I Was 16 When My Stepfather Tried to Kidnap Me From Church

Angel Nwankpa was six years old in 2006 when her mother married the man who would become her stepfather. Her earliest memory of him is from the traditional wedding itself, where he got into a fight with her mother’s cousin. The party had to end, and the tension that followed stayed with her. Even as a child, she could see how aggressive he was. She did not know then that this would define the next decade of her life.

A Childhood Marked by Violence

Before the marriage, it was just Angel and her mother. Her biological father had said he was not ready when her mother got pregnant, and she raised Angel as her sole parent. They lived in a comfortable family house with her grandmother, aunt, and cousins. Her mother was doing well for herself and was deeply involved in her church, where marriage was strongly encouraged. It took a while, but eventually, she was worn down by the talk of settling down. She was in her mid-30s when she married.

After the wedding, her stepfather told her mother to stop working. That decision would matter later, because when she left him, she had no income of her own to fall back on. Her siblings supported them, but money was one of the reasons they returned.

The violence began early. Angel remembers physical violence against her mother, but there were other forms of abuse too. The family kept what happened inside the home, even though people knew. One day, when Angel was about nine or ten, she ran out to bang on a neighbour’s door while her stepfather was beating her mother. She could see shadows moving inside and people peeping, but nobody opened. He dragged her back in, held her by the throat against the window, and lifted her off the floor. She cannot remember what made him stop. Her neck hurt for days, and it was painful to swallow. Her mother made her pap so she would not struggle with solid food. Afterwards, he said sorry, hugged her, kissed her cheek, and life went back to what passed for normal.

A Pattern of Threats and Apologies

There was a pattern in the house. Something he said her mother had done would create hostility for a few days. The pressure would build until there was an outburst. On one occasion, he threatened to kill himself, her mother, and all of them. He was the firstborn of his family, and he and her mother had travelled to his village for his lastborn’s wedding, where he had firstborn duties. As usual, he could not control himself. He chased a much younger man with a dagger, which in Igboland is an abomination. The wedding was scattered and did not hold. Her mother made them leave the village quickly. His uncle later told him that if he had not left when he did, the youths of the village would have stripped him naked and flogged him at the town square.

When they returned to Lagos, the village sent him a letter excommunicating him. For a man who prided himself on being a traditional Igbo man, it was a deep shame. He responded by threatening to kill himself, her mother, and all of them. Her mother begged him, and he said he would not kill them, only himself. He told her to take the children and leave. They started packing quickly, but when it was time to go, they could not find the gate or the car key. They were stuck there while he made threats. Eventually, he calmed down, cried, and apologised for scaring them. After the usual hugging and making up, the keys appeared. The gate key had been in his pocket, and the car key was in his wardrobe. Then life went back to normal again.

Another time, around 2014, Angel did not feed his dog when she was supposed to, and he beat her so badly that her hand was injured. People kept asking what had happened, so she said she had cut herself in the kitchen. One woman they bought tomatoes from did not believe her. She pressed until Angel told her the truth, and she and her husband were sympathetic. All those questions made Angel so self-conscious that she bandaged her hand to stop people from looking at it.

The Closeness Between Mother and Daughter

Through all of this, Angel and her mother became closer. They were like sisters in arms, fighting on the same side. When her mother was expecting her siblings, she would buy baby books for herself and her husband to read. But it was usually the two of them reading them and talking about what they had learned. Angel was the first child, and she noticed things. In many ways, it was her and her mother together.

Her mother always tried to leave, but they always ended up going back. In 2015, she left while pregnant with their lastborn. At that time, it looked final. She rented an apartment and was getting it ready. She took everything she could: the car and its keys, the furniture, the properties. She was on her way to furnishing the apartment when she had a car accident close to her delivery date. That is what made them go back. The reason she left was the same as before: the violence, the negligence, and his mental instability. She returned to him, and the violence continued.

The Final Escape

They finally left in November 2016. He had gone to work, and her mother took Angel and her three siblings away. They were practically running, looking over their shoulders and hoping he would not come back before they got out. This time, they did not clear out the house. They took only a few clothes and left so much behind. Angel still remembers her favourite red shoe. It was left in the spoils of war.

They went to stay with her mother’s elder sister. It was a full house: her aunt, her daughters, her grandchildren, her grandmother, her mother, her siblings, and her. After they left, her stepfather started saying her mother had taken his children and his family away. Angel did not call him. She was glad her mother had taken them out.

The Kidnapping Attempt at Church

In December, Angel went to church with her aunt, her cousin, and her cousin’s children. Her mother, grandmother, and siblings stayed at home. It was a different branch of the church they had attended as a family, though they had been there before. In the middle of the service, someone came and tried to drag her away. She saw her stepfather, and she saw that another man was with him. She refused to go with them. The chaos caused people in the church to look, a crowd formed and started asking what was happening. Everyone could see these men trying to take her in broad daylight.

Afterwards, people from the church went after them, but her stepfather got away at first. They ended up at a police station, and someone called her mother. She came immediately. Angel cannot tell the exact sequence of everything the adults did that day. She was there, but she had zoned out. She thinks she was in shock. What she remembers clearly is coming back into the police station after going outside and hearing one of the policemen shouting. That was when the fear finally reached her, and she started crying. He shouted at her for crying, which did not help. Her mother came and took her away from him. She cannot remember how the case ended or what, if anything, was done to her stepfather.

That was not the last time she saw him. He still came to where they were staying to see her siblings. She remembers walking past him in the sitting room once without greeting him. He stared at her, but by then she had checked out of whatever relationship they had. She has not spoken to him since the incident, as far as she can remember. She thinks the last time she saw him was in 2017, before she went to school.

After Leaving: The Long Shadow

Leaving did not take away the closeness between Angel and her mother. With him gone, they could talk about her future without him interrupting. Her mother has always been the one who told her to do whichever path she liked. She studied the arts herself. He was the opposite. He put Angel in science class throughout secondary school, with the mindset that science is the best one, where level-headed, better people and careers are found. He used pressure and violence to push her on that path. She had always been interested in the arts, but she ended up studying microbiology, partly because of him.

She went to university about a year after they left. That was where she started to see that what happened had really affected her. As outgoing as she is, she was still very timid. In church, she was a good public speaker, but she was always nervous because if she did not do her church talk well, he would come home and berate her. After they left, she realised she had taken on some of that timidity. His shouting, his violence, and his coercion had gotten into her. It also made her avoidant. She could not navigate conflict, and she did not want to go back to spaces where she felt conflicted. In her first year, her first time living in a hostel, there were six, seven, or eight of them in a room. If four people were fighting, she would leave. She could not deal with it. She likes it when everybody is happy. She does not like seeing people frown. Sometimes she felt like she was her mother’s co-parent, along with her siblings. She does not know whether growing up that fast helped her, but it happened.

Recognising the Pattern in Her Own Marriage

Living with her stepfather for so long also made Angel alert to patterns in other people. She keeps her eyes open, especially in her relationships with men. She does not think you have to believe there is one Prince Charming and stop paying attention to what someone actually does. But she admits it did not protect her completely.

She got married in 2023. The man she married was one of her closest male friends from church. If you had asked her years ago who her close male friends were, he would have been one of the first names she would have given. When she was about four months pregnant, they went to court. By five months, it became evident that he was not really who she thought he was. The switch-up was so fast. It became, “I have you here; we got married because you’re pregnant; you don’t want shame to come to you.” He also played on the fact that she would not want her child to come from a broken home, because she came from one. He even said it: she had no choice but to make it work, or everyone would see her as a failure like her mother.

Angel is clear: her mother is not a failure. She has never seen her as one. If she had not left, either she would have died, or one of them would have, or all of them. It is the general patriarchal thought that makes the parent who stayed and kept the children safe look like the one who destroyed their children’s lives. When Angel left, he told her she was going to spoil her daughter’s life the way her mother spoiled hers.

By the time she gave birth, she had postpartum depression. He was neglectful, verbally abusive, financially abusive, and emotionally abusive. The only one he did not get to was physical abuse, but he had violent traits, and she knew it was only a matter of time before he started hitting her. She did not want to wait for that. She thinks she is even a little thankful to her stepfather, because he made her spot the signs fast.

When her ex was angry, he would break doors and bust locks. In every house they lived in, the doors were never the original ones. They were refurbished, replaced, or the locks were. They nicknamed him Buster Rhymes. It is their code word for him even now, and nobody calls him by his real name anymore. One day, her ex did something like that. She felt like six people slapped her at once, and someone dumped a bucket of ice blocks on her. If she was in a trance before, she woke up that day. Her daughter was a month or two old. Her mother had seen where it was going, and she reminded her: Angel, give yourself a timeline. I did not pull you out of where we were before so you would have to go through this again.

When her daughter was about two or three months old, Angel told herself she would stay until she was a year, so she could have his support with the baby before she found her feet. She could not. As soon as her daughter turned six months, she left. They had not even gotten to a year of marriage. It was 11 months.

Breaking the Cycle

Angel and her mother had sat down and gone over what she did wrong or could have done better as she was leaving. So Angel knew what she needed to do. She knew she had to cut off the church people and not entertain any explanations or mediation efforts, because they are all manipulative. She needed to keep her wits. So she cut everybody off. People were angry. How dare Angel? Who does she think she is? He had his excuse: because she was refusing mediation, he did not provide for her child.

Even when she was leaving, her mother did not know she was leaving for good. When she got to her place, she told her, Mummy, I’m not going back, and she said, “No problem, I respect your decision.” Then she started telling her things she had hidden because she did not want her to worry. She has experienced less interference than her mother did when she left because she knew what to cut off and who to cut off. She has not heard from him in over a year. She is the sole provider for her daughter, and she really does not care. Her peace is more important.

Before her ex, she would say she had recovered from what her stepfather did. After her ex, she never recovered. That was 2024, and she has not been with anybody romantically since. She has no plans to. She used to brag that no boy had ever broken up with her, because she always broke up with them first. She was very strict with men. But she underestimated the influence of religion and the church, and that is how she let him in. He knew her background and her mother’s background, even though she never told him everything. She felt he had abused her trust and broken the most important thing. She only started recovering this year. She has never really been to therapy because it is expensive, but she is getting into it this year. She realised she never fully healed in her relationships with men. She does not really trust men now. In her spare time, when she has money in her pocket and her belly is full, she wonders when she will trust them again. On a normal day, she is too busy hustling to take care of her child and herself.

Looking Forward

Now Angel is pursuing her passion in the arts. Her career spans both the arts and marketing. She still likes science, and she may go back to it in her master’s, but it is not a priority. She does not want to suffer for money in a role she does not enjoy just because it pays more. She will be 26 this month, and she feels like she has lived 40 years on earth through those 10 years alone. She just wants to do fun things, meet fun people, and enjoy life. She has been through enough, and she does not want any more traumatic experiences.

What happened also put advocacy for women at the front of her mind. All the things they had to fight after they left — financially, psychologically, health-wise, and mentally — she has not done up to 1% of what she wants to do for women in abusive homes and relationships. It is one of the things that fuels her to work as hard as she does. She wants enough money and connections to give women, children, and anyone in that situation the help they did not have. She hopes anyone in a situation like theirs can find a way out, whether on their own or with help. The earlier you get out, the better.