These are not romantic things to think about when you are happy and in love, but they are the things that protect you when the unthinkable happens.
Every week, Zikoko 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 Nengi*, a woman in her late forties based in Port Harcourt. She talks about losing her husband suddenly in 2010, enduring a full year of Igbo widowhood rites in silence, and the decade-long legal battle she fought alone to keep everything he built for their children.
Can you tell me about your life before everything changed?
I had a good life, a genuinely full one. I’m Port Harcourt-born and raised; I grew up here, had my first job here, fell in love here. My husband and I met in this city and built everything we had right here. He started in trading, moving goods, grinding, and learning how money moves. From there, he moved into shipping, then real estate, then manufacturing. By the time he died, he had shares in oil and gas, energy, telecoms, and car dealerships. He was very serious about his money in the truest sense of the word. A builder who genuinely enjoyed building. And he loved his family with everything he had: our three children and me.
Our oldest was seven when he died. The middle one was five. Our lastborn had just turned one year old.
How did he die?
He collapsed at an industry dinner. He was seated at the table, laughing at something someone had said, and then he was on the floor. By the time the ambulance came, he was already gone. It was a massive cardiac arrest. He was in his early fifties and had never been seriously ill, so nobody saw it coming, least of all me. We had spoken on the phone that afternoon about something completely ordinary; I can’t even remember what now, and that was the last conversation we ever had. You never think the last ordinary conversation is the last one. You just don’t think that way when life is good, and your husband is healthy, and you have a one-year-old at home. You simply don’t think that way.
It’s worse to stomach the reality and actually say out loud that the worst part wasn’t him dying but what came after.
There are certain rites a woman must endure after her husband dies. Many cultures have their own; I do not know all of them, but because of what I have endured, I would say marrying into a deeply traditional Igbo family is the worst thing a woman can do to herself, whether she herself is Igbo or not. Especially if there’s nothing in place to preserve her dignity after her husband dies.
So how did you navigate the mourning process?
I may not be Igbo, but I grew up in Port Harcourt, surrounded by Igbo traditions; I knew what I was marrying into. When you marry an Igbo man of his standing, you understand that certain things come with it. I had seen enough, heard enough. I wasn’t completely unprepared in theory. But theory and reality are very different things.
I made a decision very early. I was going to do everything they asked of me. Everything. Not because I believed in all of it, but because I knew what was at stake. My children. Their inheritance. Their future. The life their father had built for them. I was not going to give anyone a single reason to say I killed him or that I didn’t respect him or his people. Not one reason.
Walk me through what those first days looked like.
They took me to his family compound. That is where the rites happen, not in the city where we lived, but in his hometown, with his people, on their terms. They shaved my head. All of it, completely gone. They put me in a room, and that room became my entire world. I slept on a mat on the bare floor. I couldn’t cook, couldn’t leave, couldn’t do anything for myself. I had to eat from broken plates; I could only wear black clothing. I was given a stick to scratch my own body because I was considered spiritually unclean, like the death had contaminated me.
At dawn and at dusk every single day, I had to wail loudly. It had to be a sustained and demonstrable grief. I was genuinely grieving. I had lost my husband, the man I loved, my protector, the father of my babies. But I also had to perform that grief on a schedule for people who were watching me for any sign of insufficient mourning that they could use against me.
I’m so sorry.
That was even okay. As painful as it was, it was okay. What wasn’t was asking me to prove I had no hand in his death by making me drink the water they used to wash his corpse.
I could not fight or argue. I also did not have my family people with me. I only had his people. They were avidly watching me, like a hawk. Even though every part of me recoiled, I thought of my children, and I did it.
I drank it. I was not going to let them win because of this. I was not going to give them anything.
Who was watching you most closely during this period?
The Umuada, the daughters of his lineage. It is difficult to explain, if you haven’t seen it, but they are powerful. They enforced everything. They were the ones who would inspect you, question you, report back. And his family was watching too. His brother especially.
Tell me about the brother.
He had come for me when my husband was alive. He was persistent and ugly about it. I didn’t tell my husband at first because I didn’t want trouble, but eventually I had no choice. He became too bold. My husband believed me immediately because this brother had done the same thing before, to someone else, and it had worked. He was furious. He told me directly, ” Look at me, Nkwuchi(a traditional inheritance practice in some Igbo communities where a widow is permanently integrated into her late husband’s immediate family by marrying his brother or a close male relative) will never happen to you. I will make sure of it.” He said he would put it in writing, get it all properly documented. But he died suddenly, and none of that had been done yet.
So the man who had tried to sleep with me while my husband was alive was now the one at the centre of a plan to inherit me like property after his death.
When did they tell you?
After a full year. I had completed every single mourning rite without complaint. Twenty-eight days of intensive confinement, then sixty more days of semi-seclusion, then the remaining months of public mourning in black clothing, no socialising, no freedom of any kind. A full year.
The Agba Okwo, the liberation ceremony, was supposed to mark the end. My mourning clothes were meant to be burned; I was meant to be given new colourful clothes and declared free. Instead, that is when they told me what they expected next.
I know people will say this is old-fashioned, that modern Igbo families don’t do Nkuchi anymore. But when there is this much money at stake, tradition becomes very convenient, very quickly.
What was your reaction?
I was appalled. I want to use a stronger word, but appalled will do for now. This man, of all men. This specific man. After everything I had endured, after proving myself at every single stage of their process, this was their expectation.
I said no. Clearly and without room for misinterpretation. That was the beginning of a war that lasted over a decade.
What did they do when you refused?
Everything. The question should be what didn’t they do. The estate, his accounts, his properties, all of it was locked away from me and my children almost immediately. The first thing they did was move to obtain Letters of Administration over his estate before I could, effectively cutting the children and me out of everything while the courts processed it. His brother, supported by other family members, led the charge. They challenged the validity of our marriage even though we had a traditional ceremony, a white wedding, and a court marriage. He paid my bride price in full. There was nothing to challenge, but they challenged it anyway, which forced us into proving what should have already been obvious.
Then they filed paternity disputes. Claiming my children were not his.
How did you respond to that?
I did not let that go on for long. I pushed for a court-ordered DNA test immediately. The courts processed it, but these things take time in Nigeria. It was months of waiting, chain of custody arguments, every delay they could manufacture. But it came back definitive. They could not disprove the paternity because the children were his, obviously. They could not disprove the marriage because it was documented three different ways. But in Nigeria, being right and being protected are not the same thing. They had money, and they had time, and they were willing to use both.
You mentioned being alone. What did that period look like?
I had my own businesses, my own cars, things in my own name. But I did not come from a wealthy family, and what I had was not enough to sustain my children at the level their father had provided for them and fight a legal battle against a very resourceful family simultaneously. And I was isolated in ways that went beyond money. The mourning period had cut me off from the world for a full year, and when I came out, I was already depleted. My friends eventually rallied, but the early period of the legal battle was genuinely lonely.
My family came eventually. My siblings ride hard for me; they always have. But none of them were in Nigeria at the time. It took time for the situation to reach the level where my sister came back first. Then years later, my brother followed. By then things were already deep.
What was the lowest point?
There was a period, a few years into the legal battle, where I genuinely did not know if I was going to win. The courts were slow. The in-laws were filing objection after objection, dragging every stage out deliberately. My lawyers were citing everything available: the constitutional provisions, the Mojekwu v. Mojekwu ruling from 1997, which had already declared customs that denied widows and women inheritance rights to be repugnant to natural justice. The Ukeje v. Ukeje Supreme Court ruling in 2014 added more weight; it reinforced the constitutional argument against discriminatory customary law and helped shift things further in my favour.
The VAPP Act came in 2015. But here is the truth: Rivers State never properly domesticated it. So what it did for me practically, in Port Harcourt, was limited. What actually moved my case was the constitutional argument, the case law that had been building for years, and the fact that some of his most significant assets were in Lagos, where the legal environment had more teeth and where VAPP had actual enforcement. My lawyers were smart enough to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously. We weren’t putting everything in one jurisdiction.
I had three young children, and I was fighting to make sure they could keep their father’s name and their father’s legacy. There were days when I sat in my house and could not see the end of it.
What happened? Did you win?
Strategically and stubbornly. My lawyers were good. Once the 2014 Supreme Court ruling came down and then VAPP in 2015, the legal landscape shifted in my favour. The paternity dispute had already been dismissed years earlier. The marriage validity argument had gone nowhere. What remained was the estate, and by then the courts had enough precedent to move.
I won full access to my husband’s estate. His shipping company, his real estate holdings, his manufacturing interests, his stakes in oil and gas, energy, telecoms. Everything he built. It went to his children where it belonged. I have been managing it.
Where are you now?
I’m still here in Port Harcourt. I run my businesses, and I run what he built, and I travel when I want to because I have earned every single trip. My two older children started university in Nigeria, and when things finally resolved properly a few years ago, they moved abroad to continue. My youngest is still in secondary school here with me.
It took more than ten years. My children grew up watching me fight. I hope that is not the worst thing I have passed on to them. I also hope it is the reason none of them will ever accept less than they deserve.
What do you want women to know?
That you are allowed to fight. Enduring something is not the same as accepting it. I endured an entire year of rites that stripped me of my dignity because I understood the game I was in. But enduring it never meant I was not going to fight what came after.
Know your rights. Find your documentation. A court marriage matters. A registered will matters. A lawyer who understands both statutory and customary law matters. These are not romantic things to think about when you are happy and in love, but they are the things that protect you when the unthinkable happens.
He told me Nkuchi would never happen to me, and I swear, I believe that he meant it. He just didn’t update the paperwork in time. Don’t let your protection depend entirely on someone else’s intentions, no matter how much they love you. Put it in writing. Make it legal. Make it unbreakable.
I had to spend ten years making it unbreakable after the fact. You deserve not to go through that.
Source: Opera News
