The rain in Lagos turned the city into a humid sauna, but inside the visitation room at Omega Funeral Home, the air was as cold as a meat locker. I stood before my father’s body, covered by a simple white sheet, his shaved head resting on stone. He looked smaller than I remembered—his physical form shrinking in tandem with the disintegration of his life.
My brother Femi held my hand, a grounding anchor against the shock that had arrived via phone call three days earlier. “Daddy passed away last night,” he had said. “At 3 a.m.”
There were no words left to say. The pain was too sharp for tears. Our father, Joshua Kayode Adepitan, had been hospitalized for a fever and died from a colon blockage—a condition that, we later learned, was entirely treatable. He was 81. And in the weeks leading up to his death, he had been living hand-to-mouth in a dim motel room in a Lagos shantytown.
From Hero to Hermit
To understand the magnitude of this fall, one must understand the man he once was. Growing up, my father was a hero. A proud Yoruba man, he had clawed his way out of rural poverty and obscurity, leveraging scholarships and sheer ambition to build a life of success. He commanded every room with wit and presence, delighting audiences with stories of his youth in colonial Nigeria, his time in Sweden where he met my British mother, and his triumphant return to Lagos.
He built two thriving businesses: a furniture factory and a charter airline. I cherished the afternoons spent in his factory, learning to identify wood by scent and grain, or riding shotgun on his speedboat as he raced along the Atlantic coast. He was our source of stability, security, and joy. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” he would quote his grandmother, instilling in us a belief in limitless potential.
But Nigeria’s economy collapsed under decades of military dictatorship. The government shuttered his airline, and demand for his furniture plummeted. The decline was not immediate, but it was relentless. He stopped visiting his office. He stopped playing squash at the Metropolitan Club. He stopped traveling with friends.
Instead, he withdrew into the shadows.
The Invisible Con
For twenty years, my father became a recluse. He broke contact with his extended family and friends. My mother, fearful of his erratic behavior and suspicious business dealings, divorced him and fled the country, changing her name to sever all ties. Femi and I, studying abroad in our early twenties, watched from a distance as the man we adored unraveled.
He spent hours on the phone with faceless “business partners,” discussing implausible deals in India and Switzerland involving millions of dollars. Threatening strangers appeared at our gate demanding money. He began associating with self-proclaimed prophets who warned him that his relatives were conspiring with voodoo men to cast spells on him.
His appearance changed. The custom-tailored Saville Row suits were replaced by dusty dashikis that swished along the floor. His famous laugh became shallow; a permanent twitch altered his facial expressions.
“I am coming into my fortune,” he would tell me during my annual visits. “I will once again emerge into Lagos society.”
I would look around at the dilapidated house, the cobwebs crisscrossing the ceilings, and ask, “How? Who are these partners?” He never answered. He only receded further, drawn deeper into the clutches of people I did not know.
The Digital Ghost
The truth only emerged after his death. Femi and I found his Yahoo email password scribbed on a piece of paper. When we logged in, thousands of densely written messages tumbled forth.
The emails revealed a single, relentless correspondent referred to only as “World Wide World Wide.”
This entity had no digital profile—a virtual ghost. In those archives, I discovered that my father had been the victim of an insidious, twenty-year long-con. This scammer had meticulously groomed him, luring him with promises of phantom riches while systematically exploiting his vulnerabilities.
The scam was multifaceted:
* Financial Exploitation: He was tricked into upfront payments for deals that never existed, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
* Social Isolation: The scammer used religious radicalization and fear of voodoo to turn my father against his closest loved ones, convincing him that family and friends were enemies.
* Psychological Control: By the end, my father had lost his ability to reason, to love, and to be loved. He had lost his home, his businesses, his dignity, and his soul.
Reading those emails was heartbreaking. I cried not just for the man who had died, but for the man who had been stolen from us long before his physical death. I didn’t recognize the person unearthed in those digital trails.
Reclaiming His Legacy
The revelation offered closure, but it did not solve the immediate problem: how to bury him.
In Yoruba tradition, a funeral for an elder is not a mournful affair. It is an exuberant celebration of life. It requires gorgeous aso oke fabrics, coral beads to ward off evil spirits, drummers, dancers, and a throng of well-wishers. But our father had cut off all ties. How could we arrange a traditional funeral for a man who had been a recluse for two decades?
We turned to our childhood friends and their parents, enlisting their help to navigate the rites. With no contact details for our father’s family, we placed an advertisement in Punch newspaper, inviting people to wear royal blue—his favorite color. We expected empty pews.
We were wrong.
On the day of the funeral, the church entrance was alive. I saw the mothers of my childhood friends, dressed in embroidered aso oke trimmed with diamante. Then came my father’s sister, Aunt Shola, and our cousins, traveling from all over Nigeria in royal blue caps and head ties. Even strangers from the shantytown motel appeared, dressed in simple but fashionable Ankara fabric.
As the drummers led the procession, the atmosphere shifted from solemnity to joy. People danced, throwing crisp Naira notes at the pallbearers and the coffin—a tradition of honoring the deceased. Femi and I joined in, laying note after note until the wood paneling was completely covered.
“Oya, put money on the coffin,” a friend’s mother whispered, nodding approvingly. “That’s the tradition.”
Inside, we sang “How Great Thou Art,” my father’s favorite hymn. At the reception, an Afrobeat band sang his name in a call-and-response that reverberated around the room:
Baba Kayode o
Baba Kayode we miss you
Baba Kayode we love you
Aunt Shola hugged me tightly. “We are so happy to be reconnected with you,” she said. She looked around at the decorations and the posters of my father’s smiling face. “Your father would have been so proud.”
I wanted to tell her about the emails. I wanted to explain the horror of the scam that had possessed him, altering him beyond recognition. But as I watched her sway to the music, remembering her brother not as a victim, but as the accomplished, respected man she loved, I stayed silent.
In death, Femi and I were finally able to reclaim the man we knew. We honored him one last time, showing him the love that we had longed to show during the years he was shut out by the fog of manipulation.
Anike Wariebi is a British-Nigerian writer and Oxford University graduate. She recently completed a memoir about her estranged father, exploring the complexities of family, heritage, and the devastating impact of long-term scams.
