In 2019, I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumour and had surgery to have it removed. The surgery, though traumatic, went very well and all the pathology came back completely cancer-free. A relief, an immense blessing. Following my surgery, I spent several months at home quietly recuperating, which forced me to take time to slow down from my hectic life, juggling full time work and bringing up two wonderful daughters.
One of the side effects I suffered post-surgery, was a temporary inability to read! My eyes simply could not focus on the letters on the page to string them into words and sentences. Looking at a page of text, I saw blurred, smudged characters, like ink on a magazine streaked by water damage. Watching TV for too long also presented challenges, often bringing on mild nausea and a throbbing headache after only a few minutes. I was told by my neurosurgeon that this was common for patients recovering from head trauma, that it would pass, soon.
Desperate for entertainment, I turned to podcasts. During this time, podcasts became my best friend. I devoured them hungrily, listening to them on a loop as I lay for hours in bed, pottered around my house or went for walks. I listened to many different genres — from true crime to historical shows, film reviews, celebrity interviews, news and comedy. I became a podcast junkie — literally.
On my journey plumbing the depths of the many podcast categories and genres, I discovered a wonderful podcast by celebrated memoirist and journalist, Dani Shapiro, called FAMILY SECRETS. The genesis of this podcast, was apparently a shocking family secret she had uncovered after her father’s death, an experience that became the focus of her acclaimed memoir, INHERITANCE.
Each podcast episode of FAMILY SECRETS delves into stories from guests who have discovered long-hidden secrets from their family’s past, presented through a combination of interviews with Dani, and readings from memoirs or personal essays.
I became hooked. I found myself getting lost in the shocking and often tragic narratives about people who had made startling discoveries about their families. There were stories of misrepresented parenthood, of family members accused of treason, of false identity, of horrendous crimes committed and family members “passing” for a different race. Complicated and challenging stories — heart-breaking, tragic and very human.
The sudden time and space I had during my recovery, combined with listening to FAMILY SECRETS day after day, made me think about my family too. You see, a couple of years earlier, I had also uncovered a family secret.
After my mysterious and enigmatic father died three years earlier, I gained access to his personal papers, notebooks and personal email account, and they revealed a horrific truth. My father had been the victim of a con that lasted for over twenty years — what is known as a long con!
The masterful con artists, who communicated with him primarily by email, exploited his vulnerabilities and character flaws and manipulated him into silence, estranging him from his entire family and forcing him into seclusion, barricaded in his once beautiful house, that crumbled with neglect all around him. Over twenty years, they systematically broke him down and scammed him of hundreds of thousand dollars, bleeding him dry until his death.
At the time of his death, my father, once a successful Nigerian businessman, had lost everything he had worked hard to build. He lived in a poorly lit room, in a seedy hotel in the shanty towns of Lagos, miles away from the bustling commercial streets of factories and high-end residential suburbs, that were once his domain.
When I uncovered the truth, I felt a multitude of emotions — disappointment, confusion, but mostly shame.
Shame is a strange emotion, it consumes you, ravaging you from the inside, leaving an imprint and an aura that follows you about everywhere, like the lingering smell of tobacco infused into the clothes of a chain-smoker. In truth, I had been ashamed of my father for many years prior to his death. I was ashamed of the recluse he had become and of the dilapidated house that he lived in, that had been gradually picked apart for sale, like the victim of a vulture that took its time with the dead. I was ashamed as I had no explanation for what was happening to him, ashamed because I could not help in anyway, ashamed because my father’s situation hinted at things that were taboo.
Nigerians have a complicated relationship with shame. Instead of admonishing those who bring shame to the country — those guilty of corruption and the pilfering of the public treasury, as a people, we are quick to look the other way, electing them to be chairmen of charities and guest speakers at events, hoping they are generous with the spoils of their corruption. On the other hand, the fear of personal disgrace is all-consuming. Shame that comes from being stigmatized, shame that can be reflected onto us from family members that do the unthinkable or behave outside of the norms of acceptability, is to be avoided at all costs. We will do almost anything to avoid hushed whispers about us, or the feeling of hundreds of eyes bearing down on us with expressions of disapproval blazing like fire, or invitees boycotting our celebrations — the notable absences screaming of judgement, and a clear message: ‘You are no longer one of us’. Growing up, ‘Don’t bring shame onto our family’, was a warning drummed into every child in every household, irrespective of economic circumstance.
It is the intense fear of shame that compels many Nigerians to shockingly deny the truth of relatives who are homosexual, to cover up mounting business debts behind carefully curated facades of happiness and prosperity, and to lock away relatives, suffering with the burdens of mental health, in institutions far away, their names unspoken, as if they never existed at all.
When I uncovered the truth of my father’s downfall — the cruel scam that manipulated his greed, the shame was overwhelming, it reached new heights. The shame permeated my whole being like the gradual spread of damp from a leak behind a wall. It was as if my father’s actions projected a shame onto me that created a permanent stain that could not be washed away. I packed up the incriminating papers and documents, shut down his email and locked away the shame, or so I thought, but the shame lingered, simmering below the surface like a slow-bubbling stew.
Three years later, as I listened to episode after episode of the FAMILY SECRETS podcast, I felt inspired by the healing and liberation many people talked about. The healing that comes from sharing the truth of a family secret in all its raw, human complexity. I felt emboldened, motivated to return to my father’s story, to unravel what truly happened to him, to face the shame, to uncover and confront the truth and expose it. And so, I began the four-year journey of writing my father’s story as a memoir.
I became a detective in my quest to uncover the truth. I realized that my journey started long before my memoir project, before my father’s death, before I was even aware. My journey began with innocent and fleeting observations — the little clues and the gradual changes in my father’s behaviour and routine that I could not explain as a child, that I had no words for. After my father’s death, I was overwhelmed with the information that suddenly became available to me: the papers, files and notebooks, and the contents of his email charting over twenty years of manipulation and deception. I combined these with my own research from books, podcasts, articles, interviews with victims of cons, and an interrogation of my own memories — those strange fragments from my childhood I could not make meaning of.
My journey has been painful and fraught with unreliable narrators: family members who, like I, were also kept in the dark and whose memories of my father were from a distant past; the strange, accented voices at the end of the phone of my father’s house; the mysterious cast of characters I met over the years; and my father’s intense email interactions with a faceless organization spanning decades.
Unexpectedly, the process of writing of this story brought great joy too. In telling my father’s story from the beginning, charting his journey to success from rural Nigeria, I was able, for a few chapters, to remember him like he was, to celebrate his brilliance and greatness, for he was once a great man. For a while, I was with him in spirit, remembering his stories, laughing at his jokes and drowning in his effervescence. For those moments, fleeting as they were, the joy filled me up.
In piecing the components of my father’s story together from the beginning to the end, there are clear gaps, inconsistencies, questions unanswered and memories that are potentially flawed, ravaged by the passage of time, with few people left to validate them. Nevertheless, the pieces of the puzzle I have managed to put together reveal a truth. A heart-breaking truth of hubris, greed and manipulation.
By revealing the truth of what I found, I hope to shed light on the reality of confidence scams, specifically advance fee scams, the so called “419” scams. For me, it was important to lay the reality out in all its horror, to reveal the way the perpetrators manipulated my father and the insidious way they meticulously broke him down and extracted everything from him.
There are many articles about advance fee fraud, sometimes referred to as “the Nigerian scam”. Indeed, YouTube and Reddit are cluttered with warnings of scams, complete with example emails and survivor stories. But these sources are either very academic, or spun into comedic cautionary tales, the underlying message being “you should have known better”. The reality is however a bit more complicated.
As I near the final stages of editing my final manuscript for submission, I hope that someone out there will want to publish it. I would love to share the story of my father’s amazing life and indeed tragic end, and reveal the terrifying truth of these calculated fraudsters, in the hopes that others can benefit from the insights. Perhaps others can succeed where I failed, to steer a loved one home, before it’s too late.
I’m so grateful to Dani Shapiro and her wonderful podcast, FAMILY SECRETS, for inspiring me, getting me to a place where I understand the healing that can come from exposing secrets and lies, and indeed giving me permission to embark on this expedition. It has been an amazing, therapeutic and incredibly eye-opening journey.
Novice Memoirist 
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