Every week, Â鶹ÊÓƵ spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.
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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 counseling after experiencing sexual assault from the .
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.
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