https://youtube.com/@taleswithdebby?si=xBT_9AdoX54YG-5V

Africanfolktales with Debby, Lagos (2026)

01/04/2026

OUR WIFE

EPISODE FIVE

WRITTEN BY Africanfolktales with Debby

Obi’s mother called the eldest uncle, who lived in Abuja. She called the family spokesman, a man who had mediated disputes for so long that he considered himself an expert in all human situations.

She called two aunts—women of firm opinions and reliable memories, the kind you bring to a confrontation as witnesses and record-keepers.

They came on a Saturday afternoon. Obi was not home—which his uncle had intended, having decided that a direct conversation between elders and the wife, without the son present to soften or redirect things, would be more effective.

Adachisom opened the gate herself.
She smiled with what appeared to be genuine warmth, which threw Obi’s uncle slightly off balance—he had prepared his opening for hostility, not welcome.

"Uncle, come in. Aunty—all of you, please, welcome."
She led them to the sitting room. She gestured to the seats. She stood until they sat, which they noted—that was correct behavior, that was a good sign.

Then she sat facing them, hands in her lap, expression attentive.
"Let me get you something first—water, malt—"
"We did not come to drink," uncle said, establishing the register immediately. "We are here to speak with you."

"Of course, Uncle. I'm listening."
He said that reports had reached the family regarding how Adachisom was conducting herself toward Obi’s mother, and that these reports were troubling.

He said that in their family, elders were not merely relatives but foundations—the people upon whose sacrifice the younger generations stood.

He said that a wife, whatever her qualities, whatever her capabilities, must understand that she had married not just a man but a family, and a family had structure, and that structure required her to conduct herself with appropriate humility toward those above her.

Family spokesman added particular grievances—the kitchen incident, the errand, the water dispenser. The aunts nodded with the percussion of women confirming shared testimony.

Adachisom listened to all of it.
She watched each person as they spoke. Her face showed nothing confrontational, nothing dismissive. She received the words with the patience of someone hearing out a long presentation.

When the last person finished, she looked around at them slowly.
"Uncle," she said, "thank you. All of you. I have heard everything." She paused. "Please—just give me one moment. Let me bring your refreshments and we can continue."

The elders sat. One of the aunts remarked on the quality of the sofas. They could hear, from somewhere deeper in the house, the sound of movement. Something being lifted. Footsteps returning.

The door opened.
Adachisom came in carrying a large silver bucket.
For a moment—perhaps two seconds, perhaps three—nobody moved.

Then she raised the bucket and poured it on them.
The aunts screamed.

Uncle was on his feet with water running from his clothes, his face rearranged completely, all the authority washed out of his expression and replaced with something that had no name yet.

Family spokesman knocked over his chair going backward.
“Get out, you miserable old fools" Adachisom yelled.
"This is my house.

You came here to spill rubbish without invitation, without calling, without my husband's knowledge.

If the family has something to say to me, it goes through Obi. If you come back here ehn, it will not be water I’ll pour on you." She walked to the door and held it open.
They left.

The gate closed. They couldn’t believe it. The person they all called “our wife”. The girl that was once humble and submissive.

The elders never returned to that house.
Obi’s uncle met Obi afterward—at his office in Victoria Island, complained and said he was disrespected by his wife.

Obi just sat there emotionless, without giving the reaction his once had expected.

Family spokesman, discovered that he had remarkably little to say about this particular matter and communicated this discovery whenever it was raised.

Obi’s mother, who had sent them and received their soaked, humiliated report when they returned, sat with the news for a long time.

She did not call Obi about the elders. She could not bring herself to.

She started remembering all the other ladies she did not allow her son marry, thinking they weren’t good enough.

Now she met Adachsiom who was the perfect wife but had been pretending all along.
She couldn’t bring herself to go to her son’s house especially when he wasn’t around.

Anytime she wanted to see her son, she would meet him at his office or at a restaurant.

Nobody in the family brought up “our wife” again with fear of her doing something worse.

THE END.

01/04/2026

OUR WIFE

EPISODE FOUR

WRITTEN BY Africanfolktales with Debby

Obi’s mother arrived in Lagos in February.
Obi was in Port Harcourt for the week—a project deadline—and his mother had decided, with the confidence of a woman who has always had unquestioned access to her son's home, that she would come regardless.

She arrived with a bag of fresh vegetables and the full expectation of warm, deferential, grateful welcome.
The gate opened. Her bag was carried. She walked inside.

Adachisom was in the living room, seated, reading something on a tablet, dressed in a silk blouse that Obi’s mother immediately recognized as costing more than anything she personally owned. She looked up when her mother-in-law entered.

"Mama," she said. Pleasantly. Without standing.
"You didn't stand up.” Obi’s mother said
"Sit down, Mama. You must be tired from the road."
She sat, slowly, shocked.

"Where is your cook? Tell her to bring me water."
"I don't have a house cook."

"Then your girl—who feeds people in this house?"
"There's a caterer. The number is on the fridge. If you want food, you can call them or go into the kitchen to help yourself"
The room was quiet.

Obi’s mother looked at the woman in front of her—her “our wife”, that she personally selected, the humble village girl who had knelt and swept and cooked and sat in church beside her fanning her with a paper bulletin—and she searched the woman's face for the person she had known.

She found someone else sitting in that person's place.
"Adachisom," she said, carefully, "is something the matter?"

"Nothing is the matter, Mama. Are you thirsty? The water dispenser is in the kitchen—second door on the left."

Obi’s mother stood up and walked to the kitchen and poured herself water from the dispenser. She stood in her son's kitchen, and drank water she had fetched for herself.
She stood there for a long time.

One night, she went to make herself pap at nine o'clock and found the kitchen padlocked. She knocked. She then heard Adachisom's voice, unhurried: "Wait until morning, Mama. The kitchen is closed."

Obi’s mother stood in the hallway outside a locked kitchen in her son's house, in the dark, looking helpless and confused.

The television remote in her room stopped working on the third day. She mentioned it. Adachisom said she doesn’t need to watch TV at her old age.

She was watching Adachisom move through the house—unhurried, well-dressed, making calls about investments and property, issuing instructions to her driver, she couldn’t recognize the person she was seeing. Adachisom had changed.
She called Obi.

"My son. This your wife—she is not the person I met. Something has changed. She is not treating me—"
"Mama." His voice was tired. "You wanted me to marry. I have married."

"But you don't understand what she is—"
"You called her our wife. You told everyone you chose her yourself. Face what your eyes have seen."
She opened her mouth.

"I'll be back Friday, Greet her for me." The call ended.
She sat with the phone in her hand for a long time.

On the fifth morning, she went to the kitchen early, before Adachisom was moving—or so she believed. She wanted to make herself pap.

She was at the stove when she heard footsteps and turned to find Adachisom in the doorway, dressed already.

”What are you doing, Mama?"
"Making food for myself, since this house does not feed its guests."

Adachisom looked at the stove. Then she walked to a cabinet, opened it, removed something without speaking, and set it on the counter. She left the kitchen.

Obi’s mother looked at the counter.
It was the key to the kitchen padlock.

Adachisom told her to leave the kitchen as she was about to step out so she would lock up the kitchen; “Mama, if you want to eat, wait till I get back but I can’t leave this kitchen open”.

Obi’s mother was speechless and couldn’t believe what she just heard.

That day, she packed her bag and left. She couldn’t bear the maltreatment anymore, she was hungry and angry.

TO BE CONTINUED……

01/04/2026

OUR WIFE

EPISODE THREE

WRITTEN BY Africanfolktales with Debby

The wedding was in December—two days, traditional rites in Owerri and then the church in Lagos, organized by Obi’s mother. She wore gold George wrapper to the church ceremony and sat in the front row.

She danced when they called for the mother of the groom.
When people asked her about Adachisom afterward, she said: "I chose her myself."
Which was, in its way, true.

Two weeks after the wedding, Obi came home to find his cook, Amaka, standing in the kitchen with the expression of someone who has received news they don't understand.

“Sir, Madam said I should stop cooking.” Amaka said
Obi found his wife in the bedroom, applying skincare at the vanity with the focus of someone completing a ritual.

"You told Amaka not to cook?"
She looked at him briefly in the mirror. "I'll handle the kitchen arrangements. Don't worry."
"What arrangements—"
"I know a good caterer. I'll sort it out."

There was something in her voice– the tone of someone who has finished waiting to do things their way. He stood in the doorway for a moment, then let it go.
The caterer arrived the next day.

Over the two weeks that followed, other things shifted. The plain ankara blouses disappeared from her rotation.

What replaced them was expensive—structured blazers, tailored trousers, heels that were modest in height but precise in quality.

The hair she had kept neatly tied back was now covered with expensive wavy wigs.

One evening he came home and heard her on a phone call in the study.

She was talking about property. She was using words like yield, title documentation, appreciation curve, in a voice that was sharper than he remembered—the English more fluent. He stood in the corridor and listened.

When she ended the call and looked up and saw him, she said: "You're back early."

"Who were you talking to?"
"My investment manager." She stood, smoothed her trousers. "I'm looking at a property in Ikoyi. Values are climbing. Do you want to see the projections?"

Obi sat down on the nearest chair.
"You have an investment manager."

She smiled. It was not the small, careful smile from the restaurant. This was a different smile entirely.

"Every woman should," she said, and walked past him to the living room.

He sat in the empty room for a while after she left.
He was beginning to understand that he had married someone he did not entirely know.

The more interesting question, which he was only beginning to ask himself, was whether this was a problem.

TO BE CONTINUED……

01/04/2026

OUR WIFE

EPISODE TWO

WRITTEN BY Africanfolktales with Debby

Chidi, Obi’s cousin, was the kind of man every family has—the connector, the one who knows somebody everywhere and makes it his purpose to introduce those somebodies to each other.

He called Obi "Brother. I have found a woman for you. Before you talk—I know your mother. I know how she is. Just listen."

Her name was Adachisom. Twenty-nine years old, from a small town outside Owerri. She had been in Lagos two years, working as a sales attendant in a boutique in Ikeja.

Chidi described her simply: a girl who has not been spoiled by this city.
Obi agreed to meet her.

She came to the restaurant wearing a plain ankara blouse and a dark skirt, ironed cleanly, nothing excessive. They talked for two hours.

She was curious about his work without flattering him about it. When he asked about hers, she spoke of her boutique job without embarrassment, without apology, and without the self-consciousness of someone who thinks they should be further along.

She talked about her plans to save money and open a small shop, about her mother in the village she sent something to every month. She said sir occasionally—not in the exaggerated way. He called his cousin that night: "She's good."

Over the months that followed, Adachisom gave Obi nothing to complain about. She did not ask for things beyond what he offered.

She visited his house and, without making a production of it, tidied things. She cooked twice and the food was really good. She was also easy to be around.

But what decided everything—what moved the matter from possible to certain—was what his mother thought of Chisom.

Obi mentioned Adachisom to his mother with careful casualness, the way you mention something fragile near someone who has a history of breaking things.

His mother's questions came in their usual order: where is she from, what does she do, who are her people. Then: "Bring her."

Adachisom came the following weekend specifically to meet Obi’s mother. She arrived carrying a bag that contained ogiri, uziza leaves, and a small bottle of palm kernel oil.

Things that a woman raised near a kitchen would know to bring.
She walked into the sitting room and she knelt.

A full, proper kneel, the kind that Obi's mother’s generation practiced and had long since given up expecting from anyone born after 1990.
She looked at her.
"Sit," she said.

The visit lasted six hours. In those six hours, Adachisom swept the sitting room before anyone asked her to. She went into the kitchen and washed a stack of dishes that had been sitting since morning.

She helped peel crayfish while listening to Obi’s mother talk—and the mother talked a great deal, stories and opinions and memories woven together—and she listened without fidgeting, without checking her phone, with the attentiveness of someone genuinely interested. She called her Mama from the first hour.

When Adachisom left, Obi sat in the sitting room with his mother then she said: "This one knows what a woman is."

Obi said nothing. He had learned not to celebrate too early.

But Adachisom kept visiting. She came without Obi sometimes, which impressed his mother more than anything else could have—a woman who came not because her man was watching but because she chose to.

She brought things that required thought to select. She went to church with his mother one Sunday, sat beside her, and when the power cut and the hall grew warm, quietly fanned her with a paper bulletin without comment.

Obi’s mother began mentioning her to other women. "My son's fiancée—this kind of girl is rare now, I'm telling you..."

And then she bestowed upon Adachisom the title that no woman before her had ever received.
She called her: "Our wife."

Obi's aunts heard it and exchanged the slow nods of women witnessing something they would discuss for months.

TO BE CONTINUED….

01/04/2026

OUR WIFE

EPISODE ONE

WRITTEN BY Africanfolktales with Debby

There was a man in Lagos named Obi, and the problem with Obi was not that he could not find a woman. The problem was his mother.

Obi was forty years old. He had made the kind of money that makes a man's phone ring constantly—construction contracts in three states, a house in Lekki behind a gate that his security men polished like furniture, a black Mercedes that his driver brought around every morning.

By every measure people use to judge a man, Obi had arrived.

Except he had no wife. And in Nigeria, a man without a wife is a house without a roof—structurally impressive, but clearly unfinished.

His mother was sixty-four, short, wide at the hip, and with eyes that assessed a person's entire character within thirty seconds of meeting them.

She had given birth to four children. Three of them were married. Obi—her firstborn, her brightest, her personal project—remained a bachelor, and this fact was her greatest complaint though she would never admit it even in prayer.

Obi’s mother wanted him married. She said this constantly. She said it at family meetings, at church, to market women she barely knew, to priests who had heard it enough times that they now completed her sentences.

She had enlisted aunts, commissioned prayers, and sent her younger daughter to Lagos on at least two occasions purely as an intelligence-gathering mission. She wanted grandchildren from Obi.

But every woman Obi brought home, His mother chased away.

She would say the women are not suitable, it’s always one complain or the other about the women obi brought home to marry.

The complaints are “she is too educated” or “she doesn’t do house chores good enough” or “she is not submissive enough” or “they are all after my son’s money”

The first serious one was Adaeze—a banker, sharp mind, master's degree. Obi’s mother sat with her at dinner for forty minutes and afterward told Obi: "Too educated. She will be reading her certificates while your children are crying. And I’m sure she’ll run her mouth when you’re talking"

Obi had looked at his mother. "Mama, you told me to find an educated woman."

"Educated is not the same as too-educated," His mother said.

After Adaeze came Chiamaka, a fashion designer with natural hair and her own car. "Too flashy. She is in love with herself—where will you fit?. She will not be submissive”

Then Ulunma, a schoolteacher from Enugu, quiet and capable, who had come to visit and cooked ofe akwu from scratch, cleared the table without being asked, and called Mama as the good girl she is.

Obi had been cautiously hopeful about Ulunma. He remembered standing in the kitchen doorway watching her cook, thinking: this one even my mother cannot find fault with.

Three days later, His mother called him.
"That Ulunma girl—She is a teacher and her father is a civil servant. She is after your money."

“Mama but she cooked the whole meal herself.” Obi said
"That is what they do at the beginning, they pretend" His mother said.

After the fifth woman, Obi stopped arguing. After the seventh, he stopped bringing anyone home altogether.

He began to keep his personal life in Lagos while his mother's opinions lived in Onitsha, and the arrangement gave him peace, if not happiness.

But she was not a woman who accepted distance as an answer. She called every Sunday. She sent messages through his sister.

She arrived in Lagos without prior notice. One time, she came unannounced to find a woman named Chioma sitting comfortably in his living room, and without saying a single direct word against her, managed to make the woman gather her bag, say a polite goodbye, and never return Obi's calls again.

He was forty years old.
He had money
But he did not have a wife because of his mother.

TO BE CONTINUED……

31/03/2026

OUR WIFE - PART 5 🥰

31/03/2026

OUR WIFE - PART 1, 2, 3 & 4 is out
PART 5 drops today by 7pm 🥳💃🏾

30/03/2026

OUR WIFE - PART 4 🥰

30/03/2026

OUR WIFE - PART 1, 2 & 3 is out
PART 4 drops today by 7pm 🥳💃🏾

Africanfolktales with Debby

01/04/2026

01/04/2026

01/04/2026

01/04/2026

01/04/2026

31/03/2026

31/03/2026

30/03/2026

30/03/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category