That was not the first time I was meeting Pastor.
I had gone to his church for spiritual help like two or three times before then. What impressed me about him was that when he preached many people always fell under the anointing. He would just wave his hands like this and people would fall gbosa on the floor. We all believed him to be a true man of God.
So this is what happened.
I got pregnant for my boyfriend, Wajud whom I have been seeing for two years. Wajud is a printer in Lagos Island. He had been telling me he would marry me but that he needed money to rent his own place as he was at that time sharing a room with another friend of his. So usually, when me and Wajud want to ‘meet,’ his friend will just disappear…because Wajud does the same thing for him when he and his girlfriend, one girl called Laide in the area, comes over and they want to ‘meet.’
The truth is, I wasn’t looking to getting pregnant. No. I was not even thinking of marriage as I consider myself still young. At 22, I am still too young to have a child. Having a child means I won’t be able to do all the things I had planned for my life and besides, the person I want to marry, still hasn’t even got a house for himself, so no marriage was not on my mind but as God will have it, I became pregnant.
Did we not use condom?
Ha, condom? No o, we did not, there’s a way we do it…that’s why I didn’t get pregnant all the times we had been ‘meeting’ before it now failed and I got pregnant. There’s a way. If you ask other girls, even the guys, they will tell you. Condom will not give you that…that thing you are looking for when you ‘meet,’ that’s why we didn’t use it. But we made a ‘mistake,’ that’s why I got pregnant…yes.
When I became pregnant and I told Wajud, he agreed the baby was his own but that I would go to meet his mother in Osun state and have the baby there, since she couldn’t come to be with me here in Lagos…I lived with one of my mother’s cousins…she has been the one helping me. I was a sales girl in her shop on the island…before the pregnancy.
Ok now, when I became pregnant, I began to have bad dreams.
I would dream that my baby was taken from me.
Another dream would be that I delivered the baby but it didn’t have arms and legs!
One time, I dreamt I give birth to a monkey, you know some strange creature! They were very disturbing dreams.
When I told my friend, she said I should go to the church in our area and speak to the pastor that he would pray for me.
And that’s what I did.
The pastor told me he knew I would come to his church and that if I hadn’t come, I would have died because my enemies do not want me to deliver the child I was carrying. He even said “they” wanted to turn my baby into a monkey! That was when I thought, “indeed, this a man of God!”
I hadn’t mentioned the monkey baby and he already knew!
What more did I need to be convinced he could see visions?
When the pastor then found out that I wasn’t married or that my boyfriend was not in any position to marry me…that was when he began to change towards me.
His jokes were loose, you know?
He would say, he heard pregnant women were good for sex!
What kind of talk is that coming from a man of God? And he usually told theses crass jokes when I was alone with him.
So one time, I went for the prayers he asked me to come to for special anointing. I was almost 6 months gone by then…he told me to wait after service because it would require pouring the oil from my head to toe so that my baby would be well formed… and that he would like to rub anointing oil on my stomach for the protection of my baby.
I waited.
Pastor’s house and Church are the same place; the the church isn’t even big…you know, small church, with a room behind that Pastor lives in.
In that area too, they hardly have light so that day, NEPA had taken light so he lit two candles. We were in his small room behind the church when he asked me to remove my clothes so he could massage the oil on my stomach to prevent my baby from turning into a monkey.
I removed my dress…he said I should remove everything, that he had been instructed by his spirit to rub me with the oil from top to bottom…
I removed it…shebi I was the one who came looking for a miracle?
He began to rub the oil on my body…yes, I was ashamed, standing there naked but you know the candle light was not even bright, so I thought, he won’t see my body like that…
He was rubbing me with oil and I noticed his manhood was up like…hummm, I looked away but I was beginning to get afraid…I told myself, shebi this man knows I am already pregnant?
What was he wearing?
You know that long jalabia, yes, that’s what he was wearing.
Ok, he was touching my breasts, squeezing it…I was pulling back because it was painful…you know how tender a pregnant woman’s breast gets?
Then he just grabbed me from behind and told me his spirit told him to have sex with me…
With oil all over my body, I was slippery. I told him, no!
He told me I would regret it if I ran out or screamed that my child would be deformed! I didn’t want a deformed child but I also knew what he wanted was wrong.
I didn’t listen, I sped out of his house and was shouting… “Help me, pastor wants to force himself on me!”
That’s how people came, thank God there was no light that day, so even though I was naked, I was more scared than ashamed!
You see, it is a taboo where I come from, for a pregnant woman to have sex with another man, things will never be good for that woman and her family. It’s a big taboo!
How could I allow one stupid pastor ruin my life, for what?
Maybe the pastor was even the monkey I was always seeing in my dreams thinking it was my baby!
Anyway, people came and beat him like mad…since that day, almost 6 months have passed now, his church hasn’t been open. After I told my boyfriend what happened, he has been looking for the pastor to teach him a lesson but I don’t think the pastor will ever show up again!
Besides, I have given birth to a fine baby girl and she’s not a monkey. We are doing fine, thank you.
(Series written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories)