My father died in 2019. A man from Ilesa showed up at his burial claiming to be his first son.

My father died in 2019. We buried him in Akure, full ceremony, my mother in black at the front row. Then a man walked into the reception holding a photograph of my father in his twenties, standing beside a woman none of us knew, with two small children in front of them.

He said he was the first son. Born 1981. My father left Ilesa for Akure in 1983 and never went back, never sent a kobo, never called. The man had been selling spare parts in Ladipo for twenty years. He had our surname. He had the same gap tooth. My mother went inside and did not come out for two hours.

We shared the inheritance. Not because anybody agreed, but because the lawyer said the certificate would take years and cost more than the land was worth. My mother still calls him 'that man from Ilesa' at every family gathering. He calls her 'Mama Deji'. She has never once corrected him.