had met through the industry. I was drugged without my knowledge or consent, and the effects were extremely severe. I experienced hallucinations, lost consciousness and became very unwell afterwards. For a period of time, I struggled to function normally and had to receive psychiatric care. Recovery took a long time and affected both my mental and physical health. That period after the abuse was when I got some of my project management certifications. It was when I pushed myself into getting a job at a multinational engineering company. I was very quietly rebuilding my life after what had been the most devastating period of it.

It wasn’t until Miss Grand that I was encouraged by my chaperone to speak publicly about the abuse. My family also had concerns about me becoming, for lack of a better expression, the poster girl for abuse. They wanted me to approach the conversation gently, and I understood that. I also didn’t want everything I had rebuilt afterwards to disappear behind this identity of being a victim. So I spoke about it in subtle ways. I spoke about getting from the girl who genuinely did not know if she would make it through another day to becoming this woman who could stand on an international stage representing her country.

And then life did what life does.

The three years after that have been a lot. There has been loss, grief, depression, drastic career transitions, questioning around faith, building my own agency, becoming a creative strategist, returning to writing after not writing for a very long time, building two publications, new relationships and the reevaluation of old ones. I got into long-distance running, which completely changed the way I thought about discipline. And then there was turning 30.

So these three years have held extreme pain, loss, grief and sadness, but they have also held an extraordinary amount of growth, lot of healing, a lot of self-reflection, learning to love myself, learning to appreciate myself and learning to have the courage to build the things that actually matter to me.

What did healing actually look like for you?

Healing has never looked particularly beautiful to me. And I don’t think it has been linear either. There wasn’t a morning when I woke up and thought, okay, I’m healed now. For me, it has looked like telling myself the truth. It has looked like a doctor’s appointment. It looked like rebuilding a career when I didn’t feel particularly confident about anything. It has looked like learning to trust again, forgiving myself and others.

Sometimes healing has been prayer. Sometimes it has been journaling. Sometimes it has been running. Sometimes it has been sleeping. Sometimes it’s been walking away from a relationship. Sometimes it’s admitting that I don’t have the capacity for something.

I think social media sometimes presents healing as becoming this perfectly evolved person who has transcended everything that hurt her. That hasn’t been my experience. My experience has been becoming someone who knows what hurt her and still chooses to participate fully in her own life.

Was there anything you had to unlearn about what it means to be a strong woman?

Absolutely.

I think strength used to mean something very different to me. I’m naturally a hard worker. I’m disciplined. I’m extremely passionate. And for a long time, I thought that was a strength. Just keep going. Endure. Push through it. Overcome it. But the older I get, the more I realise that strength at its core has much more to do with honesty and authenticity. Strength is having a true relationship with yourself. Strength is accepting who you are and where you are. Strength is sometimes rest. Strength is being honest about your capacity.

And I think particularly as women we’re taught an enormous amount about endurance. Endure the relationship. Endure the work. Don’t be emotional. Be the strong woman who can take anything. I don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes strength is standing up for yourself and saying, I will not accept this. Strength is saying, I don’t have the energy for this right now. Strength can be taking a step away from something that doesn’t inspire you, fuel you or feel aligned with who you are.

Once I realised that having an honest relationship with myself became more important than proving to everybody else that I was strong, the very definition of strength changed for me.

You also mentioned your faith. What did your relationship with it look like during your hardest moments?

I started cultivating a personal relationship with God quite young. I was exposed to Christianity early, but I was also naturally inquisitive, so faith became something I wanted to understand personally rather than simply inherit. One of the most profound things I have realised as I’ve gotten older is that my relationship with God and my relationship with myself are far more connected than I used to understand.

Somewhere along my healing journey, I had to confront this question: how could I claim to love God while being cruel to myself? How could I speak about the value God placed on me while constantly speaking to myself as though I had none? That changed what spirituality looked like for me. There were parts of my faith that had become performative. I could pray for hours, but then speak terribly to myself afterwards.

So spirituality started becoming much more practical. Sometimes it looked like journalling. Sometimes it looked like taking myself on a solo date. Writing love letters to myself. Taking a bath because I wanted to care for my body. Resting. Being honest with God instead of trying to sound perfect when I prayed.

Faith taught me to pray, yes, but also to get up and act on the gifts I’d been given. That period of radical self-care and quiet creation was the seed for ALBA Studios: the first time I began to structure my creative identity into something tangible that could belong entirely to me. 

Entering your 30s during all of this, did it change what you wanted or what you were willing to tolerate?

Thirty certainly doesn’t look the way I imagined it would when I was in my early twenties. And I always say something to my friends that even sounds funny to me: I feel younger at 30 than I did at 26.

At 26, there was this pressure I carried about everything I thought I needed to have and be. I assumed that by 30, the pressure would be ten times worse. Somehow, it has been almost the opposite. There are still expectations around what a woman should have achieved by this age. There are still moments when social media gets into your head, and you start wondering whether you should be married, whether you should have children, whether your career should look different. I’m human. Those thoughts still happen but I have become much better at tracing myself back to what actually matters to me. I understand now that my journey is peculiarly mine. There is no such thing as me being a late bloomer because I cannot be late to my own life.

My relationships have changed, too. I used to think having lots of people around me meant I was loved. I understand the importance of boundaries now. I would rather pour from overflow than constantly pour from depletion. Thirty hasn’t made me feel like I’m running out of time. It has made me much more interested in making sure that the time I have actually belongs to me.

So you built ALBA Studios while navigating all of this. What did building something of your own mean to you?

ALBA Studios grew very organically. Long before it had a name, I was already the person friends came to when building something. I would help with naming, positioning, visual direction, and how the whole idea came together. At first, I didn���t recognise it as a business or even a distinct skill set; it was just something I was doing naturally alongside engineering and pageantry, at one point even turning it into a side hustle.

So I had always done creative strategy. I just never really had the courage to put my own name or vision behind it and say, ���This is what I do.���

Eventually, I realised there was a clear thread running through all of it. I wasn���t just helping with aesthetics, I was helping people turn an idea into something coherent and intentional. That became ALBA Studios: a strategy-led brand positioning and identity studio. Today, I work with brands, particularly within African fashion and luxury, to help them clarify who they are, how they should be positioned, and how that translates visually.

Building something of my own came from stripping away so many things: people who didn’t affirm where I was moving, environments that didn’t feel like me, and inherited expectations about what my life was supposed to look like. I genuinely believe your environment can place a ceiling on your capacity, and environment isn’t just where you live. It���s your people; it���s the voices surrounding you.

It was terrifying to take that step, but there was also an incredible sense of validation. Beyond making the most money I’ve ever had, I���m the most fulfilled I���ve ever felt professionally. There are nights I���m working at 3 a.m., and I suddenly think, Oh my God. I am awake at three in the morning doing work, and I’m not angry. I’m not depressed. Ideas are flowing. To experience that through something you get paid to do is such a blessing.

I named it ALBA because it means dawn or sunrise. For me, it represented a personal line in the sand; a symbolic marker of beginning again with clarity and intention.

When you talk about “beginning again,” does that philosophy extend beyond your studio work into other areas of your life?

Yes, absolutely. That���s actually where Alba Dawn comes from.

The connection between my agency and my impact work is very personal to me. Through ALBA Studios, my work is about brand identity, clarity, and helping something become what it has the potential to be. Alba Dawn takes that exact same belief beyond companies and applies it directly to people and communities. 

While the studio is my professional practice, Alba Dawn is my social impact initiative. It’s centred on helping people find a pathway back after difficult or disruptive periods in their lives; built around rehabilitation, education, community, and access to opportunity. Because recovery isn’t just emotional; people need practical, tangible support to begin again.

My mother taught me early that if your life isn’t directly impacting someone else, all the success in the world doesn’t mean much. After everything I survived, I became deeply drawn to people whose lives looked like mine had at my lowest point, people society had written off.

That���s what led me to prison outreach.

I got the opportunity to volunteer with an organisation during a prison visit, and I genuinely think I will talk about that day for the rest of my life. When you hear the word prison, you automatically create an image in your head of the people you expect to meet there. But I walked into that space and saw women and young girls who were educated, articulate, intelligent, and still had this light in their eyes. 

I remember thinking, ���How can someone who has been confined within four walls for years be speaking with so much hope about what she is going to do when she leaves?��� Because I knew people outside those walls who had already decided their lives were over.

That did something to me.

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What does a crown represent to you now, at 30, having built a full life beyond pageantry?

Pageantry gives you visibility. It puts you in rooms. It gives you access to government, institutions and people you may not ordinarily have had access to. A platform like Miss Universe can genuinely amplify the things you care about. But beyond all of that, there is something deeply personal about this crown for me. Whenever I’m asked, why Miss Universe, why now, my answer is very simple. I am proving a point to myself first. That my circumstances do not determine the direction of my life.

For years, I wanted to return to pageantry, but life kept getting in the way. And this year, I found the courage to say, I’m going to pursue what I want, irrespective of where life has placed me or how old I am. My mother reminds me of that, too. She got her university degree in her late 50s. She sat in classrooms with people younger than some of her own children and said, “You know what, I’m getting this degree.��� That inspires me enormously.

So what does the crown mean to me now? It means I refused to decide that I was too old, too late or too far gone to pursue something that still mattered to me.

When the crown comes off, the cameras stop, and nobody needs anything from you. Who is Boma?

Boma is an artist.

At the core of who I am, I think that is probably the simplest answer. I have always felt things very deeply. I love deeply. I hope deeply. I dream deeply. I feel most at home in myself when I am being completely authentic, and sometimes authenticity is unconventional. Sometimes originality is strange. Sometimes it isn’t particularly palatable because it doesn’t look like what people are used to. But that is where I feel most alive.

With my agency, people literally pay me for my eye, my taste, the way I interpret things. Even my pageantry journey is being built from that same place of artistry. So when you remove the crown, the cameras, the work, and everybody else’s expectations, I am still somebody who wants to create. I am still somebody who wants to feel something deeply and turn it into something.

I hope I never lose that.

If you don’t win Miss Universe Nigeria, what do you hope this chapter still gives you?

Can I say this chapter is already giving me so much?

The courage it took for me to buy the form and actually apply already felt like a win. This is the first time I am actively juggling my baby agency with something as demanding as pageantry. So I am learning an enormous amount about time management, responsibility, emotions and stress.

But I think the most striking thing about this season is that pageantry has become such a mirror. A mirror into certain character flaws. A mirror into what I genuinely believe. A mirror into my integrity. A mirror into the relationship I have with myself. It has also put me in rooms and conversations with incredibly inspiring women. I’ve heard women talk about what they’re building, what they believe in, and what they want to change, and I’ve walked away inspired, even though technically we are competing against each other.

So this process has already stretched me enormously. Of course, winning the crown would be incredible. But I don’t need the final night to tell me whether this entire chapter was worthwhile. It already has been.

And if you do win, what do you want to do with that platform?

I genuinely think I would be doing the same thing, just in a different capacity. I want my life and my story to reach people who feel like society has written them off. People who think they have failed. People who think certain decisions they made, or decisions other people made that affected them, have somehow permanently limited what their lives can become. I want them to know that those limitations do not have to stand if they choose to rise again, to begin again.

But beyond words of hope and encouragement, I want to show people a practical pathway. I am extremely passionate about education. My mother always said that people can take almost anything material away from you. You can lose your car, your house, your money. But the knowledge you have gained is something nobody can take away from you.

So I would love to help create access to education and skills for people who need a new beginning, especially people coming out of situations where their lives have been interrupted or completely derailed. Support for people recovering from addiction, survivors of domestic violence, and people trying to rebuild after incarceration. Encouragement is important, but people also need tools. They need education. They need skills. They need meaningful work.

I don’t just want to stand somewhere and tell somebody, you can change your life. I want to be able to say, “You can change your life, and here is something that can actually help you do it.���

The heart hasn’t changed. I just have a clearer idea now of what hope needs to look like when it becomes practical.

What do you hope women reading your story take away from the woman you’ve become?

This is the one message of my life, truly.

Every morning you wake up is another chance to go at life again. To fight for the life that you want. To look your limitations in the face, look your circumstances in the face, and say, “You do not get to tell me when I’m through. I don’t care what was taken away from me. I don’t care where I ended up. I don’t care how far gone the world thinks I am. I can rise again. I can take up space again. I can reinvent myself as many times as I need to. I can change my life as many times as I need to. I can start again and again and again, at 20, at 30, at 40, at 50, at 80. I get to determine when I’m through.“

And I hope every woman who has been faced with whatever challenge life has put in front of her, her background, where she comes from, what she has experienced, the mistakes she has made, the things that have been done to her, remembers that.

As long as you still have breath in your lungs, you can begin again.

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What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Adaeze*, a 48-year-old businesswoman based in Port Harcourt. She married one brother, and decades later, she is still not sure it was the right one. She knows people will judge her for this story. She says go ahead. Nobody was in her shoes.

Can you tell me about yourself?

I am Adaeze. I am 48 years old, and I live in Port Harcourt. I run a small business, a fabric and clothing store that I have had for many years now. I am a widow and a mother of four.

I grew up in a modest home. My parents were not wealthy, but they were decent, and they tried. There were two of us, two daughters, and they made sure we both finished school and university. It was a simple, happy childhood. I did not grow up wanting for love, even if we sometimes wanted for things. I always knew that after school came marriage and family. That was just how I was raised, and I accepted it. I was not lazy, I could sew, I could do hair, I knew how to generate income if I needed to, but I was wife and mother first in my heart. That has always been true.

What was your life like when you started university?

I was 19, and I remember being fresh. It was my first year at uni, and my first time really away from home, finding my feet and my place in society without my family. As I already said, I came from a simple household; my parents were not wealthy people, but they were good people. So I was not spoiled, but they really tried to provide for me. Our fees were paid every year, including hostel accommodation. What they couldn���t always give us was pocket money, which is why I started making hair in the hostel and sewing so I could feed my sister and myself. Eventually, I made enough to buy a machine. Other than that, I remember being happy, open and ready for a higher education.

That is where everything started, yes. It���s where I met these two brothers on campus. They came from a big family with 12 children in Port Harcourt. They had not grown up with money, quite the opposite, actually, but their oldest brother, Sotonjo*, the first son in their family, had built something significant in shipping and oil services over the years and had begun pulling his siblings into it. By the time I encountered these two, the family was already in a comfortable financial position. The oldest brother, Sotonjo, was revered in the family. His word was law. He funded them, and they knew it, and they behaved accordingly.

How did you come to know them?

The older of the two, Emeka*, found me first. He was 28, in his final year, and was really only on campus to defend his project before he left. But he was the kind of man who went after what he wanted. He spotted me somewhere near the faculty buildings, introduced himself, and asked for my number. He was confident and direct. He liked that I was Igbo like his mother; he told me that later. He started calling, took me out once or twice. I enjoyed the attention, and I must admit that he was a fine man with Ego.

And the younger brother?

Here is the thing. What Emeka did not know was that his younger brother Chidi*, who was 25 and in his third year, had already been aware of me for months. Since I first arrived on campus. We had seen each other around, had even ended up in a few of the same courses, but Chidi had never approached me. He had always been quieter, more reserved and content to just observe.

So the day Emeka brought me along and introduced me to his brother, imagine how that went. Chidi looked at him and said, “We already know each other.” Even I could hear the defensiveness in his voice and see the anger in his eyes. By then, we had even been put in the same assignment group. Emeka noticed the way Chidi looked at me. He said nothing. He was older, already earning from their brother’s business; he figured he had the better position.

What happened when Emeka left after his project defence?

He moved on to work, and Chidi used every single day he had left on campus. That is what I did not fully understand until later. He was deliberate about it. He was calm, where Emeka was loud, soft-spoken where his brother was forceful. He had gentle eyes and a patience that I had never encountered in a man before. He remembered things I said in passing. He showed up consistently without making noise about it. By his final year, we had started dating properly. It had not been rushed. It had just become obvious.

How did his family receive the news?

Kasala. There is no other word for it.

When Chidi went to his older brother, Sotonjo, to say he wanted to marry me, the house went up in flames. Emeka was furious. He felt I was his, that he had seen me first, that his younger brother had gone behind him. He was breaking things. He said he had been planning to come back for me. But where had he been in all those years since he left campus? Spending his new money on other women and enjoying himself while Chidi was here, present, and building something real with me.

It took their Sotonjo completely putting his foot down. He issued what I can only describe as a decree. And then, because this family does nothing in simple terms, they actually asked me directly which of them I wanted to marry. I was 23. Chidi was 29. I chose my boyfriend. I chose the man I loved.

How did Emeka take that?

He never fully got over it. He married by the end of that same year, brought a woman home and started his own family. But the resentment sat in him. He was not a gentle man at home, not easy with his wife or his children. He had something of the oldest brother’s energy in him, that belief that being the man in the room entitled you to run it however you pleased. He could be harsh. Tyrannical even.

And Sotonjo, what was he like to live around?

He was the kind of man who reminded you constantly, without always saying it directly, that you existed within something he had built. He funded many of his siblings’ children���s school fees and some of their spouses��� businesses, yes. He opened a store for me before things between him and Chidi eventually soured. I ran it, and I was grateful. But his generosity always came with a weight you felt. He spoke to people anyhow. He said whatever he liked and expected everyone to absorb it because he was paying for the ground they stood on. Most of the siblings did absorb it because what choice did they have?

How did Chidi navigate that?

He pulled away slowly. The way he did everything. He had been building his own funds on the side, his own footing, and somewhere around ten or twelve years into our marriage, their oldest brother said something to him that crossed a line. Chidi warned him calmly and clearly never to speak to him like that again. And then he moved us. Got his own house, built completely separately from anything the family had provided. Something shifted after that; even Emeka looked at him differently. 

What was your marriage like during all of this?

It was a good marriage. I want to say that and mean it because it is true. Chidi was kind to me and to our children. We had four boys, the last two of whom were twins. He was not a perfect man, but he was a present one, and he made me feel protected without making me feel small. I was wife and mother first in those years, and I did not resent that. It was what I had always wanted. We had our life, and it was ours.

Then everything changed 5 years ago.

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What happened five years ago?

We were hit by a trailer, my husband, I and the children. The children and I escaped with minor injuries, but Chidi died.

He was the youngest in his family, and everyone was genuinely shaken. He was the calm one, the one people actually liked underneath all the politics of that house. When he died, everything moved very quickly in ways I was not prepared for.

I am so sorry for your loss. What do you mean by things moved quickly?

Sotonjo came up with ideas almost immediately for managing Chidi’s trucks and business interests on my behalf. I understood what that meant. I had watched this family for twenty-five years. I knew exactly how they operated. I got lawyers involved. Sotonjo was not pleased. He made a remark, something to the effect that I would understand the value of family when things got difficult. He eventually let it go, but I knew the temperature had changed between us.

Emeka came with condolences like everyone else. But he stayed longer and called more. He found reasons to be present, to help, to check in. I was grieving and exhausted, managing four children and now, 2 businesses I was struggling to run alone, and Sotonjo was applying pressure about the trucks.��

I eventually handed the trucks and the business interests back to Sotonjo. It was too much to manage on my own, and I needed peace more than I needed that particular fight. I know people will say I should have held on. They were not in my house at two in the morning.

And Emeka?

He kept showing up. At first, weekly, then he started spacing it out to monthly. Gradually, and then entirely after a year, he became a constant at the house. He found his way back into my life, and I���m sorry to say I let him. I am not going to lie or try to make what we���ve done more acceptable. He still has his family, his wife and children, and I have my life, but I was so tired, and I could not fight him. The relationship between us now is what it is, alongside everything else.

What does that mean? How do you make sense of it?

I am not sure I do entirely. I ask myself questions I do not always have answers to. I think about the sequence of things. Emeka was the one who came for me first. He was the one who saw me and moved. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I have thought about what my life might have looked like if things had gone differently at the beginning.

Chidi was good to me, and I loved him, and I do not regret our life together. But I would be lying if I said I never wonder.

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Wonder what exactly?

Whether I married the right brother.

I know how that sounds. I know what people will say. But nobody was in my shoes. Nobody knows what it is to be me, to have lived this particular life in this particular way. So I say it anyway. What is there to lose at this point?

At least we have a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs; I can feed my children, and their inheritance from their father will cover all their fees until they are done with school. Additionally, there is a father figure for them.��

What about Emeka���s wife? Is she okay with this?

Of course not. It was a big fight, but she���s a woman as am I, and this is a man���s world. The family says if he can handle the two of us, who is anyone to stop him? His wife refuses to leave this safety net, and I will remain at least until all my children have finished university.

Everybody is managing everyone.

What do you want women to take from your story?

Nobody truly knows what it is like to be inside another person’s life. Nobody. I stopped explaining myself a long time ago.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, this weekend, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Suoyo*, a 55-year-old consultant and entrepreneur. She talks about a childhood that ended without warning, parents who chose silence over justice, a marriage that showed her a different kind of cruelty, and the truth that was living in her parents’ house for years before she understood what she was looking at.

Trigger Warning: This story contains accounts of sexual violence, domestic violence, pregnancy loss and child sexual abuse.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is Suoyo*. I am 55 years old. I am a marketing consultant, I run my own business, and I live with my best friend, which sounds like an unusual arrangement for a woman my age, but it is genuinely the most peaceful I have ever been in my life. One more thing, I have a daughter. 

What was your childhood like?

I was an only child, which in a Nigerian family, at least in mine, means you are surrounded by everybody else’s children all the time. Both my parents came from large families, at least four or five siblings each, and there were always cousins, relatives, somebody’s somebody passing through or staying for extended periods. I grew up used to a full house.

My parents were educated people. They valued education above most things, and they made sure I had every advantage they could give me. On the surface, we were a functional, respectable family. That was always the most important thing to them. How ���people��� saw them. 

What do you mean by that?

Well, when I was 14, I was raped by my uncle, my father’s brother. 

I will not go into the details of what happened. I think the trauma I endured and the years I���ve carried it are enough for one lifetime. What I will say is that the person who did it was someone who was supposed to protect me. Someone who was in my parents’ house, in my life, as a trusted figure. And when my parents found out, they did not go to the police. They did not confront him in any meaningful way. What they did was manage it. They sent me away quietly, far enough that nobody in our community would notice, and I had the baby there. A beautiful girl.

It was one of the most difficult periods of my life. I was living with very distant family that I didn���t know and though they did not treat me badly, they were not always kind or understanding. I was a young girl whose world had been ripped out from under her. I was pregnant and barely allowed to leave the house. I was very depressed and almost never laughed. I hated the child I was carrying but I also weirdly started to care for her at some point. All they saw was an irrespossinble teenager who was paying for the decisions she made. My parents never told them the truth.

And after all that, they took the baby from me and told me she had been given up for adoption. I was 15. I did not know how to fight that. I did not know I was allowed to. It was just the next step in my life that my parents had decided for me. 

After about a year, they put me back in school. It was a boarding school, about 2 – 3 hours from where they lived. Life was supposed to continue.

How do you continue after something like that?

You just do, because the alternative is not continuing, and at 16, I did not have the freedom to fall apart. I finished secondary school. I got into university. I made a friend there who became the most important person in my life, a woman who has been in my corner in ways I cannot fully articulate. She paid for things when I had nothing, she showed up, and she was simply always there. I graduated, did my NYSC, and got a job. Eventually, I started my Master’s. I was a functioning adult in society. Whether I was happy is a different question.

I carried what happened at 15 in complete silence for years. I had no romantic relationship that lasted because I never fully trusted any man. Something in me was always slightly removed, always watching, always waiting for the version of the person they were hiding. I did not know at the time that I was doing it. I just knew that nothing ever quite stuck.

Did things ever change?

Yes but not in my favour at first. 

It was about three years after I graduated, two years after NYSC. I went home to visit my parents, and there was a young girl there I did not recognise. This was not unusual. There were always people passing through, cousins, relatives, someone’s child being looked after for a while. She was eventually introduced to me as my cousin, Bellema* and I accepted that without a second thought.

But something about her pulled at me. I found her a little annoying but also charming. By the time I left after that week, I was fond of her.

What happened to her after that?

A few months later, my parents told me she would be living with them permanently. Again, I did not find this strange. They had taken in other children before, helped raise cousins, that kind of thing was normal in our family. Over the next two years, I thought of her often. Whenever I visited, I brought her something. Eventually, I got her a phone. I watched her grow, and I felt something for her that I could not name. I just thought I was attached to her because she was a sweet child. Around this time, my parents introduced me to someone.

Who?

I was 31 now. They made it fairly clear that marriage was the expectation. I was not opposed to meeting him, and in the year or so that we courted, I genuinely liked what I saw. He was kind, patient, and tolerant. He did not try to make me smaller. He never said anything that suggested he thought a woman should stop working or shrink herself after marriage. He was the opposite of everything I had been bracing for. I thought I had been given something good.

We got married. Some months later, he began to show me who he actually was.

What did that look like?

It started with what he called standards. What a married woman should wear. How long she should be out of the house, even for work. The food, which had to be freshly cooked by my hands every single day, whether or not I had had a fourteen-hour day, whether or not we could afford to pay someone else to help, which we could. It was about control. It was always about control.

And then about a year into the marriage, he started hitting me.

What did you do?

I told my parents. My mother told me to endure as a woman. My father said nothing. I stopped telling my parents after that.

My best friend from university was the only person I spoke to honestly. She had been telling me to leave for a long time, and I could not, because of my parents, because of what leaving would have meant in terms of their approval and their disappointment and all the things I was still, at 32, 33, 34, trying not to lose. She came to the house more than once to shout at him and take me away for a few days. She was the one who took me to the hospital.

What She Said: I Married a Man I Met Online. A Month Later, I Didn���t Recognise Him

Why did she need to take you to the hospital, and how many times did that happen?

Three times. I got pregnant three times during that marriage. I lost all three pregnancies because of what he did to me. Three times, my best friend sat with me in a hospital while I lost a child that I had wanted, because of a man I was trying to stay married to, to please people who had already failed me once.

I stayed with him for five years.

What ended it?

Though the marriage was turbulent, there were rare good days, and I would often have Bellema stay over for months at a time. One night, I came home and found him forcing himself on the young girl. She was about 21 by then, and I was 37. The girl my parents had told me was my cousin. The girl I had been buying gifts for, getting phones for, and watching grow up.

I picked up one of the decorative pieces in the house, and I broke it on his head. Then I took her, and I left. I took her straight to my best friend’s place. Her father was a lawyer. We got him arrested that same night.

What was going on in your head during those hours?

It took me back. That is the only way I can explain it. It took me back to being 15 years old and having something taken from me by someone who was supposed to protect me, and then having my parents decide that the most important thing was not me but the story they would tell everyone else. History was repeating itself in the most grotesque way possible, and I had been living inside it without knowing.

After some weeks, I started the atrociously long divorce process. And then I went to see my parents.

Tell me about that conversation.

It was the first time in my life that I told them how I actually felt. All of it. What they had done when I was 15, what their silence had cost me, what enduring and managing and keeping up appearances had actually looked like from inside my body for all those years. My mother cried. My father looked ashamed and could not meet my eyes, but he still said he had done the best he could for me at the time. I have never in my life wanted to hit anyone harder than I wanted to hit him in that moment.

And then I asked them what they had done with my child. I screamed it when they would not answer. They told me they had kept her close. That eventually, I could not stay away. It took me a moment to understand what they were saying. And when I did, I did not stop sobbing for a very long time.

What did you understand?

The so-called cousin I had helped with was my daughter, the child I had at 15. The product of a rape by my father’s brother. She had been living in my parents’ house, she was introduced to me as a cousin, and I had spent years loving her without knowing who she was, while my parents knew exactly what they were doing and said nothing.

She had now survived her own sexual violence at the hands of the man my parents had approved of and encouraged me to marry.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

Wow. I cannot imagine what you went through. How did you and your daughter navigate what came next?

It took time. There were years when I did not speak to my parents at all, close to a decade. I took my daughter and left the city. My best friend and I got an apartment together, got a job and eventually, I started consulting remotely, then tackled building my own business. I focused on rebuilding, on creating something stable for the two of us, on learning how to be in a relationship with a person I had loved without knowing I was her mother.

She’s now an international lawyer, though she often says that’s not a thing but it’s an easier way to describe what she does. She has 2 businesses: one here, and the other in one of the countries she’s licensed to practice law in. She often volunteers and donates to important causes. She really is the most remarkable person. What she has survived, what she has built herself into despite all of it, I cannot take credit for that. She did that. I just tried to make sure that from the moment I knew, she had everything I could give her.

Where are things now?

My daughter and I have a relationship. It took time, honesty, and a lot of difficult conversations to get here, but we have it. I run my business. I live with my best friend, who has been the most consistent presence in my life for over thirty years now. I have made my peace with my parents to the extent that I am able to. My father died a few years ago. My mother and I speak.

I am 55. I am not who I was at 15, or 25, or 37. I am someone who survived things that should have broken her completely, and I am still here, and I am still building. That is more than enough.

What do you want women who are reading this to take away?

That silence is never neutral. Every time someone chooses silence to protect a reputation, a family name, a marriage, a narrative, there is a person on the other side of that silence paying the price. I paid for decades. My daughter paid it too.

If you are in something that is hurting you, please tell someone. Not someone who will ask you to endure. Someone who will actually show up. I was lucky enough to have that person. Not everyone is. But please look for her, because she exists.

And if you are a parent, your child’s safety is not something you ever hesitate to secure. It is the only thing that matters. Whatever you think you are protecting by staying quiet, I promise you it is not worth what you are asking them to carry.

If you are going through something similar, whether sexual violence, an abusive relationship, or simply carrying something too heavy alone, help is available. You do not have to carry it alone.

1. Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative: Call or WhatsApp text 08091116264 or 08111680686 to receive immediate mental health crisis intervention and counseling from the active volunteers at the .

2. Lagos State DSVA Helpline: Call 08000-333-333 (toll-free) or dial the quick shortcode *6820# on your mobile phone to safely report domestic violence, rape, or child abuse and get immediate medical or legal response from the .

3.��The Mirabel Centre Support:��Call or text��+2348155770000��to receive 24/7, completely free medical care, forensic evidence collection, and professional psychosocial counselling after experiencing sexual assault from the��Mirabel Centre.

4. WARIF Toll-Free Crisis Line: Call 080092100009 for 24-hour completely confidential emergency aid, legal advocacy, and rapid response to rape and gender-based violence from the .

5. Project Alert Crisis Line: Call 08180091072 to receive professional counseling, shelter support, and legal advocacy for female survivors of domestic and sexual abuse from .

6. National Emergency Line: Dial 112 from any mobile network in Nigeria to reach nationwide emergency services if you are in immediate physical danger.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Stella*, a 37-year-old woman from Rivers State. She talks about a childhood that taught her to survive before she even knew she needed to, a whirlwind online courtship that led to a wedding within six months, and the slow, devastating unravelling of a man she thought she knew.

Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up, and what was your childhood like?

I’m Stella, I’m 37, I’m from Rivers State, and I have always lived in Port Harcourt. School took me away for a while, but I always came back.

My childhood was good until my parents separated when I was 15, and then life became something else entirely. Before that, though, we were comfortable. My dad is not a rich man, but he made sure I never lacked. He would buy me something every day after work, no matter how small, just something to show he was thinking of me. Our house was always full of people because there was always food. People were always coming to eat. That was my childhood before everything changed.

What happened when your parents separated?

Here is the thing: when they separated, I was actually happy at first. I always knew my mum never loved my dad. She married him so her siblings could have something to eat, and she passed a lot of that anger onto us. So when she finally left, part of me felt relief.

But that relief did not last long. My lastborn sibling was only six months old when she walked out. She did not come back for us. She just started travelling to other states, living her life, and she has never cared since. The only time she shows up is when there is something to get from me.

Then, about a year after she left, my dad remarried. His new wife wasted no time. She made him take me out of the house and sent me to live with his brother. That was when real suffering started. My uncle and his wife took me on as their house help. The maltreatment became too much, so at 17, I ran away from that house and moved in with my maternal grandmother.

At 19, I started selling okrika clothes, which people now call thrift. By 22, I had saved enough to get my own single-room apartment, where I shared a toilet and bathroom with other tenants. I lived on my own from 22 until I got married.

What kind of person did all of that make you?

I have always been a happy girl, somehow. I love to play, I love to laugh, I love being around happy people. I know that sounds strange given everything I have been through, but it is the truth. Life has been a great teacher, and even though I have been hurt by people I trusted, I never gave up. God has been faithful, even when things were hard.

I have always been the romantic type. I love love. And if you know what I have been through, you know what that means. I had four partners before my husband. My first relationship lasted eight years and seven months, and that man made me feel less of myself every single day. By the time I met my husband, I was completely done with long courtships that led nowhere. I said to myself, forget it. Let me try something different.

What did your life look like just before you met him?

I was 36, living in PH, working. Not yet where I wanted to be, but moving. I work in the children’s department at my church, and I have always loved children. I celebrate my birthdays with them. My friends and family all know it. The whole essence of getting married for me was always to have a family, to have children of my own, to see my own offspring. That was always the dream.

How did you meet your husband?

He messaged me on TikTok, and that is where we shared contacts. The very first message he ever sent me, he called me his wife. Just like that.

What was that early period like?

It was beautiful, honestly. He told me he loves the things of God, and I do too, so that mattered deeply to me. We prayed together every morning and every night, even while he was still away at work, and he was the one who initiated it. He sent me messages without fail every single morning and night. I asked him once how long he planned to keep doing that, and he said forever. He still does it today. He has never missed a single day.

He told me he does not drink alcohol because of a health condition. He made me believe that whenever there was conflict, he preferred to talk things through and never go to bed without resolving it. That made me feel safe. That made me think, this is a man I can trust.

Walk me through what happened after his first text and how it led to a wedding.

We were talking online for three months while he was still away at work. Before he came back, I told him I thought we needed to slow down. I said I wanted us to spend maybe a month or two in the same space first, going on actual dates, properly getting to know each other. He got angry. He asked me if he had ever been bad to me, and I said no. He said he loved me, he knew what he wanted, and I should trust him. He said he believed we could make it work.

Considering his age, he is 42, and the fact that I was also ready to settle down, I accepted. I believed we could make it work.

We met in person for the very first time the day he got off work. The next day, we went on a date, and that was when he proposed. He said, “Please be my wife; it would make me the happiest and luckiest man.” At first, I was scared, and I told him that. He promised to make me the happiest woman.

I said I know marriage is a good thing and I am happy, but a part of me is scared because I know how emotional I am. My fears were greater than my joy in that moment. But I said to myself, I have heard stories of people who meet online, fall in love, get married, and it works. Mine would not be any different, especially because of the God factor. So I believed.

. I met his family a week after the engagement. When he introduced me to them, everyone loved me. His friends, too. Nobody said anything discouraging. He kept saying, ���Why can’t you see that this is meant to be?��� About a month after the engagement, we got married.

Tell me about the wedding. How did that day feel?

It felt special. I was happy seeing people come out to celebrate with us.

But my mother made me sad. She acted like a complete stranger. I had given her money to buy clothes since she rejected the outfit I had already bought for her. She did not buy anything. She showed up in a wrapper she had bought in 2000, when she was still married to my dad. I ended up giving the outfit I had bought for her to my dad’s younger sister, one of the people who actually took care of me when I was little.

My dad and my elder siblings, though, were the happiest. That made me so happy and teary. That part I will always hold.

When did you first sense something was wrong?

The morning after our wedding. I was on the same bed with my husband, practically naked, and he was masturbating while watching pornography. I was right there. He preferred to do that rather than be with me.

I felt disgusted. Would you be happy seeing your partner do that when you are right there?

What She Said: The Day My Husband Asked for a Divorce Was the Best Day of My Marriage

Did you say something to him about it?

I did. But things just kept unravelling after that.

He drinks heavily, and whenever he drinks, he says whatever he wants without caring how it affects me or our marriage. He makes me feel like he’s disgusted by me. We always quarrel when he is drunk. This is the same man who told me before we married that he does not drink at all.

And there was something else happening underneath all of it. My husband barely even kisses me. When we first met, he told me he loves all of that, the romance, the kissing, all of it. But this is the first relationship I have ever been in where the man does not kiss me or want romance at all. He just wants to go straight to the point. I have never gotten an erection from him just from being close to him, even when we cuddle. My exes were never like that with me.

I spoke to him about it a few times, and he kept telling me I love sex too much. That is not true. I actually have a very low libido. In my previous relationships, my exes constantly complained about it. But with my husband, something shifted in me. I had never gotten wet during sex before, but with him, I would get wet just from cuddling. So I knew it was not about me.

And yet he was the same person who, when he was drunk one night, told me he did not find me attractive and that he regrets marrying me and wants his bride price back. Rather than getting mad, I almost found peace. Because he had finally said out loud what I had been sensing all along. It also explained why he was seeing other women..

What do you mean?

I hacked into his phone. The reason I did it is that from very early on, he was always on his phone. The moment he woke up, he went straight to his phone. When I asked him to come and pray with me, he told me to pray and leave him alone. This was the same man who used to initiate our prayers when he was still away at work.

I found messages with numerous women, along with pictures. Even in the days leading up to our wedding, he had been sleeping with different women. While I was the one begging him for intimacy.

I was filled with so much anger and disgust. Especially when I saw the pictures of the women. It made me sick. Dey no even fine reach me. All I could think of was evil.

What did you do with that?

I told my family and his as well. I told him to leave the house, which he did. I sent his clothes home to his family and told them to instruct him not to come back, because at that point, I could not trust what I was capable of feeling.

But I want to be honest about that period, because it was the darkest period of my life. I have two older sisters who were not yet married when I first got married. In my community, people had already been saying things about my family, calling us cursed, using it to humiliate my dad at gatherings. When I started to see that my marriage might be falling apart, the weight of what people would say became unbearable. I almost did not survive that period. I was so afraid of the shame that I nearly cut my wrists with a knife. I thank God for his mercy and grace for still being here.

If you are reading this and you are in that place, please do not do what I almost did. No marriage, no shame, no public opinion is worth your life. Please reach out to someone. In Nigeria, you can call the Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative on 08091126655.

What made you come back from that edge?

God. Just God. And eventually, the anger helped, too, because it was louder than the shame.

When his family saw that I was serious about leaving, and when he saw that I meant every word, he got scared. He kept calling and begging. His family and some elders held a meeting. They called me on WhatsApp, and I spoke for a long time.

Weeks passed, and after much begging from everyone, I told them that the moment this man married me, God made him the head of our home. But since he has refused to act like the man that he is, this marriage will continue on my terms and conditions. If he agrees, fine. If he does not agree, it is way better for me, because this is not how I envisioned my marriage.

The next day, they called back and said he had agreed to do whatever I wanted.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What were your terms?

I wrote them down and sent them over. We signed the agreement with a third party, their king, as a witness. Everyone in that room scolded him. Not one person supported what he had done.

I told them clearly: any day he deviates from any of my terms, the marriage is as good as over.

How has he been since?

He stopped drinking. He joined a department in the church. We pray together as a couple again. He has taken the things of God very seriously since then.

When he came back home after we were separated, he had lost so much weight. He looked so pale and sick that it made me cry. I gave us a second chance, knowing that we never actually dated before the marriage. Some of these things were probably always going to surface eventually.

I still have trust issues. He changed the password on his phone after I gave it to him once. I have decided not to let that consume me. I also have my own plans, and those are between God and me.

I know he is probably still cheating, even though I have not caught him again. I know that if I went through his phone, I would find things. But I have decided not to go looking. I told him that he alone will expose himself to me, and that will be the total end.

No one will cut my life short simply because he has refused to keep his penis in his pants. It is very easy for people to say “leave” until it is their turn and they find out they cannot. I know there is no perfect person out there. I pray for my marriage to work out fine.

How do you carry all of this day-to-day?

I channel my energy into building myself. For myself, for my unborn children, for my family. I do not let it consume me anymore.

I come from a polygamous home, and I have hated that reality my whole life. I promised myself and God when I was young that I would have all my children with one man. That has not changed. I want to have my own children. I want to see how beautiful and handsome they will be. I want to see my own offspring grow.

One thing I will never do is cheat. In all my relationships, I have never cheated, not once. I have always believed this: if you are not happy, please leave rather than hurting someone. I believe that even now, even while I am the one still trying to hold things together.

If you could go back to the version of you who said yes to him, what would you tell her?

I would tell her to stand her ground about taking things slow and getting to know each other properly before marriage. Marriage is a long ride.

I would tell her to ask more questions. About him. About his family. Before you sign up for the whole thing.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Remi*, a 52-year-old businesswoman based in Lagos. She talks about 25 years of marriage, the emotional and financial abuse she quietly endured, the mother who told her she would be disowned if she left, and why she laughed when her ex-husband finally asked for a divorce.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

I’m Remi. I’m 52, and I live in Lagos. I deal in textiles, which is actually something of a family tradition; my mother was in the industry before me. It is the business I have built my independence around, and I am proud of it. Beyond work, I am a mother of three and someone who has learned, later than I would have liked, that choosing yourself is not selfish. It is necessary.

Before you got married, what did you imagine marriage would be like?

I only had my parents’ marriage to use as an example of what a perfect marriage looks like. So I imagined that my husband would be like my father, someone who worships the ground I walk on and loves me wholeheartedly, and that my marriage would be blissful and free of complications. My father genuinely adored my mother. That was all I knew of what a husband was supposed to be, so naturally, that was what I expected for myself.

How did you meet your ex-husband, and what made you think he was the one?

I met him through a friend. Let���s call her Stella*. At the time, she was dating his friend, and the day they introduced us, I kept staring at him because I had never seen someone as handsome and confident as him. When we started talking, I realised he was someone I could see myself having all my kids with.

What was that early period like before you got married?

It was exciting. He was charming and attentive, the way men are when they are trying to win you over, and I was completely taken. Looking back now, I can see things I missed or chose not to see, but in my time, when you are young and in love, and someone looks at you the way he looked at me then, you are not exactly looking for red flags. You are just happy. I was happy.

How long did you date before he proposed, and how did he ask?

We dated for about two years before he proposed. It was not an elaborate thing; he was not that kind of man, but he was sincere about it, and at the time, sincerity was enough for me. We were at home, just the two of us, and he told me he wanted me to be his wife. I said yes immediately because I genuinely wanted to. I loved him, and I could see my life with him clearly in that moment.

But even as I said yes, there was something sitting at the back of my mind. A few months before he proposed, I had met his eldest brother for the first time at a family gathering. I do not even remember what the occasion was now, but I remember that man’s face when he looked at me. He barely acknowledged me. At some point during that visit, he made a comment, not directly to me but loud enough that I could hear, something about his brother always making decisions without thinking them through. It was not hard to understand what he meant. I was the decision he was referring to. I smiled and said nothing because I did not want to cause problems, but I filed it away. When my husband proposed, I was happy, genuinely happy, but that interaction with his brother was already there, already casting a small shadow over everything.

What was the wedding like?

Quite dreadful, if I am being honest. By the time the wedding came around, I had had enough interactions with the eldest brother to know that the shadow I had felt at the proposal was not going anywhere. He was cold throughout the entire occasion. Not rude in a way that anyone would point to, but the kind of cold that you feel in your body when you are the only one it is directed at. He did not congratulate me. He barely spoke to me. At one point, I caught him watching me from across the room with an expression I can only describe as contempt, and when our eyes met, he simply looked away.

I told my husband how I felt, and he told me I was seeing things, that I was overthinking it, that his brother was just like that. But I knew what I had felt, and I knew what I had seen. I was scared, not in a dramatic way, but in the quiet way you are scared when you can see something difficult ahead of you and nobody around you will acknowledge it is there. I pushed the feeling down and got married anyway, because what else was I going to do? I loved him. I chose to believe it would be fine. It was not always fine.

Did that fear about his family materialise?

Yes. It was not just the eldest brother. Most of my husband’s siblings were awful to me because they felt I was trapping him. He was their only breadwinner at the time, so they resented me for it, as though my marrying him was some kind of scheme. Only the younger ones liked me. The older ones detested my guts. It created a tension in the marriage that never fully went away, because he was always navigating between being a husband and being loyal to siblings who did not particularly care for his wife.

How long were you married?

Twenty-five years.

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What were those twenty-five years like? Start from the beginning.

The early years were fifty-fifty. There were good days, genuinely good ones, but there were also moments that made me stop and ask myself if I had made the right decision. He had a way of saying things, cutting things, that would sit with me for days. He would berate me in front of people, family, friends; it did not matter who was watching. He would tell me I could not amount to anything. At the time, I was relying mostly on my parents’ money because I was not in the job market, and for some reason, he would call me useless for that, as though I had lied about who I was before we got married. He knew exactly what my situation was. He still used it against me at every opportunity.

The financial side was its own separate cruelty. There were times he would not give me money for food, but right in front of me, he would give his brother any amount he asked for without blinking. For a couple of years in that marriage, I had to rely on my parents to feed my children and me. He never denied our children their education, I will give him that, but he would constantly expect me to produce money from nowhere to carry the house, while simultaneously making me feel worthless for not having any.

I kept hoping the good days would become the majority, that we would find our rhythm and settle into something more stable. That never really happened. The difficult days were always there, just waiting.

I���m sorry. How did you eventually find financial independence within the marriage?

I tried a few things before I found my footing. Provisions first, then drinks, then I tried baking for a while. None of it quite clicked the way I needed it to. Eventually, I found my way into the textile industry, which is actually a family thing. My mother was in textiles before me, so in a way I was following a path that had already been laid. Once I found it, things started to shift for me in ways that went beyond just the money.

How did your husband treat you once you became financially independent?

He started seeing me as someone worth respecting. I was no longer someone he could rule over in the same way, and whatever control he had felt over me before started to loosen. There were still moments when he made me feel strange about having my own money because he no longer had the upper hand in the marriage, and that clearly unsettled him. But there was a certain level of respect I started to see that had not been there before. It is telling, really, that the thing that changed how he treated me was not a conversation, a realisation, or any kind of emotional growth on his part. It was money. The moment I had my own, I became worth respecting.

How important was having your own income to your sense of self?

It made me feel really good. I felt confident that I could spoil myself and my children without asking anyone for permission or waiting on anyone’s mood. I could get what I needed without calculating how much money I did not have. I did not have to beg him or my parents for anything, and that freedom changed how I moved through the world entirely. It is a beautiful feeling to know that you are not dependent on someone who does not treat you well for your basic survival.

When did you realise the marriage was something you could no longer live with?

When my daughter started making her displeasure with her father very obvious. She was not subtle about it, the way her brothers were. She genuinely hated him and wanted everyone to know, and watching her made something click for me. I realised that by staying, I had damaged my children in more ways than one. He never let them lack anything materially, that much is true, but he was still emotionally abusive to them. They were watching how he treated me and experiencing his moods and his coldness firsthand. My daughter’s anger was just the loudest version of it. Her brothers had their own version of it, too; they just kept it quieter. Seeing it so plainly on her face made it very hard for me to keep pretending things were fine.

For a long time, you stayed despite everything. What kept you there?

My children, mostly. And the whole “what would people say?” that my mother kept muttering in my ears every time I told her I could not stay in the marriage anymore. There was also the fact that I still loved him, to an extent. That is a complicated thing to explain, loving someone who treats you badly, but it is real, and it is one of the most disorienting feelings there is. You are not stupid for feeling it. You are not weak. It is just that love does not always go away simply because the person has stopped deserving it, and for a long time, that love, mixed with fear of losing my mother’s approval and genuine concern for what this would do to my children, kept me in that house long past the point when I should have left.

What did those conversations with your mother look like?

They usually started with me calling her, exhausted, trying to explain another thing he had done and how overwhelming everything was getting. And they would always, without fail, end with her saying, “he is still the father of your kids.” She has never experienced what it is to have an emotionally abusive husband, so like most women in our society, she trivialised my struggles. A lot. She did not mean harm. I think she genuinely believed she was giving me wisdom, but what she was actually doing was telling me that my pain was not enough of a reason to leave. The concept of my leaving him was so unacceptable to her that she told me she would disown me if I ever did. That threat sat with me for years.

That must have been very painful. What messages had you grown up hearing about divorce?

It was. I grew up learning that divorce is unacceptable and unheard of. That, unless your husband is physically laying his hands on you, there is no valid reason to leave. Just stay with him, even if he spends three hundred and sixty-five days a year making you feel like a failure. Just manage it. Pray about it. Find a way to make him happy. Nobody ever asked whether he was making you happy. That was not part of the conversation.

Why were you worried about what people would say if you left?

I was mostly worried about what my parents would say. My mother had made her position very clear, and my father, though gentler about it, had always taken an “as long as you are happy” stance that I knew would be tested the moment I told him I was choosing divorce. Honestly, I did not really care about other people beyond my immediate family. It was the people closest to me whose reactions I could not stop thinking about.

Do you think you would have left earlier if you had had financial security from the beginning?

Even if I had the money, I would not have left earlier, because my mother would have made good on her threat and disowned me. The financial piece was important, but it was not the only thing holding me. The fear of losing my family’s approval, particularly my mother’s, was its own kind of trap.

How did the conversation about divorce actually happen?

He left the country about three years ago. He said it was to set roots there, but I had a feeling from early on that he just wanted to leave without making it a dramatic event. So when he eventually called and told me he wanted a divorce, I was honestly just blank about it. There was no explosion of feeling, no moment of crisis. I told him to send the necessary papers, and I would sign. That was the whole conversation.

What was going through your mind in that moment?

Honestly? Relief. When I tell you I laughed, I mean I genuinely laughed. It had been such a long time coming that there was nothing left to feel except the strange lightness of it finally being said out loud by him. I did not have to be the one to say it. He said it. And all I had to do was agree.

How did your family react?

When I told my parents that he was the one who had initiated it, they expressed surprise and then more or less called it a day. My dad was calm about the whole thing, and I think it is because he never really liked him like that. He had always taken the gentle path with me, never pushing back strongly, just going with “as long as you are happy,” but over the years, you could sense that his opinion of my husband was not particularly high. My sister asked if it was the right idea because of the children, but our children are grown, all 3 in their 20s and barely interact with their father, so I honestly did not know what point she thought she was making.

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Did you feel judged by your community or extended family?

No one judged me. They all knew what kind of husband he could be. I think that says a lot about how visible his behaviour had been over the years, even to people on the outside.

How did you talk to your children about the divorce?

I told them casually, and they barely blinked. They just said okay. There was no drama, no tears, no long conversation about what it meant. They already knew. They had been living in that house too.

How aware were they of what was happening in the marriage?

Very aware. He was not only unkind to me, but he was also unkind to them. He had his good moments, and I want to be fair about that, but my children mostly remember him for his bad days. They had their own relationship with his moods and his emotional distance, completely separate from whatever was happening between us as husband and wife.

Looking back, do you think staying together would have been better for them?

No. What was the point of having a father in their lives if he only gave them trauma to carry? I think it would have actually been better for them if I had left him much earlier. They would have been more self-actualised. They would have grown up watching their mother choose herself, which is a lesson I gave them far too late.

How has your life changed since the divorce?

It has been wonderful. Honestly, when he left the country, I was already living like a divorced woman in many ways. The weight of wondering whether someone at home was eating, whether his mood that evening was going to determine the atmosphere of the entire house, all of that was already gone. After the papers, I just kept going further in that direction. I started going out more, spending time on myself, pouring into who I am. No husband constantly chipping away at my self-esteem. I am prioritising myself in ways that feel completely natural now, as though I was always supposed to be living like this.

Do you ever regret it?

No.

Have your views on love or marriage changed?

I still think love is beautiful and that people just have to find their right partners. I understand that marriage did me dirty, but it is not everyone it would do dirty. Case in point, my parents. Their marriage is everything I imagined mine would be when I was young. I just did not end up with someone like my father.

Would you get married again?

Absolutely not. I am okay like this. I love being single.

If you could speak to the version of yourself who was scared to leave, what would you tell her?

It is fine to be scared, but she should not be, because it is not even as big a deal as she thinks. She is going to be okay. She is going to be more than okay.

What is one thing society gets completely wrong about divorced women?

That it is shameful. We have always tied a woman’s entire worth to being a wife and a mother, and the moment she exits a marriage, people act as though she has failed at the most important thing she was supposed to do. I think it is silly because more women should be allowed to divorce and still have their communities backing them. Leaving a bad marriage is not a failure. Staying in one for the sake of appearances is not a strength. We have had it backwards for a very long time.

What is one lesson you hope younger women take from your experience?

That it is fine to leave if your husband is not acting like the love of your life should act. You do not need him to be hitting you. You do not need a dramatic, obvious, provable reason. Feeling consistently unseen, disrespected and diminished is reason enough. Your life is too long and too valuable to spend it managing someone else’s ego.

The  is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria. Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together. .

What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is ��n��re Abang Gideon, a growth strategist and founder in her twenties, originally from Cross River State, Nigeria, now based in Luxembourg. She talks about selling everything she owned to chase a visa-sponsored job in Estonia, surviving three rejections in Egypt with an empty wallet, and how the worst period of her life became the foundation of everything she has built.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is ��n��re Abang Gideon. I am from Cross River State, Nigeria, and I am currently based in Luxembourg. I am a growth strategist and the founder of InstaGo Travels, a global travel agency providing tailored mobility solutions, and Giena Consulting Group, a business development and marketing firm. I also founded a rapidly growing community for women founders in Luxembourg, dedicated to empowering and connecting ambitious women worldwide.

Can you tell me about the family you grew up in? What kind of child were you?

I grew up in a household where both my parents were educated, yet they placed an immense value on hard work. Some of my earliest memories involve planting cocoa seedlings on my father’s farm, where I was always eager to take on more seeds, not just for the work itself, but because I saw it as a path to earning enough to buy my own treats. That early exposure to industry and the desire to build my own capital shaped me into a curious, driven child, always looking for the next challenge or opportunity to create something of my own.

What did success look like to you growing up? Did you always imagine you would build a life outside Nigeria?

Growing up, success was about independence and the ability to build from the ground up. I did not necessarily have a fixed vision of leaving, but I always possessed an expansive view of what was possible, knowing I wanted to operate on a global stage even if the path was not yet written.

What was your life like before everything changed?

I had just completed my National Service in Abuja and was deeply involved in community services while learning about finance and investment in the stock market. I enrolled in an academy that shaped my mindset on success and the financial markets. I was browsing the internet one day when I received a job opportunity notification in Estonia. I applied, went through three interview rounds, and they gave me the offer. There was, however, one huge problem: I had to apply for the visa from Egypt, as there is no Estonian embassy in Nigeria.

What exactly was the opportunity?

It was a role as a business support associate with a fintech company in Estonia. The interview sessions were held over Zoom, and I got to ask questions and clarify my doubts with all the hiring managers. After the interview rounds, I was offered the position, and I believed it was worth the risk because I saw it as the beginning of a new chapter and the answer to my desire for a life that felt big enough for everything I carried inside me.

So you decided to travel to Egypt for the Visa. What did that decision to go all in actually look like?

I was convinced that I was meant for more than the life I was living. I had received confirmation from people who had already arrived in Estonia that the contracts and paperwork were legitimate, so I decided to move everything at once to avoid making the trip twice and to minimise the financial risk of multiple international journeys. I believed in that opportunity with everything in me because it was the proof I needed that my potential was not limited by my environment.

What did moving everything at once actually mean? What did you have to let go of?

I let go of my apartment and sold all my properties, including downsizing from my two-bedroom apartment in Kubwa to a self-contained apartment a month before my trip. Saying goodbye to my life also meant saying goodbye to my pet. The closest company I had then was my cat, whom I gave away to the Uber driver who took me to the airport. It was very painful, but it had to happen. I was mentally done with my life in Nigeria and was looking forward to a fresh start.

How did your family react when they found out?

My family was excited for me because they have always wanted the best for me. There was some scepticism until they saw proof of others who had successfully received the visa, which is natural, but as I have always been someone who follows a conviction once I am sure of it, they were not surprised at all.

What was life like in Egypt while you waited?

Egypt was intended to be a brief stop, so initially it was fun and less heavy. When you are living in a new country as a tourist with a timeline, things feel different. But it soon became a space of waiting, torture, and eventually, a profound curriculum. My expectations were high, and I spent that period in a state of bracing for the future. My life in Egypt was sustained only by the grace of God. My visa application was rejected 3 times, but people kept showing up for me in ways that defied logic. 

The first wait was short and less painful, and I was less anxious because I was almost 100% certain of approval. But the second and third waits tested me in more ways than I could have imagined. It forced me to stop seeing myself as a victim and start seeing myself as a strategist navigating life. Because that period contained so many lessons I could never fit into a single interview, I am currently writing a book about that journey, with an expected release next year.

Tell me about receiving the first rejection. What did that moment feel like?

That morning, I was excited and just a little anxious. I was looking forward to my next flight out of Egypt, but could not see what lay ahead. Upon arriving at the embassy, I saw many people who had already been rejected, as well as others whose visas had been approved. I was hoping to be among the latter, but I had no idea that I was holding a rejection letter until I opened it. Looking at that paper for the first time was heavy and sobering. It was one of the most confusing and loneliest moments of my life.

What She Said: I Lost My Sight at 11 and Refused to Lose Anything Else

What made you decide to apply again?

After the first rejection, the company itself was confused. They had seen many other candidates receive approvals, so they reached out and strongly encouraged me to apply again. That external validation gave me the glimmer of hope I desperately needed, but ultimately, I kept going because the “why” behind my journey remained true. Even when the evidence was thin, I clung to the belief that it would work out. At the time, I seemed to forget that we make plans and God laughs, and God must have laughed quite hard at my plans, because clearly that specific path was not mine to follow. I simply needed the lessons that period of waiting contained, and I was not finished learning them yet.

By the third rejection, what was going through your mind?

That moment made me question my judgment and my direction. I had to face the difficult truth that my savings were entirely finished, and I had no backup plan before leaving Nigeria, so going back home would mean hitting rock bottom all over again. By the third rejection, I reached a profound self-realisation about life’s survival limit. I knew I had to act immediately, so I began job hunting in Egypt. 

A Good Samaritan I met at an African restaurant eventually referred me to a job as an animator at a resort in Sharm el-Sheikh. Working long, gruelling hours, dealing with frustrated guests while carrying the heavy mental weight of my own failed relocation was intensely humbling. It stripped away every ounce of ego I had left, but it provided the bridge I needed to sustain myself until I could finally return to Nigeria.

When you got back to your hotel room after each rejection, what was actually happening inside you?

When I got back to my hotel room from the embassy, sitting there with an empty wallet and a rejected stamp was the moment I genuinely asked God what he was doing with my life. I cried my eyes out and prayed more times than I can remember, asking for a miracle. Eventually, I learned to treat those doubts as temporary visitors rather than permanent residents.

What did coming home feel like after all of that?

It was a humbling return, but I realised that I was not the same woman who had left. I discovered that even without resources, I was still standing and formidable. It was a hard and heavy experience, and because I could not explain to everyone what had happened, only a few close friends even knew I was back. I refused to let the setback define me, so I applied for an MBA upon my return and secured a visa to study in Paris a few months later. It was not easy, but I am deeply grateful to my family, who never gave up on me.

Financially, emotionally and mentally, what did starting over actually look like?

It looked like extreme discipline and the realisation that I could not do it alone. I had to move past the pride of being the one who figures it out and learn to accept help when it is offered. I was drained and wanted it to end. I spent most of my time at a friend’s place until I was stable enough to stand on my own feet. I learned the necessary survival skills to move forward, and when my flight out of Nigeria finally left, I was determined to make it, and I never looked back.

At what point did you decide that the rejection would not be the end of your story?

The moment I realised that my ability to build and my mental grit were not tied to a visa or a geographical location. I decided that if I could build a business once, I could build it again and again.

How did InstaGo Travels come to life?

InstaGo was born from the intersection of my personal experience navigating complex travel systems and the academic rigour of my MBA programme. During my time in Egypt, the travel agent who planned my trip showed no sympathy, support or transparency, which became incredibly draining. Once I returned to Nigeria, friends and contacts began asking for my support with their own trips. When we were tasked with a mini-project in business school, I chose to develop a concept to solve the very problems I had faced. InstaGo became that project, and I eventually brought it to life outside the classroom because I realised there was a better, more sustainable way to serve travellers. I have trained my team to treat every client’s application as a strategic project because I know they are really buying their future in a new environment, not just a service.

How has the journey with InstaGo been?

It feels surreal, especially when I recall where and how InstaGo started. It was not a smooth path, but I am grateful for the vision. It feels like a blessing to give back in a way that makes people feel seen, heard and supported.

You also founded The Fem Founders. Where did that come from?

I wanted to create the space I needed when I was starting out, to surround myself with women who are building and pushing boundaries. Most of the women in our community are expats and career-driven professionals looking to navigate life or business in a new environment, and my goal is to ensure that no female founder feels she has to face that loneliness alone. The growth has been beyond what I imagined. In just two months, we have welcomed over 200 members from around the world. I believe that when you pool collective intelligence, you reduce the time it takes for every woman in the room to reach her goal.

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Looking back, do you think you would have built the life you have today if that visa had been approved the first time?

No. Never. I believe the rejection timeline was the best professional development I ever had, and I never looked at life the same way again.

What is the biggest lesson rejection has taught you?

Rejection has taught me countless times that a NO from a system is not a NO to your potential. It is simply an invitation to innovate. If you can survive the process of building from nothing, you can lead in any market or environment.

What do people misunderstand about starting over from scratch?

People think you lose your progress, but you do not. You lose your things, but you keep your experience, your network and your capacity to solve problems, which is the only real currency you ever need in life.

If another woman is reading this while navigating a major setback, what would you want her to know?

I want her to know that this, too, shall pass. Giving up should never be an option, and asking for help when you need it is not a sign of weakness. It is actually the first step toward understanding the true power of community. While you are in the thick of it, never give up and do not stop praying, because I truly believe God has a better plan for you than what you can see right now.

What are you most proud of, not because the world celebrates it, but because you know what it cost you?

I am most proud of my mental agility. I honestly did not think I had it in me until life showed me that I did. You never really know how strong you are until the only choice you have left is to survive, and in that space, you realise you are far more capable than you ever imagined.

When people remember your story years from now, what do you hope they remember most?

I stood in the middle of my own fire and built a path out of it despite the challenges life threw at me. I hope my story serves as a reminder to everyone, especially women, that if I could do it, so can they.

意鞄艶油��is returning on August 22, 2026, in Lagos! Come learn from finance experts and industry leaders and join unfiltered conversations about building wealth and diversifying your income stream in a country like Nigeria.��Real stories, expert advice you can actually use, and a community ready to build wealth together.��.