One night in June 2011, in a quiet neigbourhood in Ajangbadi, Egbeda
area of Lagos, a 35-year old man sold his soul to the devil. While the
residents slept peacefully, Adeleke Adetayo, who lived in a small
apartment with his two children, woke up his first daughter, 13-year-old
Bola (not real name), and asked her to pull off her pants.
That night, Adeleke, a commercial bus driver, raped his daughter as the little girl cried in agony.
“Blood was coming out from my body. He used a white singlet to clean it.
I was crying but he told me to stop so that the landlord would not
hear. My sister was in the room at the time. My father started sleeping
with my younger sister last year,” the girl told our correspondent as
she looked down at her toes.
Bola’s younger sister, Tolu (not real name), is just 10 years old.
In any African culture, sleeping with one’s child is the most abominable
form of incest. But once in a while, reports of such incidents come up.
Such traumatic experience most times leaves a very damaging effect on
the abused child and it may take substantial effort by specialists to
make such child live a normal life.
The case of Adeleke’s daughters will bring tears to many eyes.
Unlike their peers who have the love of their parents and live normal
lives of going to school and coming back home to the warm embrace of
their parents, Bola and Tolu close from school every day with the
trepidation of what awaits them at home.
They rarely have good food to eat as their father barely provide for
their feeding when he comes back from his commercial driving job.
Their mother moved out in 2012, leaving them at the mercy of a predatory father who rarely had time for the children’s welfare.
The children’s mother, Kemi, spoke with our correspondent on the telephone on Saturday.
Her voice shook as she expressed shock at what her husband had done to their daughters.
She told Saturday PUNCH, “I moved out last year because it became clear I
was not safe in his house anymore. My children and I were suffering. He
was not taking care of us in anyway. We rarely had food to eat.
“He would beat me at the slightest provocation. When the beating was too
much and it got to the stage where my mother was the one bringing food
for us to eat, I took my children to live with my mother and I moved to
Ibadan.
“But when my husband learnt about where my children were, he went to
take them from there. I had no idea that while I was with him, my
husband was already sleeping with his own children.
“I have not been able to eat anything since yesterday that I was
informed about what that man did to my daughters. I am really sad.”
Did Kemi starve her husband of sex when she was still with him?
She replied, “Sir, you need to understand that my husband was the kind
of person who wanted sex every day. After two children, should we still
be acting like children when it comes to sleeping with each other?
“He would ask for sex almost every day and anytime I said no, he would
beat me up. Sometimes, he would pour urine on my head just to humiliate
me for turning him down. He called me all sorts of names.
“I was a hairdresser, but he said I should stop the work, because he
thought I was prostituting myself in the process. He called me
prostitute at the slightest provocation. All these were the reasons I
decided to leave him. I have seen my daughters a number of times since I
left their father’s house, but they never told me about what he was
doing to them.”
