DopeNation
Despite the absence of paternal affection until the age of fourteen due to their father's estrangement, an intentional desire to foster a continuous familial bond is persistently thwarted. It is only when they grant an interview and mention him that he finally reaches out for a conversation, music group DopeNation have said.
Known privately as Micheal Boafo and Tony Boafo, the duo who met their father in Takoradi in their teens during an interview on The Delay Show said, “The connection is no more after we left Takoradi for Accra. We had an interview where we spoke about our dad and after that interview, the news got to him. We had to go and see him and talk about a lot of things, trying to make out for lost time.”
Asked if that is an indication that the father only reaches out to them after they mention him in interviews, the duo responded in the affirmative.
“Exactly,” they said. “After reconnecting and thrashing issues out, there’s been silence again.” Regardless, they look forward to “going back to visit him”.
How they first met their father
For the initial fourteen years of their lives, Michael and Tony had no contact with their father and were unaware of his whereabouts other than the recurring explanation that their Fante father frequently traveled.
“He used to travel a lot outside Ghana,” they said, referencing the narrative they had been told.
But when they were fourteen, circumstances brought them and their father together in a manner perhaps they least expected. They had lived their first fourteen years with their caterer mother at Abeka, a suburb of Accra but had to relocate to Takoradi when their mother, an Ewe, changed her career.
According to them, their mother had no idea their father at the time lived in Takoradi.
As expected, the bonding, according to them, took time as the incubation period was slow. But after the father performed some fatherly roles including buying some items for them and picking them up from school, showing them his properties, they bonded.
“It was easy building a relationship with him,” they said. “There was this unspoken conversation about ‘where have you been; how has life been?’ We never touched that conversation because, from the beginning, we didn’t click. It was later that we got to know him more when we bonded. We left Takoradi after 8 years.”
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