Of loss, National mourning and the subterfuge of institutional memory

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb…”

— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.43 (Pericles’ Funeral Oration), trans. Richard Crawley

“Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.”

— Sima Qian, Letter to Ren An, c. 93 BC (English version as quoted in Mao Zedong, “Serve the People,” 1944)

“And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.”

— Ecclesiasticus 44:9 (King James Version)

Prologue: The Unknown and the Named

On the night of 7 November 1920, in the shattered fields of northern France, British army parties went out and dug up four bodies. They came from four different battlefields: the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres. None could be identified. No tag survived, no letter, no button that might say a regiment, a village, a mother. The four were laid in four plain coffins inside a hut, and a brigadier general named Wyatt, with a colonel at his side, was brought in, in the dark, and told to choose. He rested his hand on one of them. The other three were quietly returned to the earth, and the one he touched was carried, under guard, to the coast.

What followed is among the most remarkable acts of public mourning in modern history. A destroyer carried the coffin across the Channel to a nineteen-gun salute. A train bore it to London. On the morning of 11 November, the second anniversary of the Armistice, it was drawn on a gun carriage through streets packed with silent people, past a Cenotaph newly raised in Whitehall, and into Westminster Abbey, where it was lowered into earth brought across from France, so that the soldier would lie in the soil he had died in. It is said that over a million people filed past the grave in the days that followed. Many of them were women who had never been told where their sons were buried. For each of them, the Unknown Warrior might be the boy. That was the point. A state that could not give a name had decided to give everything else: ceremony, soil, silence, a place in the nave among kings, and a promise that the nation would not look away.

I begin with this story because it sets before us a question that has haunted me all this week. A nation that could do all that for a man it could not name, what does it owe to the dead whose names it has?

On Tuesday, 6 October 2026, the Nigerian Air Force published the names. An ATR-42 transport aircraft, registered NAF 931, had gone down in the Igbokoda area of Ilaje, in Ondo State, on a flight from Benin to Lagos that the Air Force called routine. The crash was on the morning of Monday, 5 October. Air traffic controllers were reported to have lost contact at about 9:13, eyewitnesses spoke of about 9:40, and another resident of about ten, so that even the hour is variously given. The Air Force said twenty-five persons were on board, five crew and twenty passengers, and that no survivor had been found.

Within hours of the first reports, Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo had spoken of thirty-two, twenty-five passengers and seven crew, and a later press report spoke of twenty-six. The President declared three days of mourning and ordered an investigation. A condolence register was opened at Air Force Headquarters in Abuja, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sunday Kelvin Aneke, called the day a deeply painful one for the Service and the nation. Among the military mourners in Abuja, one officer counted nineteen officers and airmen lost, a figure that agrees with twenty-five once the six civilians are set aside.

Nothing in that sequence is out of the ordinary. That is exactly what troubles me. We know this script. We have heard its every line before: the flags, the register, the investigation “ordered”, the plea that the public not speculate, the governors’ sorrow, the Vice-President’s debt of gratitude. And we know, from the long and bitter experience of being Nigerian, what generally comes after the script ends. The register is closed. The flags are raised. The report, if it exists, is placed on a shelf where reports go to be forgotten. The families are left to the arithmetic of their own grief, and a new set of names is waiting in the wings.

This essay is a slow journey through that after. It is an interrogation of a country, and also of ourselves, because a state forgets only what its citizens allow it to forget. It asks how official Nigeria has treated loss, carelessness and untimely death; how it has treated those who serve it, who served it, and the families they leave behind; and how it has allowed the deaths of countless citizens to go unsung, uncounted and unrequited. I will use the Ondo crash as the lamp, but the lamp is only for seeing the room. The room is larger, and older, and much more crowded than this week’s dead.

I. The Names and the Numbers

In the spring of 1981, a jury in the United States sifted 1,421 entries in a national competition for a memorial to the dead of the Vietnam War. The winner was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Yale named Maya Lin, and what she proposed made many people deeply uneasy. It had no hero on a horse, no flag, no carved victory. It was a long V-shaped wall of polished black granite sunk into the earth of the National Mall, and on its surface she proposed to inscribe the name of every American who had died or gone missing in the war, in the order in which they fell, by date of death rather than alphabetically.

The critics called it a scar. When it was dedicated in November 1982, veterans, some of whom had despised the design, stood before the wall and wept, and then they began to touch the names. Today there are more than fifty-eight thousand of them. The wall’s argument is wonderfully simple. A nation’s honour is not measured by its rhetoric about the dead. It is measured by whether it is willing to count them, one at a time, and to carve each of them where the living must see them every day.

Let us keep that wall in mind as we read the list that Nigeria received this Tuesday. I set it down here as it was released, rank by rank and initial by initial, because the first duty of any serious meditation on loss is to say the names.

The crew:

• Squadron Leader MI Aburime, Flight Captain
• Squadron Leader AP Man-Ugwueje, Co-pilot
• Flight Lieutenant IS Bako, Co-pilot
• Warrant Officer Abubakar A, Aircraft Technician
• Corporal Uguru HC, Aircraft Technician

The passengers:

• Flight Lieutenant TL Lazarus
• Flight Lieutenant M Akinloye
• Flying Officer IM Adeshina
• Master Warrant Officer Onwuka F
• Master Warrant Officer Matini BA
• Warrant Officer Nuhu FS
• Flight Sergeant James RB
• Flight Sergeant Mohammed AI
• Sergeant Ani AE
• Sergeant Izibenikien SI
• Sergeant Alafuka C
• Sergeant Mbadugha AN
• Lance Corporal Ugwuba FC
• Lance Corporal Eledan GE
• Mrs Ezeh Nneka
• Godstmine Tarabina
• Joy Micheal
• Sunday Micheal
• Ukeme David
• Gideon Omotola

Read them again, slowly, and notice what the list does and what it cannot do. The military grammar is exact: rank first, surname, then the initials of given names, as if each man were a line in a ledger of stores. The last six entries speak a different grammar, with first names intact and, in one case, a courtesy title. They are, so far as the published list shows, civilians. We are not told who they were. We are not told whether the two bearing the same surname were mother and child, brother and sister, or strangers who happened to share a name. We are not told what any of them was going to do in Lagos.

A list is the beginning of a biography, never the end of one, and ours stops at the beginning. Yet the names themselves carry something that no communique can: between them they seem to speak in Yoruba and Igbo, in Hausa and in the tongues of the Niger Delta and the Cross River. They read like a census of the federation that we are always told is too divided to agree on anything. Death, in this instance, drew a truer picture of Nigeria than any national day parade.

Now the numbers, which are the second language of every disaster. The Air Force says twenty-five. The Minister of Aviation, in the first hours, said thirty-two, with twenty-five passengers and seven crew. These two figures can be reconciled, no doubt. Preliminary counts are often wrong in both directions, and manifests are sometimes revised. A minister speaking early may have been quoting what he was handed. But I want to dwell on the discrepancy, because it is the first symptom of everything I am about to describe. In the hours after a catastrophe, the state does not know how many people it has lost. That is understandable. What is not understandable is how little we expect it to know, and how little we protest when the number changes without explanation. A passenger manifest is supposed to be among the most exact documents a state keeps. Here it has become a rumour that settles gradually into a fact.

Why does the count matter so much? Because every number is a person who is either remembered or erased. If there were thirty-two aboard, then seven persons are unnamed in the list we have been given. If there were twenty-five, then someone’s husband or daughter or mother was counted among the lost in the first hours of grief and then quietly subtracted, and a family that had begun to mourn was told, with no word of apology, to stop. Either possibility is a small cruelty. Taken together with the thousand other small cruelties of our public life, it becomes a method.

There is a deeper dialectic hidden here, and it will recur through this essay like a ground bass. On the one hand, a name is a gift to the dead. It says: you were not interchangeable; you were someone. On the other hand, a name published without a duty attached is only a decoration. The Air Force has done what it should do in naming the dead promptly, and it deserves credit for that, because we have had much worse. But the naming is only the first half of a covenant. The second half is the remembering, the investigating, the compensating and the correcting of what caused the loss, so that the names do not return in a new list next year in a different swamp. A name without a consequence is a wreath laid on a grave the state will never visit again.

II. Those Who Serve Us

On 28 February 1948, a column of African ex-servicemen marched through the streets of Accra, in what was then the Gold Coast, towards Christiansborg Castle, the seat of the colonial governor. They were veterans of the Second World War. Many had fought in Burma, in the jungles where soldiers of the Royal West African Frontier Force, from the Gold Coast and from Nigeria, had been thrown against some of the toughest fighting in Asia. They had come home to a promise of pensions, gratuities and jobs, and found that the promise had been quietly forgotten. They marched to petition the Governor.

At the Christiansborg crossroads a British police superintendent, Colin Imray, ordered them to halt, and when they would not, shots were fired into the column, the superintendent himself firing. Three of them died: Sergeant Cornelius Adjetey, Corporal Patrick Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey. By evening Accra was in flames. The riots that followed are now regarded as one of the sparks that lit the road to Ghanaian independence, and the three dead men are remembered in that country by name.

I have thought of those three veterans often this week. They remind us that how a state treats its servants in life and in death is never a private matter between the state and the soldier. It is the foundation of the whole political order. A people will fight for a government only so long as they believe that government will not discard them. Break that belief in the barracks, and the barracks will soon enough break something larger.

Nigerian Air Force personnel flew that aircraft, and Nigerian Air Force personnel sat in its seats. These were men and women who had put on a uniform and accepted a discipline that most of us would find unbearable, and who had agreed, by oath, that their lives could be spent. This is the contract of military service in every country, and it is a terrible contract. In return for the possibility of that supreme demand, the state undertakes obligations that are meant to be equally absolute: to equip them adequately, to train them thoroughly, never to send them into avoidable danger, to care for them when they are hurt, and, if they die, to care for those they leave behind. The sacrifice is not a gift freely poured out by the soldier. It is a loan the nation takes out in his name, and it is repaid, if at all, in the quality of the care we show his family.

Every Nigerian knows how that contract has fared in practice. We have watched uniformed men post videos from the front complaining of inadequate ammunition and unpaid allowances. We have seen widows of fallen soldiers gather at barracks gates and ministry corridors to plead for benefits that should have been paid automatically. We have seen retired police officers march in Abuja again and again over pension arrears, men who spent decades risking their lives for a salary that never quite made a decent life, and who are then handed, in old age, a bureaucratic maze. These are not isolated scandals. They are the ordinary texture of how this state treats those who serve it. And the language of reverence grows louder as the substance of care grows thinner.

Listen again to the phrases we have heard this week. The Governors’ Forum describes the dead as having made the ultimate sacrifice in national service. The Vice-President speaks of an enduring debt of gratitude. These sentences are not false. But consider what they do. They convert a loss into a gift; they present as noble self-giving what may have been, for all we yet know, a preventable accident. There is a quiet violence in calling every death a sacrifice. The word belongs to the altar, and the altar has a priest, and the priest is the state. If a man dies because an aircraft failed, because a maintenance schedule slipped, because a procurement was starved of funds, then he was not sacrificed on any altar but lost to the carelessness of the institution that sent him up. To name that death a sacrifice is to wash it of blame before the investigation has begun.

I am not saying the Ondo crash was caused by negligence. I do not know what caused it, and neither does anyone else, which is exactly why a sober nation waits for the evidence. But I am saying that the reflex of reverence arrives before the reflex of inquiry, and that this ordering is itself a political choice. We do not have to choose between honouring the dead and demanding answers. The truest honour is to demand the answers. The soldier who is lauded at his funeral and forgotten in the budget has been honoured only by the loudest, cheapest means available.

There is a further matter the Ondo list forces upon us, and it concerns the six apparent civilians among the dead. Reports, citing sources, say the flight was a logistics mission that also carried families of military personnel to Lagos. We should treat that detail with care until it is officially confirmed. But if it is true, it tells a story of its own. It suggests that the military, for all its constraints, is quietly carrying a burden the wider state has failed to bear: the burden of moving ordinary people along corridors, such as that between Benin and Lagos, which are among the most punishing in the country by road and too costly for many by air.

A soldier’s wife in this country may be offered a seat on a transport aircraft because the alternative is a road that has killed a great many Nigerians. And if that is a kindness, it is a kindness resting on a failure. In a better-governed country the civil transport system would carry civilians, and the military would carry its own cargo under the disciplined safeguards that apply to passengers. Here the uniform becomes a social safety net, and the safety net, on a bad morning in October, turns into a coffin.

One detail from the scene deserves its place beside the names. Ondo’s governor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, said that the aircraft came down about two hundred metres from the community, and that the pilot had steered it into the swamp and away from the homes. A resident told journalists much the same. Only the pilot, the governor added, could explain what went wrong, and the pilot cannot now be asked. I do not know whether the account will survive the recorders, for accidents are rarely so legible. But if it holds, then the last act of a public servant in uniform was to put distance between a stricken machine and strangers’ roofs, and a country that wishes to honour its dead might begin by letting that act be examined, confirmed and recorded, and not merely applauded.

III. The Skies and the Ledger

On 12 August 1985, a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight from Tokyo to Osaka lost its tail fin and much of its hydraulic control and wandered in the sky for thirty-two minutes before it struck a mountain ridge, Osutaka, in Gunma Prefecture. Five hundred and twenty people died; four survived. It remains the deadliest single-aircraft accident in history. In the aftermath, the president of Japan Airlines, Yasumoto Takagi, publicly apologised to the bereaved families and then resigned. The investigation found that a faulty repair carried out years earlier, after a tail strike on landing, had left a fatal weakness in the rear pressure bulkhead. The airline did not hide behind that finding; it built a safety centre near Haneda Airport, where today visitors may walk among the recovered wreckage, including the twisted bulkhead itself, and where every employee is expected to confront what carelessness can cost. Each August, company staff still climb the mountain to the memorial.

I bring Japan into a Nigerian essay not as a reproach but as a measure. It shows that a nation, or a company, or an air force, can choose to turn a disaster into an institutional memory that remains active in the body. Japan Airlines did not erase August 1985. It put it on display. It made the wreck a classroom and the dead the teachers.

Now let us make the Nigerian ledger, because we owe the reader the whole account and not only this week’s page. On 26 September 1992 a Nigerian Air Force C-130 Hercules came down shortly after taking off from Lagos, at Ejigbo, killing about one hundred and sixty people, a great many of them officers of the armed forces. It was, and remains, among the worst military aviation losses in the country’s history.

Which of us can name five of the dead? On 22 October 2005, a Bellview Airlines Boeing 737 fell near Lagos with the loss of all 117 aboard. On 10 December that same year, a Sosoliso Airlines aircraft crashed on approach to Port Harcourt; of 110 persons aboard, 108 died, among them some sixty schoolchildren of Loyola Jesuit College, Abuja, who were flying home for Christmas. In October 2006, an ADC Airlines flight went down shortly after leaving Abuja, with ninety-six dead, among them the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido, and his son.

In June 2012, a Dana Air MD-83 plunged into a residential neighbourhood in Lagos, and all 153 on board died, with others on the ground. In December that same year, a helicopter carrying the Governor of Kaduna State, Patrick Yakowa, and General Andrew Azazi, a former National Security Adviser, crashed in Bayelsa, and all aboard died. In May 2021, an Air Force King Air 350 crashed near Kaduna airport, killing the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Ibrahim Attahiru, and ten others.

I have listed these crashes plainly because the plainness is the argument. When set side by side, they form a ledger of Nigerian aviation grief in which ordinary children, a sultan, a governor, a chief of army staff, and now twenty-five crew and passengers, uniformed and civilian, have all been consumed by the same sky. Death in the air is a great leveller in Nigeria, but our grief has never reformed our institutions.

There is a memory in this ledger that belongs to me, and I will tell it, for this is meant to be a journey through memories. I was a small child in Abiriba when the civil war reached our part of the country. I was already born before 1966, and I am old enough to remember very little and young enough that what I remember is shaped by fear rather than by understanding. I remember being led by older hands into the bush, and the moving of our small party from hiding place to hiding place, and the sound of aircraft above us, fighter planes whose business I could not have explained. I remember being hushed.

The adults went silent, and the children were taught, without a single spoken lesson, that the sky was a place from which death might look down and that silence was a form of survival. The memory is faint now, muted by the long years, but it has never entirely left. So when I read that an aircraft of my country’s own air force has fallen from that same sky, killing the very people who were meant to guard against such fear, something in me goes back to that bush and listens.

There is an old irony here that I find hard to bear. Nigeria’s military aircraft were, for some of us, once the instruments of terror; they are now, for others, the instruments of loss. Between the two, we have never built a national habit of reckoning with what the sky has done.

What would such a habit look like? It would begin with the plain principle that every crash is a teacher and that every report is a lesson owed to the public. In civil aviation, the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau, established under a 2022 law, exists precisely to examine accidents and publish what it finds, and its predecessors left behind reports whose recommendations, critics have long complained, were too often neither implemented nor remembered.

In military aviation, the usual practice across the world is that the armed forces investigate themselves through boards of inquiry, and their findings are rarely published. That arrangement is defensible when the aircraft carries only military cargo and crew. It becomes much harder to defend when it carries families, children, and civilians, as the Ondo flight reportedly did. Those who step into a military aircraft do not leave the protection of the public’s right to know why they died.

The arrangement showed itself within hours. The Aviation Minister, Festus Keyamo, who had given the first count of the dead, said that military aircraft fall outside the jurisdiction of his ministry and of the civil aviation authority, and the Safety Investigation Bureau said it would assist only on a formal request from the Air Force. The man who announced thirty-two had, by his own account, no jurisdiction over the aircraft, and the body with the expertise had no standing to ask. Ownership of the flight and investigation of its loss rest, once again, in the same hands.

Mike Ejiofor, a former director in the Department of State Services, made part of this case on Arise News this week, and I set down his claims as his. Nigeria, he said, has seen more than ten military air crashes in the past decade, a count I have been unable to confirm from here. Daily Trust, counting from 2015, puts the figure at about twenty military aircraft crashes, among them a Dornier 228 in 2015 that killed seven, the Kaduna King Air of 2021 that killed eleven, and an Mi-171E helicopter in 2023 that killed eleven.

The two counts are not necessarily in conflict, since “more than ten” is a floor, but a floor and a newspaper’s tally are poor substitutes for a register. An inquiry, he argued, must look past any single cause to maintenance schedules, the age of aircraft and the oversight of the fleet. The gap between twenty-five and thirty-two he took to be the symptom of a chronic failure of record keeping, since manifests on military and chartered flights are, in his words as reported, often not strictly observed. That last point is the one I would underline, because it lies beneath all the others. A state that cannot say who boarded an aircraft cannot say who died in it, and a state that cannot say who died cannot be asked to say why. The count is the first fact of accountability.

He also doubted that an aircraft of a type assigned to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance was on a tactical mission along the Lagos and Benin corridor, with families reportedly aboard. If he is right, then who authorised civilians on such a flight, and under what rules, belongs in the inquiry’s terms of reference. The same caution governs the talk of an explosion before impact. He called it speculative until the flight recorders are read, and noted that wreckage scattered widely is consistent with an event in the air or with a violent impact on the ground. Until the recorders are read, the honest answer is that nobody outside the investigation knows.

The aircraft’s own history belongs in the public file. According to the ICIR, working from spotters’ photographs and aviation records, NAF 931 was one of two ATR-42 surveillance aircraft bought from Alenia under a contract of about seventy-three million dollars signed in 2007, and was delivered in March 2010, which made it about sixteen years old.

It was photographed at a maintenance facility in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in January 2021 with components removed, and was reported to have returned to Nigeria in late December 2024. The ICIR itself cautions that a long stay does not establish a defect or show that maintenance contributed to the crash, and neither shall I. But the authorities have not said what was done in those four years, or why it took so long, and facts of that kind should not have to be reconstructed by aircraft spotters.

The precedent is not encouraging. After the Kaduna crash of May 2021, the minority caucus of the House of Representatives called for a system-wide investigation of military air accidents. In September the Accident Investigation Bureau handed an interim report to the Chief of the Air Staff, and the joint statement that announced it did not disclose a cause; the Bureau’s chief said it was his agency’s first direct involvement in a military crash investigation. I have looked for a published final report and have not found one, and I stand to be corrected. If that is so, then the lesson of Kaduna reached the public as a promise and no more, and the families of Ondo are right to ask what will be different now.

Channels Television, in a retrospective published on the day of the crash, calls Ondo “the latest dot in a 10-year pattern of public NAF mishaps”, and lists them: helicopters, trainers, fighters and transports, in Makurdi, Abuja, Damasak, Kaduna, Shiroro, Port Harcourt and Kainji. It recalls that the Kaduna joint probe was reported to have listed twenty-seven initial findings and eight immediate safety recommendations, and that in July 2025 the Air Force announced a full year without a mishap, a claim the station notes was not independently audited. Its sharpest sentences are two.

“Maintenance questions need receipts, not rumours.” And: “Investigations happen. Transparency does not.” It also records that in December 2025 the crew of an Alpha Jet over Kainji steered a failing machine away from houses before ejecting. If the governor’s account of the Ondo pilot holds, he or she would not be the first to make that choice, and the habit of the airman deserves a habit of the state to match it.

The Air Force has promised timely and verified updates. We must hold it to the word “verified” and to the word “timely” alike. The truth about an accident has a half-life. The longer it takes to speak, the more thoroughly the swamp, the weather and the rumour will do the work of silence for the state.

IV. The Liturgy of Mourning

At 9:15 on the morning of 21 October 1966, in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, a mountain of colliery waste that the National Coal Board had piled above the village for years, and that its own engineers had been warned was unstable, liquefied in the rain and slid down the hillside. It struck Pantglas Junior School just as the children were settling into their first lessons after assembly. One hundred and sixteen children died there, along with twenty-eight adults. The coal board’s chairman, Lord Robens, was slow to come and quick, when he spoke, to suggest that an unforeseeable natural spring beneath the tip had caused the disaster.

The Queen visited eight days after the slide, and, as she later acknowledged, she wished she had gone sooner. A tribunal found that the Board bore the blame, condemning its failure of vigilance in unsparing terms. No one was dismissed and no one was prosecuted. The Board paid the families five hundred pounds per child lost, and the authorities then took one hundred and fifty thousand pounds from the public disaster fund, money given by the grieving public to the bereaved, to pay for the removal of the remaining tips that the Board’s carelessness had made dangerous. Only decades afterwards was that sum returned, and without interest.

Aberfan teaches us that mourning is not innocent. A nation can weep with complete sincerity and still be engaged in the work of avoiding responsibility, for the two do not exclude each other. The tears of the many can shelter the negligence of a few.

Nigeria has, over the decades, perfected a liturgy for the aftermath of loss, and it would be an act of dishonesty not to describe its parts. The first element is the declaration: three days of mourning, announced from the highest office, flags to be flown at half-mast on public buildings. The second is the register, here a condolence book opened at Air Force Headquarters for officials, diplomats and the heads of security agencies to inscribe their sorrow. The third is the chorus of condolences, from governors and ministers, from the legislature, from trade bodies, from every quarter of the republic that has a letterhead. The fourth is the order of investigation, issued in a single sentence. The fifth is the appeal for calm, which in this case came in the Air Force’s own request that the public refrain from speculation and from circulating unverified information while respecting the privacy and dignity of the bereaved. The sixth, usually, is silence.

I do not wish to be uncharitable to any of these. Rituals of mourning are among the oldest instruments of human society, and the families of the dead truly do draw strength from knowing that they are not alone. The register in Abuja is not a cynical thing. But a ritual, however sincere, can take the place of the work it is supposed to express. A nation that mourns exquisitely and investigates poorly has made grief into a substitute for justice, and the substitute is cheaper.

There is a measure of proportion, too, that the liturgy never confronts. Three days are declared for one catastrophe in the sky. Yet this country buries its citizens every day of the year, on its roads, in its hospitals, in its farmlands and in its streets, and for these there is no proclamation, no register and no flag lowered. I shall return to that arithmetic, for it is the true measure of the sham: a mourning that begins and ends by decree is a mourning that has already told us what it is worth.

Consider the appeal not to speculate. There is wisdom in it. Rumour can wound the families of the dead, can accuse the innocent, can pre-empt the technical findings that only experts can supply. Yet we have to notice the asymmetry. The same newspaper that carried the Air Force’s plea carried, in the same news cycle, a headline reporting that the Governor of Ondo State had suggested a technical problem, and not the weather, may have been responsible. An official may speculate; the citizen is asked to hold his tongue. And speculation flourishes exactly where information is withheld. If Nigerians speculate, it is because we have learnt, from a long run of unexplained disasters, that an official silence is rarely a prelude to honesty. The remedy for speculation is not the discipline of the public but the generosity of the state with the facts it holds.

Consider, too, the appeal to privacy and dignity. Here we meet another dialectic. The families of the dead have a legitimate claim to be shielded from the vultures of social media and the ghouls who share pictures of wreckage. That claim is just. But the phrase “privacy and dignity” can also be a velvet curtain. Behind it we may find the interest of an institution that would prefer not to be asked how an aircraft came to be in the air in a particular condition, with a particular maintenance history, on a particular mission, carrying particular people. The dead have dignity; so do the living, who are entitled to know whether their own families may be put in the same danger tomorrow. It is not an intrusion upon the family of a fallen airman to ask what caused his death. It is, on the contrary, the most serious form of respect we can show him.

The asymmetry was visible within hours. While the public was told not to speculate, officials were offering causes of their own. The governor, speaking on Channels Television, said a technical or mechanical fault might explain the loss of contact, and doubted that weather was the cause, since the aircraft would probably not have taken off in poor conditions. A local official, according to Daily Trust, blamed the weather. Each used the careful language of possibility, and neither was necessarily wrong. But when two explanations point in opposite directions, and both come from people with no access to the recorders, the instruction against speculation begins to sound as if it is addressed to the governed more than to the governing.

V. The Frankenstein Republic

In January 1897, a party of British officials set out from the coast for Benin City, the capital of one of the oldest and most sophisticated kingdoms in West Africa. The Acting Consul-General, James Phillips, had been warned that the king, the Oba, had asked for the visit to be delayed during a sacred season. He went anyway, with a column of nine Europeans and some two hundred African carriers, and he and most of his party were killed on the road. Britain’s answer, in February, was a punitive expedition of some twelve hundred men. They fought their way to the capital and took it. The city burned.

The Oba, Ovonramwen, surrendered in August, was exiled to Calabar, and died there in 1914. And the troops carried away from the royal palace thousands of objects, among them hundreds of brass plaques and carvings in ivory, which were sold and scattered, and are in museums across Europe and America to this day. The king was deposed and exiled without any trial that a British court would have recognised. No inquiry asked whether the burning of a capital city was lawful. The men who had done it went home to a country whose own laws would have required a trial for far lesser acts.

That same year, a journalist named Flora Shaw, writing in The Times of London, proposed a name for the sprawl of territories along the Niger which Britain was gathering under its flag. She called it Nigeria. It was a name taken from a river, chosen by a foreign writer for the convenience of a foreign empire. In 1914, the colonial governor, Frederick Lugard, whom she would later marry, joined the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria into a single administrative unit. The union was driven, as every honest historian concedes, by money: the north ran a deficit, the south ran a surplus, and an accountant’s solution was found. Nobody asked the peoples of Oyo, of Sokoto, of Benin, of the Igbo villages, of the Ijaw creeks and the Tiv plains, whether they wished to be one.

I set these facts down because I have long wondered about the foundation on which this country was built, and about the distorted, violent and militaristic manner in which it was joined. We know what it is made of: hundreds of peoples, a handful of great religions, a coastline, a desert edge, and rivers that were already old when the Portuguese came. What troubles us is the manner of the joining.

A thing sewn together by force, from parts that were never consulted, is in danger of becoming what Mary Shelley imagined in 1818: a body without a soul, assembled by a creator who then fled from his work. And the lesson of her novel, which is too often forgotten, is that her creature was not born a monster. He says of himself that he was benevolent and good, and that misery made him a fiend. What turns him is abandonment. He asks only to be received, and he is not.

Look at how the colonial state governed. It was a state of the constable and the carbine. The West African Frontier Force, raised by Lugard at the turn of the century, was an instrument of conquest and pacification before it was anything else, and the police were its civil twin. In 1929, thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women in the Calabar and Owerri provinces, convinced by rumour that they were to be taxed, marched on the colonial administration in what we call the Women’s War.

Troops and police fired on them, and some fifty women were killed. In November 1949, at the Iva Valley colliery in Enugu, police opened fire on striking coal miners, and twenty-one were killed. In each case, an inquiry was set up, sometimes with a certain candour, but in each case the pattern was set. The state that governed us regarded the African crowd as a threat to be dispersed, not a public to be answered. A people who are only ever policed learn that the state is a thing to be avoided or captured, and never a thing to be trusted.

Then came the inheritance. At independence, in 1960, a country that had been built for the convenience of an empire was handed to its own children. The new leaders were, in the main, patriots. But they received a machine they had not made, in which the army and police were designed to command and not to serve, the civil service was designed to extract and not to answer, and the map was designed by someone else. Within six years the first coup had come, and a great part of the next three decades was spent under the boot. Military rulers governed Nigeria for something like twenty-nine of its sixty-six years.

Think of what such a life does to a nation’s reflexes. A generation learnt that disagreement was disorder, that decrees came from above, that the soldier could simply take a town, as at Odi in 1999, when a civilian president who had himself been a general sent in the army, and that no one of consequence would ask why. The civil war of 1967 to 1970 was the great and terrible rehearsal of the lesson: it proved that unity in Nigeria could be enforced at an unimaginable price, and it ended with a slogan of no victor and no vanquished, and with a policy of reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction that was never accompanied by the truth.

To be fair, we must say that our leaders have not been without attempts. The National Youth Service Corps, founded in 1973, sought to send the young of one region to live and work in another. The principle of federal character, written into the constitution, sought to give every part of the federation a share in the institutions of the centre. These were serious efforts, and they deserve their due. But look at their shape. They are engineering efforts, rules and quotas and postings, mechanisms of balance. None of them is an attempt to teach a people to feel for one another, to build the habit of a shared sorrow. Federal character apportions the offices; it does not create the affection that would make the apportionment unnecessary. Here is the first dialectic of the foundation: a union can be made by administration or by affection, and ours has had a surfeit of the first and a poverty of the second.

The French thinker Ernest Renan, in an 1882 lecture on what a nation is, offered a definition of a nation that has lasted a century and a half. A nation, he said, is a daily plebiscite: a continuing, voluntary act of consent, rooted in a rich legacy of memories held in common and in a present desire to live together. Hold Nigeria against that sentence, and measure the distance. Our common memories are few and contested. Our desire to live together is real in the market and the street, where Nigerians of every origin trade, marry, worship and quarrel and make up, but it is very thin in the institutions of the state. What the common people have made, in spite of the country’s foundation, is greater than what the state has made of it. That, too, is part of the tragedy: the nation is better than the republic.

So I understand why so many of us say that violence breaks out for no reason at all, that it settles, that no one asks why it returns. It returns because the foundation has never been questioned. A house built on the wrong ground does not cease to crack because we paint the wall.

VI. What We Love, We Mourn

On 1 May 1865, just over three weeks after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, an extraordinary procession took place in Charleston, South Carolina. During the war, the Confederates had turned the city’s race course into a prison camp, and hundreds of captured Union soldiers had been held there in the open, with little shelter, and many had died. They were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand, without markers. When the Confederates withdrew and Charleston fell, it was the city’s own Black residents, among them workmen who had until months before been enslaved, who went out to the race course, dug up the dead, and reburied them in individual graves.

They built a high fence around the burial ground and an archway over the entrance, and they painted on it words naming the dead the Martyrs of the Race Course. And on the first of May, thousands of people, a great many of them freed people and their children, marched to the site with flowers, with hymns and with a sense that they were doing something no official had thought to do. Many historians count it among the earliest of the Memorial Days of the American nation.

Reflect upon what this tells us. Those who mourned those soldiers had been given no order from any capital. They had nothing to gain. They had every reason to look to their own wounds and their own uncertain futures. They mourned because they loved: they loved what those men had died for, and they recognised in the dead strangers a part of themselves. Nothing could be further from a proclamation. And nothing could show more clearly what I take to be the heart of this whole matter: that mourning is the work of love. You mourn what you feel for. You mourn what you love. A flag lowered by decree over a people who feel no tie to one another is a gesture that has lost its reason.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim made a startling observation about mourning, one that bears on our case. In the rites of small societies and large, he said, mourning is not the spontaneous outflow of private sorrow; it is a duty imposed by the group. We weep because the community has decided that this is the time to weep. There is something in that to give pause. It suggests that the ritual of half-mast flags is not, in itself, a falsehood. A decreed mourning, if it is rooted in a community that recognises itself as one, can create the feeling it commands, can gather scattered sorrow and give it a shape. The proclamation is a kind of invitation, and where there is a people to receive it, it may be a true one.

But that is exactly the point at which the difficulty lies. A decree can summon only a feeling that the group is capable of. And the group, here, is not yet a group. When Americans lowered their flags for Lincoln, a funeral train carried his body some sixteen hundred miles, and the grief along the track was extraordinary, because four years of shared war had made a people who knew they had lost something together. In Nigeria, the proclamation goes out, and it falls on a population divided into the families, towns, faiths and regions that give the individual his only reliable sense of belonging. The half-mast flag flies over public buildings that most citizens experience as places of extortion, delay and indignity. For many of us it passes without notice. The ritual is intact. The feeling it was made to carry has nowhere to land.

The scholar Benedict Anderson, in his study of the origins of nationalism, called the nation an imagined community, imagined because its members will never meet or know most of their fellows, yet each carries in his mind the image of their communion. He observed that nothing speaks more clearly of the modern nation than its cenotaphs and its tombs of the unknown soldier, empty monuments saturated with the ghostly national imaginings. Recall the beginning of this essay, and the Unknown Warrior of 1920. The British state did not conjure the million mourners from nowhere; it gave form to an imagination that already existed. The ceremony worked because the people had already agreed that they were one. If the Nigerian ceremony does not work, it is not because it has been badly organised. It is because the imagination it needs is not yet there, and this is the failure of the foundation, and not of the protocol.

Which brings me to the leaders, and to the sharpest charge that can be laid against them: that those who profess the loudest love for the country and its communities do not love them, but love the perks of power. I will not pretend to read hearts. There are officeholders in Nigeria, I have no doubt, who serve with honesty and who grieve when the dead are carried home. But the structure of our politics makes it very difficult to see them, and rather easy to understand the suspicion.

A system in which office is the way to wealth, in which the road to a position runs through patronage and the road from it leads to a comfortable exile abroad, is a system that rewards the love of position and starves the love of people. What a person loves is revealed by what he is willing to pay for. We know what Nigeria’s governing class has been willing to pay for. It has paid for convoys and allowances and lavish funerals of its own. It has not paid, with equal readiness, for a hospital, for a road, for a soldier’s pension or for the investigation of a massacre. The budget is the confession of the heart.

So the three days of half-mast are not, in themselves, a lie. They are a question put to a nation that cannot yet answer it. They ask whether we are one people, and the silence that follows is the reply. I would not have the flags taken down. I would have them mean something. And that would require that the nation be built, at last, on a foundation of the kind of attention that makes an unknown farmer in a distant village a loss to a man who has never heard his name.

VII. The Country of Dead Souls

In the Russia of the nineteenth century, the tsarist state taxed its landowners by the number of male serfs, known as souls, that they were recorded as holding. The count was made at intervals, in what were called revision lists, and between one revision and the next, the lists were frozen. A serf who died the day after the census went on being counted, and taxed, as if he lived, until the next count came round. A serf who was born the day after did not exist at all. The state thus kept, for years at a time, a register in which the dead lived and the living had no name. In 1842, the novelist Nikolai Gogol took this absurd and entirely real arrangement and made of it a masterpiece: a swindler named Chichikov travels the provinces buying up the names of dead serfs from landowners who are only too glad to be rid of the tax on them, intending to mortgage these phantoms to the state. The novel is called Dead Souls, and it is, among other things, the great satire of a state that does not know whom it governs.

I think of Gogol whenever I consider the subterranean territory in which we seem to live, a place where we have breath and yet are breathless, where we feel alive and are treated as dead. It is no mere figure of speech, and the more I look at it, the more literal it appears.

Consider what the country knows of itself. The last full national census was taken in 2006. Commentators have noted this year that Nigeria has now spent twenty years without counting its people. Every figure we quote for our population, the two hundred and some million, is an estimate, an extrapolation from a count that is two decades old, and a good deal of the planning that rests on it, the schools, the clinics, the electoral constituencies, the allocation of revenue, rests on a number that no one can verify. We are a country that does not know how many of us there are.

And of our dead, the position is worse. The National Population Commission has itself said this year that only about fifty-seven percent of births in Nigeria are registered, and that registration of deaths remains below twenty percent. Think what that means. More than four in every five deaths in this country pass into the grave without leaving a mark in any record of the state. The dead are not just unmourned; they are unrecorded. They have not, in any administrative sense, died at all.

They go on being counted among the living in every projection built on a census twenty years old, and when they are finally lost, no one in authority knows the date, the place or the cause. Gogol’s serfs were counted though dead. Ours are dead though uncounted. The state of the nineteenth-century tsars at least kept a ledger. We have a country in which entire lives pass between two silences.

We should add a third forgetting, which is the forgetting we teach. As I understand it, Nigerian history was for a long period dropped from the primary and junior secondary curriculum, and was restored only in recent years. For more than a decade, a generation of Nigerian children was allowed to pass through school without being taught how their country came to be, what happened in 1914, in 1966, in 1967, or at Asaba, at Odi, at Ikeja. I do not suggest that this was done with a plan; I suggest only that it is of a piece with everything else. A state that does not count its people, does not record their deaths and does not teach their history is not neglecting three separate things. It is pursuing one: the preservation of its own freedom from being asked.

That is the hidden logic of the whole thing. It is not that someone, in a room, has decided to kill memory. It is that memory is expensive and inconvenient, and an administration that is not held to account has every reason to let it die. Records create obligations. A registered death is a pension that may be claimed, a cause that may be investigated, a promise that may be broken in public. A counted village is a claim on the budget. A taught history is a question about the present. The unrecorded do not ask for anything, and so a state that wishes to be asked for nothing finds the unrecorded most convenient.

There is a final dialectic that I would like to name, because it explains a great deal of our private and public lives. In Nigeria, the private sphere of loss is rich and the public sphere is poor. Look at how we bury our own. The funeral of a family member, in the village, is an event of great expense and great ceremony; the entire kindred assembles, the age grade and the town union and the church or the mosque come together, the praise-singers and the drummers and the cooks are engaged, and the dead person is sent off with a dignity that no hospital or ministry ever showed him in life.

Those are the real institutions of our memory: the family, the village, the burial society, the town union. They are not weak. They are, in their way, the strongest institutions we have. And it is precisely because they are so strong that the national institutions have been permitted to remain so weak. We have learnt, over generations, that we can look to the kin and the village for what the state will not give. Our loss is always personal because the personal is the only place where loss is received.

But a country cannot live forever on the private memories of its families. At some point, the village’s grief must be joined to the nation’s, or the nation will never exist. That joining will not come from a decree, or from a flag. It will come from the slow, unglamorous work of counting, recording and teaching, work that must begin with the simplest of questions: who are we, how many of us are there, and who has died.

VIII. The Subterfuge

In the spring of 1940, the Soviet secret police shot something like twenty-two thousand Polish officers, officials and members of the intelligentsia in the forest of Katyn and in other killing grounds across the western Soviet Union. In 1943, German forces occupying the region uncovered the mass graves at Katyn and announced them to the world. Moscow replied, with a straight face, that it was the Germans who had done it. For nearly half a century that lie was the official truth of the Soviet state. It was written into textbooks and into the diplomatic language of a bloc of nations. Polish families were not free to name the true killers on their relatives’ gravestones. Only on 13 April 1990, under Mikhail Gorbachev, did the Soviet government admit that the secret police had done the deed. Two years later the order that signed the killings was produced from the archives, as it had been there all along.

A student of history, as I was in Russia, learns early that the most dangerous institutions are not those that kill, because killing is only an event, but those that govern what may be remembered about the killing. The Katyn lie was not an accident of bureaucracy. It was a machine, with clerks and censors and educators operating it, and it was run with a diligence that any ministry might envy.

I do not suggest that Nigeria has built a Katyn. We have not, and to say so would be a calumny against our own country’s real pluralism of press and voice. But I do suggest that we have developed, with considerably less malice and a great deal more inertia, a subtler apparatus of forgetting. Its tools are the commission, the panel, the committee, the white paper, and above all the shelf. When the nation is shamed by a catastrophe, a body is constituted. Its members are appointed with fanfare. It sits for months or years. It receives evidence, often at great cost and with great pain from those who testify. It submits its report to a leader who receives it with solemn thanks. And then, nothing. The shelf takes the report, and the shelf, in this country, is an extremely efficient incinerator of memory.

The great example is the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, the Oputa Panel, which was inaugurated in 1999 under Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, took evidence in public in 2000 and 2001, reported in 2002, and received more than ten thousand petitions from Nigerians who had suffered at the hands of the state across decades of military and civilian rule. Citizens poured out their loss in public hearings, some for the first time in their lives. The report was submitted. Its recommendations lie unimplemented. Ask a young Nigerian today what the Oputa Panel found, and the odds are that you will receive a blank look. A truth was told with great labour, and then the state worked, with equal labour, to make sure no one would be required to act upon it.

Tomorrow, 7 October, will mark fifty-nine years since the day in 1967 on which federal troops carried out the worst of the killing of the men and boys of the town of Asaba, on the banks of the Niger, in the early weeks of the civil war. Hundreds were murdered, by some counts far more. Their descendants brought their testimony to the Oputa Panel.

The killings of Asaba are among the better documented atrocities of that war, and yet, to my knowledge, they have never received formal acknowledgment from the federal state. Our national calendar does carry a day of remembrance for the armed forces, observed on 15 January, the date the war ended in 1970. Look at how the choice of date performs the forgetting. We remember our soldiers on the day of the war’s closing, and the civilians whom the war consumed are left without a national day at all. A nation that chooses the date of its mourning has also chosen the object of it.

Or take the explosions at the Ikeja military cantonment on 27 January 2002, when a fire at an armoury sent ordnance raining over densely populated neighbourhoods of Lagos, and more than a thousand people died, many of them drowned in a canal as they fled the blasts. Ask a Lagosian who is not old enough to have lived through it what happened that night, and the answer will often be a shrug. A thousand citizens, and the republic’s memory has already evaporated.

Why does the state forget? There is a school of thought, expressed by Renan in the same 1882 lecture, that forgetting is an essential factor in the making of a nation, that people must have forgotten many things in order to be able to live together. There is truth in that. A country made of peoples who have wronged each other cannot run on an unbroken inventory of grievance. Forgetting can be a form of mercy, and a certain kind of amnesty is the price of peace.

But there is forgetting that heals and forgetting that kills, and the difference between them is a matter of who chooses and who pays. Healing forgetting is chosen by the injured, after acknowledgment, and out of the hope of a shared future. Killing forgetting is imposed on the injured by the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s heir, in order that no account be rendered. The first says, we have named what happened, and we choose to move on. The second says, nothing happened here, and you are troublesome for remembering. Nigeria, I am afraid, has gone a long way in the second direction while describing it in the vocabulary of the first.

The Romans had a name for the most radical form of official forgetting. They called it the damnation of memory. When the emperor Caracalla had his brother Geta murdered in the year 211, the Senate decreed that Geta’s name should be struck from inscriptions and his face removed from public portraits, and in a famous painting of the imperial family, now in Berlin, one can still see where his face was smeared away, a pale ghost in the paint. The attempt failed, in the sense that we know his name eighteen centuries later. But it succeeded in its immediate aim. The point was not to alter the past but to alter what the public was permitted to say about it.

We do not smear faces from portraits in Nigeria. We do something more elegant. We simply fail to produce the portrait in the first place. We do not annul a name; we neglect to ask for it. And the neglect, repeated across generations of officials, becomes a tradition, a form of institutional memory whose content is the habit of not remembering.

IX. The Citizens Who Die Without Ceremony

On Saturday 30 April 1977, fourteen women gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, the great square in Buenos Aires that faces the presidential palace. Their children had vanished, taken in the night by the agents of Argentina’s military junta, and when they went to police stations and ministries to ask where, they were told that no such persons had been arrested, that perhaps they had run off with lovers, that mothers should go home. The women declined. They began to walk, in circles, around the square, soon settling on Thursday afternoons, and from that autumn they wore white headscarves originally made from their children’s cloth diapers, and carried photographs of the disappeared.

The generals, who could kill with impunity, did not know what to do with a silence that refused to leave. Azucena Villaflor, who had founded the walk, was herself abducted that December and killed. The mothers kept walking. They walked through the dictatorship and its collapse, through the amnesties and the trials, and in time the world learnt their name and the country learnt what it had done.

That story belongs here because it stands against the idea that the dead of the poor and powerless must remain unsung. They need not. Their families, if they will not be silenced, can make a nation hear.

Let me put the matter plainly, since the Ondo crash makes it unusually easy. Within a day of the aircraft falling, Nigeria knew its dead by name and rank and initial. A printed roll was in every newspaper. A register was open in the capital. A national mourning was declared. The aircraft’s passengers, uniformed and civilian, were seen. And this is as it should be. The question is who else is seen.

On 3 December 2023, in the village of Tudun Biri in Kaduna State, a military drone struck a crowd of Muslims gathered for a Maulud celebration, and at least eighty-five villagers died. The army spoke of an error. Investigations were promised. I have yet to see the full public accounting that the scale of that loss demands, and I cannot name five of the dead. On 17 January 2017, a Nigerian Air Force jet bombed a camp for the displaced at Rann, in Borno State, and killed scores of people who had already fled the war, among them aid workers. We were told it was a mistake. Whatever the explanation, did a single bereaved family there receive a state funeral, a register, or a three-day mourning of their own?

On 20 October 2020, at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, soldiers fired upon young people protesting against police brutality. Amnesty International documented at least twelve protesters killed at Lekki and Alausa; a Lagos judicial panel later described what happened as a massacre; the authorities initially denied that anyone had died at all. On 5 June 2022, in the town of Owo, in this same Ondo State, at least forty worshippers were killed at St Francis Catholic Church on Pentecost Sunday. And in April 2014, two hundred and seventy-six schoolgirls were taken from their dormitories in Chibok, and scores of them are, as far as the public record shows, still unaccounted for.

Owo came back into the news in the same week as the crash. On Sunday, 4 October, the army, working with the Department of State Services and the Western Nigeria Security Network, Amotekun, said it had killed a senior ISWAP commander, Abdulssamad Ohide, in a forest near the town, and that he had been planning attacks for the Christmas season. The army’s account is the army’s, and I make no claim here about who carried out the church attack of 2022. What I notice is the pairing. The commander received a name, a rank, an alleged plan and a date within a day, while the worshippers killed at St Francis are, in the national retelling, chiefly a number: at least forty. A state that can describe its enemy so promptly can describe its dead as promptly, if it chooses.

Notice the difference of language. The dead of a plane crash receive names. The dead of the villages, the camps, the highways and the farm settlements of the north and the Middle Belt receive numbers, and the numbers receive adverbs: at least, about, an estimated, more than. A Nigerian child learning arithmetic from our news learns that the dead of the poor are always approximate.

The philosopher Judith Butler has written of what she calls grievable lives, the idea that societies distribute the right to be mourned unequally, that some deaths are felt as losses while others are registered only as statistics. Nigeria is a laboratory for the proposition. The airman and the aviation passenger are, in the moment of their death, grievable. The farmer slaughtered in his field in a village whose name does not appear on any map the capital consults is not. Between the two stands no difference in the humanity of the dead, only a difference in the proximity of their deaths to the apparatus of national attention.

I want to be careful here, because the Ondo dead are not to be resented for their visibility. Their families are bereaved as deeply as any, and nothing in this essay asks that their grief be diminished. The point is the inverse. The honour paid to them is the honour that every Nigerian life is owed. The register opened in Abuja should be the model and not the exception. Our task is not to withdraw attention from the airmen but to extend the same quality of attention to the villager, the commuter, the schoolgirl and the street trader. A republic is measured by how it treats its least visible dead.

There is a final cruelty in this inequality, and it concerns our own habits as citizens. We are, many of us, quick to be moved by the death of the named and slow to be moved by the death of the counted. We scroll past the villages. We have learnt to manage our horror like a currency, spending it carefully, reserving it for what arrives with a photograph and a roll of names. In this we are not different from the state. The state forgets by policy; we forget by exhaustion. But the result is the same, and the dead of the unsung villages have been abandoned twice, first by those who killed them and then by those who did not mourn them.

X. The Wound at the Root

In 1968 a young French doctor named Bernard Kouchner went to Biafra as a volunteer with the Red Cross. What he found there, in the hospitals and feeding centres of a blockaded enclave, were children dying of hunger in numbers that no ward could hold. He came back to France convinced of two things: that the world had been watching a people starve, and that the organisations charged with relief had bound themselves to a silence that the dying could not afford. In December 1971, he and a group of fellow doctors, some of whom had also served in Biafra, founded Médecins Sans Frontières, whose central creed was that a physician who sees an atrocity owes the world his testimony. It is one of the stranger facts of the modern age that a global humanitarian movement was born in part out of the dead of the East of Nigeria, and that the country in which they died has built so little out of them.

I begin with that story because it names the thing I have been circling through the whole of this essay. A foreign doctor made of Biafra an obligation to bear witness. The Nigerian state made of it an embarrassment to be managed. And the people who were there, who lost children and parents and towns and every kobo of their savings, were asked to lower their voices and be grateful that they had been allowed to remain citizens at all.

If I am to be sincere in writing about loss, national mourning and the memory of institutions, I cannot go on writing about aircraft and ordinary roads while the great unmourned bereavement of my own people sits at the foundation of the republic. I have already said that Nigeria was made by force. Here is what the force produced when it turned inward, and here is where the habit of unaccounted death was learnt.

The story is long and has many hands in it, and I will set it down as plainly as I can. In January 1966 a group of mostly Igbo officers struck against the government of the First Republic and killed, among others, the Prime Minister and two regional premiers. The coup failed to take power in the way its authors had hoped, and it passed to General Aguiyi-Ironsi, himself an Igbo. In July of the same year northern officers struck back, killed Ironsi, and in the barracks hunted down Igbo soldiers and officers.

Then came the killings of civilians. In May and again, with terrible force, from September to October 1966, Igbo men, women and children living in the northern cities and towns were murdered in the streets, in their homes, at railway stations and on the roads as they fled. Estimates of the dead run as high as thirty thousand, though the figure is probably nearer eight to ten thousand, and more than a million people are said to have made their way back to the East with whatever they could carry. No one that I am aware of has ever been tried for those killings. The numbers are uncertain, and they are uncertain because no one in authority has ever had the interest, or the courage, to count.

I should say here, since I have promised myself to be fair, that this story is not told with one pair of hands. The decisions of the Eastern leadership were not free of error or of pride. The people of the minority areas of the East, among them the Ogoni, the Ikwerre, the Ibibio and the peoples of the riverine country, found themselves between two armies, and their suffering is also part of the ledger, and has also been poorly remembered. A people that carries a wound is not thereby absolved of the wounds it may have helped to inflict, and it is a mark of a serious memory that it can hold both.

But the scale of what was done to the East is not in dispute among serious people. The war that followed the secession of May 1967 began in July of that year and ended on 15 January 1970. By the usual accounts, tens of thousands of combatants died on the two sides. The civilian dead, mostly in Biafra, mostly from hunger, are variously put from several hundred thousand to over a million, and the older figure, which many Igbo families have always carried in their hearts, is between one and three million. Historians argue about the number, as they should. The point that they cannot argue away is that a blockade was thrown around a densely populated enclave, that food and medicine were kept from entering it, and that the people who died of the hunger were, in overwhelming proportion, children.

I was one of the children who lived, and I do not wish to claim a memory I do not have. What I carry is small and muted: the sound of aircraft overhead, the hush, the bush near Abiriba, and a stillness that the adults around me taught me to keep. I did not know then why we were hiding. It took me years to understand that I was part of a people who were being hidden from, and later, in the long peace, a people who were asked to hide again, this time not in the bush but in silence.

For here is what strikes me most, as I set the history beside the republic that came afterwards. The vast majority of those who died in that war, in the pogroms and on the frontlines and in the camps and on the roads, died without a single named account entered into any public record of the Nigerian state. So far as I know, there is no register. There is no memorial in the capital to the civilians of the war. There is no public list of the towns that were burnt, or of the children who died in the refugee camps, or of the families who were turned out of their houses in Port Harcourt. They were not nameless because they were few. They were nameless because naming them would have required a verdict, and the state has never been willing to deliver one.

It is a curious thing to say, but the world has taken more notice of the dead of Biafra than the republic has. There are books, films, relief charities and a great body of scholarship in other countries that keep their memory. In Nigeria itself, what we have is a private grief, handed down in the family, told in the dialect of the compound at funerals and in the half-voice of old men, and a public silence so complete that a student may, as I understand it, pass through the entire school system without hearing an honest account of what happened. A country that has not mourned its great loss at its foundation cannot be expected to mourn its small losses in the present. The habit is learnt at the root. And where the root is wounded, the whole tree bears the mark.

XI. The Ease of Forgetting

In October 2000, in a village in the north of Spain, a journalist named Emilio Silva stood beside a shallow trench and watched volunteers and forensic experts uncover the bones of thirteen men, among them his own grandfather, who had been shot by Franco’s supporters in the autumn of 1936. For sixty-four years the dead had lain by the roadside, and the families had been unable to say aloud what they knew. The reason was a bargain, which Spaniards later named the pact of forgetting. When Franco died in 1975, the country had made a tacit settlement to move into democracy without looking back, and in 1977 an amnesty law had sealed that settlement, shielding the perpetrators of the dictatorship and, with them, its crimes from inquiry.

It was peace of a kind, and it was calm. But the calm was built over a field of unmarked graves, and when Silva dug up his grandfather he started something that the pact could not contain. Within a few years there were associations across the country digging for the missing, and in 2007 the Spanish parliament passed a law of historical memory, recognising the victims and giving state backing to the families who wished to open the ground. The forgetting had held for a generation. Then the grandchildren dug.

I place this story here because Spain is a warning to a country such as mine, and also a consolation. It is a warning, because it shows that a society can agree to forget and that the agreement can seem, for a while, to be a form of wisdom. It is a consolation, because it shows that the buried is never wholly buried, and that the dead will find the grandchildren.

Nigeria, too, made a pact of forgetting at the end of its civil war. It was proclaimed with a phrase that has been repeated for fifty years as though it were a verdict from heaven: no victor, no vanquished. General Gowon, who led the federal side, announced a programme of what came to be called the three Rs, reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction, and the world applauded a victor who had declined to be vengeful. There was no mass execution of the defeated. The leaders of Biafra were not put on trial in the manner that the leaders of defeated powers are put on trial elsewhere. I do not wish to deny this, and I do not forget the many Nigerians of other peoples who sheltered Igbo neighbours in the worst hours, as many did in 1966. The absence of a gallows is an achievement, and I would never want to be heard to say otherwise.

But I must say what the phrase hid. A nation that announces that there is no vanquished has also announced that the vanquished has nothing to claim. And the ledger of what the Igbo received in return for the peace, as the East remembers it, and as historians have set it down in outline, is not the ledger of a people who were treated as if nothing had been lost. Those who held savings in the banks of the East were paid, whatever the amount, a flat ex gratia sum of twenty pounds, so that the accumulated work of a lifetime, of a trader’s long years or a civil servant’s careful thrift, was reduced overnight to the same small coin as a pauper’s.

Property that Igbo families had owned and developed, in Port Harcourt and in other places beyond their home towns, was declared abandoned, and in many cases was never returned. Officers and civil servants who had served the federal government before the war were not restored to their positions in the same measure as their colleagues. These were not the acts of an army; they were the acts of administrators, carried out by decree, in the name of reconciliation.

That is what I mean by the ease of forgetting. It was easy, in the first place, because the people who had to be reconciled were exhausted. They had no strength to demand a reckoning, no leaders to lead one, and no institutions to receive it. It was easy because the world, with its attention elsewhere, looked away. And it was easy, above all, because the new republic found in forgetting a convenient method of government. If the war was not discussed, then no one was responsible for the pogroms that preceded it, for the blockade that was part of its conduct, or for the peace that followed. If the dead were not counted, then no one need answer for them.

There is a date in the calendar that I have already spoken of: 15 January, the day on which the war ended, which became the nation’s day of remembrance for its armed forces, in place, if I read the record rightly, of the earlier observance in November that was inherited from the British. I raise it again only to add one thought. A people who are given a national day for the soldiers of the war that devastated them, and none for their own dead, are being told, year after year and in the clearest of ceremonial language, whose death counts. The wreath at the cenotaph is for the uniform. The child who starved in the camp has no wreath.

I will not press this further without turning the lamp on my own people too. We Igbo have been, in our own way, poor keepers of our own dead. There is a war museum at Umuahia, and I salute it, but it is, as I know it, a house of weapons and relics and not a register of persons. Our great families have kept their grief at home. Our states have not built the archive. Our elites, who were so quick to rebuild houses and businesses after the war, were slower to build the record, and some of us, I confess, were quite happy to leave the dead to the churches and the age grades so that we might get on with the living. A people cannot expect the state to remember what it will not remember itself.

And here is the dialectic that I think the whole matter turns upon. A memory that the state refuses to hold does not vanish. It goes somewhere else. It passes into the hands of whoever will take it up. The refusal of the republic to mourn the Biafran dead did not cause the dead to be forgotten; it left the remembrance of them without an official keeper, and anyone who wished to make use of that remembrance, for good or ill, was free to do so. Some who have taken it up have done so with a grief that is pure. Others have done so for purposes that are less pure. And the state, having refused to hold the memory in the open, found itself unable to distinguish the mourner from the agitator, and so treated them all as the same. That is the cost of a pact of forgetting. It does not abolish memory. It abolishes the common ground on which memory could be shared.

XII. The War That Does Not End

Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union fought a war in Afghanistan, and for much of that time the Soviet public was told, in effect, that it was not happening. Young conscripts went out to a war that official newspapers described as fraternal help. And when they died, they came home in sealed zinc coffins, shipped quietly by night to their towns and villages under the bureaucratic code name Cargo 200. Their mothers were often told not to open the lids. In the early years, families were reportedly discouraged from putting the true place of death on the gravestone, and the funerals were hurried and small, so that a street might not learn how many of its sons had gone the same way. It took the journalist Svetlana Alexievich, years later, to gather the mothers and the survivors and let them speak, in a book called Zinky Boys, and the book, when it came, was met with fury by many who preferred the old silence.

As a student of history trained in Russia, I have long known that story, and I have found myself returning to it as I think of the northeast of my own country. A state that cannot bear to look at its dead will not look at them. It will dress the loss in euphemism. It will count what it can bear to count. And it will hope, with a patience that is truly terrible, that the nation grows tired before the truth grows loud.

The war in Borno State, and across the northeast, is now seventeen years old. It began in 2009 with the uprising of Boko Haram, and it has since passed through the rise of the Islamic State West Africa Province, the sacking of towns, the kidnapping of schoolchildren, the burning of villages and the displacement of millions. Nobody can say, with precision, how many Nigerians it has killed; the figures commonly offered by international bodies run into the tens of thousands, and the true figure may be higher. And in the course of it, a generation of Nigerian soldiers has gone to the front, some of them barely out of their teens, and many of them have not come back.

Consider how we learn of their deaths. In April this year, an army base at Benisheikh, some seventy-five kilometres from Maiduguri, came under overnight attack. A brigadier general, Oseni Omoh Braimah, was among the dead. One intelligence source told reporters that eighteen soldiers had been killed. The military declined to give a number and spoke only of a few brave and gallant soldiers. The President saluted their courage. And that, for the nation, was that. A general and, by one account, eighteen soldiers were lost in the dark, in a place most of us could not find on a map, and the grammar of the state’s response was one we have all learnt by heart: a statement, a salute, a refusal to give particulars, and a week later, a different headline.

I do not wish to be unjust to the commanders and the Presidency, who face a difficult enemy and who must, I understand, guard operational information. There are things an army cannot say in the middle of a campaign. But the guarding of operational secrets is one thing and the withholding of grief is quite another. Whatever the enemy knows about the loss of a base, the families of the dead know it first and best. They are the only ones kept uninformed. A mother in some village in the Middle Belt or the South-East whose son is at the front may learn, if she learns at all, from a whisper in a WhatsApp group, and she is told by no officer, in no letter, with no name, what happened to her child.

There is a deeper question, and it is the one that haunts me most: where do these dead finally go? When a Nigerian soldier falls in Borno, what is the final disposition of his memory? Who keeps his name? So far as I know, there is no public register in this republic of the soldiers who have fallen in the northeast, no wall, no standing book that any citizen can open and read. There are, I am told, the quiet burials in military cemeteries, the posthumous promotions, the benefits that arrive, when they arrive, with such delay that the widows have learnt to dread the bureaucracy more than the bereavement. There is the annual Remembrance Day. And beyond these, there is the fog. A war of seventeen years that has swallowed tens of thousands has left in our public life no memorial that I could point to and that the average citizen could name.

We are, let us remember, not old. Nigeria is sixty-six years from independence. A nation of that age is not an ancient thing with centuries of ritual to lean upon; it is still making its customs. That is, in a sense, a reason for hope, because customs that are not yet made can still be made well. But it is also the reason for urgency. The habits we are forming now, of the shrug and the statement, will harden into the national character if no one interrupts them. A young nation that learns to forget its dead early will not suddenly learn to remember them later.

The deepest dialectic of the northeastern war is the contradiction between the soldier as hero and the soldier as expendable. In speeches, the soldier is the nation’s finest son. In practice, he is a cost to be managed. The more the speeches soar, the more suspicious one should become, for rhetoric is often a payment made in the currency we can afford instead of the one we owe. A soldier does not need a speech. He needs a boot that fits, a rifle that fires, a ration that arrives, a medical evacuation that comes, a salary that is paid, a commander who has been given what he needs, and, if he dies, a country that says his name aloud and cares for his children. Give him all that, and the speeches may be as modest as they like.

XIII. The Villages That Burn

On the last day of May 1921, in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a white mob, many of them deputised and armed by local authorities, descended upon Greenwood, a prosperous Black district of the city that was known as Black Wall Street. Over the better part of a day they burned thirty-five blocks of homes, businesses, churches and a hospital. Many people were killed, by estimates ranging from several dozen to about three hundred, and thousands were left homeless. No one was convicted.

Insurance claims were denied. And then the city did something that I find, in some ways, even more shocking than the violence: it forgot on purpose. For decades the Tulsa massacre was scarcely mentioned in the schoolbooks or the newspapers of the state. It was a gap, a smoothed-over place in the civic memory. It was only at the end of the twentieth century, when a state commission was formed, and then in recent years when investigators began to search for mass graves, that Tulsa began to say aloud what had happened within living memory.

I begin with Tulsa because it names a double wound: the killing of a people and the killing of the memory of the killing. And I begin with it because it bears upon a matter that has produced, in this country, more rage than almost any other, and more silence from those who are supposed to answer it: the sacking of villages, across the Middle Belt, across parts of the South-East and the South-South, by armed men widely and commonly described in public speech as Fulani herdsmen.

I will be as exact as I can with the language, for this is a subject on which careless speech has already cost much blood. Most herders in Nigeria, of the Fulani and of other peoples, are not killers. They are poor and hardworking men who follow their cattle across a landscape that has been shrinking under their feet, and many of them, too, have lost herds and kin and homes to cattle rustlers and to reprisal. It is wrong to charge a whole people with the crimes of armed groups.

But it would be equally wrong, and an insult to the dead, to pretend that the groups do not exist or that they have not committed atrocities of a scale and a regularity that no country should tolerate. Amnesty International reported in May 2025 that more than ten thousand people had been killed in the first two years of the present administration, in violence concentrated in the north and the centre of the country, with Benue and Plateau among the worst hit. In Benue, it found, all twenty-three local government areas had been attacked, over two hundred villages sacked, and some four hundred and fifty thousand people displaced.

Think of the single night at Yelwata in June 2025. The governor of Benue State put the dead at fifty-nine; media accounts that compiled lists of victims put it at over a hundred; others, later, of about a hundred and fifty. Human Rights Watch recorded firsthand accounts that the attackers held the community under siege for more than two hours with little or no resistance from security forces. Notice the first symptom: the numbers do not agree, and the dead themselves, the poor farming families of a Benue village, are once again approximate. And notice what followed. When Human Rights Watch wrote about it a few days later, nobody had been arrested or prosecuted for any of the recent attacks in the state. I have seen one report since which says that nine persons were eventually charged. That is something. But we must ask how long the families had to wait for even that.

In the South-East, in the Ebonyi community of Nkalaha, in February 2025, suspected herdsmen killed at least fifteen villagers. The state’s governor called the attack worrisome and observed, with a candour that tells its own story, that it was not the first in the area. The deputy governor gave the security agencies twenty-four hours to name the attackers. In Enugu, in April 2016, gunmen had attacked the community of Nimbo, killing dozens. In the South-South, residents in a number of farming communities speak of the same pattern: the sudden appearance of armed men on the farms, the destroyed crops, the abandoned homes, the long walk to a camp, and the long silence from the capital.

What chills me, more than the blood, is the grammar of it. Read the reports. The killers are always unidentified armed assailants, suspected herdsmen, unknown gunmen, men suspected to be. The dead are, in their turn, reduced to at least this, about that, an estimated thus. Between the nameless killers and the numberless dead, there is a vast space of impunity, and in that space the state stands and issues a statement. A resident of an attacked community in Zamfara told Amnesty researchers, in words that deserve to be remembered, that the only relationship between his people and the government was that it issued media statements after they were attacked and killed. A citizen could hardly pass a more devastating verdict on a government.

And the statement itself has become a genre. Condemnation. Sympathy. Assurance that security agencies have been directed to track down the perpetrators. Appeal for calm. A visit, perhaps, a few days later, by an official in a helicopter. Then the movement of the news to the next catastrophe, and with it the movement of the state. This is not governance. It is the choreography of its absence.

I note a further tragedy, which is that this coldness has bred a poisonous mathematics in the minds of the grieving. Where the state will not name the killers, the people name them for themselves, and they name them by tribe and by faith. It is the inevitable result of institutional silence. When the state does not do justice, communities do arithmetic, and the arithmetic of grievance has consumed other nations before ours. The restoration of public trust, and the protection of the many peaceable Fulani citizens who are themselves exposed to reprisal and suspicion, both depend on the same thing: a state that investigates, arrests, prosecutes and names, in public, the guilty and the dead alike.

XIV. When the State Is the Killer

On 10 June 1942, German forces entered the Czech village of Lidice. It had been marked for destruction, in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, with which it had, in fact, no proven connection. The men were rounded up and shot, a hundred and seventy-three of them. The women were sent to a concentration camp. Many of the children were taken away. The houses were burnt and razed, the ruins levelled, even the graveyard dug up, so that nothing would remain. The Nazis had wanted Lidice to vanish from the earth and from memory. They failed in a way that remains instructive: the destruction of the village became one of the most widely remembered crimes of the war. Towns across the world took its name, in Mexico, in Brazil, in the United States, so that the word Lidice would be spoken again and again. After the war a new village was built beside the site and a memorial garden was made at the old one.

I do not compare the crimes of regimes; each has its own horror. What I draw from Lidice is a pattern, and a lesson. The pattern is collective punishment: the idea that when a few commit a crime, a whole community may be made to pay, in lives and in homes. The lesson is that memory, if it is organised, can outlast even the most determined erasure.

Odi, in Bayelsa State, in the Niger Delta, is where our own country met the pattern. In November 1999, a few months into the return to civilian rule, a gang killed twelve policemen in the area, seven of them on 4 November. That was a heinous crime, and the families of those policemen are owed justice, too. But the response of the state, on 20 November, was to send in the army against the town. Nearly every building was destroyed; reports say that only a bank, a church and a health centre were left standing. The government at first spoke of forty-three dead, among them eight soldiers. Human Rights Watch concluded that soldiers had certainly killed tens of unarmed civilians and that a figure of several hundred dead was entirely possible, and a Niger Delta rights group claimed nearly two and a half thousand. This was done under the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, a former general and a man whose later reputation was built on democratic restoration. I know of no apology.

The tail of the story is telling. In February 2013, more than thirteen years later, a Federal High Court in Port Harcourt ordered the Federal Government to pay N37.6 billion in damages to the people of Odi, condemning the massacre as a violation of the fundamental human rights of the people of Odi. In the following year, the government reportedly settled for a fraction, N15 billion, and the money triggered bitter disputes within the community, as such windfalls do, including, by one account, the kidnap of the chairman of the committee set up to handle it. Look at what the state did here. It took the form of justice, a judgment and a payment, and used it as a way of closing the question without answering it. I have found no public inquiry into who gave the order and no trial of an officer. There was money, and a lot of quarrelling about the money. The state purchased silence at a discount.

The same pattern recurs elsewhere in the memory of the republic. In October 2001, in the Benue communities around Zaki-Biam, after the killing of soldiers by a local militia, the army carried out reprisals in which, according to Human Rights Watch, more than two hundred unarmed civilians were killed. In Tudun Biri, in December 2023, a military drone fell upon the faithful. In Rann, in 2017, an Air Force jet struck the displaced. In Lekki, in 2020, the soldiers fired on the protesters. Every one of these events has the same anatomy: an act of the state’s own forces, a flat initial denial or a muffled admission of error, a promise of investigation, a quiet suspension of inquiry, and an absence of anyone, officer or politician, who has paid a visible personal price.

The dialectic here is the sharpest in the whole essay. A state exists to protect its citizens from violence. When the state itself becomes the author of the violence, it cannot be both the judge and the accused. And yet, in the Nigerian practice, the military investigates the military, the executive reviews the executive, and the verdict, when there is one, arrives long after the witnesses have grown old. A republic that wishes to be believed must submit its own use of force to an examination it does not control: independent, civilian, public, and empowered to name names. We have not built such a thing, and in its absence the dead of the state’s own mistakes do not even have the dignity of being counted as victims; they are counted, at best, as collateral.

XV. The Dance of the Python

On 21 March 1960, in the township of Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, a crowd of several thousand Black South Africans gathered outside the police station to protest against the pass laws, which controlled where they might live and work. They were unarmed, and many were singing. The police opened fire, and in the confusion that followed sixty-nine people were killed, many of them shot as they ran. The apartheid government spoke at once of a mob, of agitators, of a crowd that had threatened the police. For as long as apartheid lasted, the dead of Sharpeville were, in the official account, the casualties of their own disorder. But then the order changed, and the new South Africa took the date of the massacre and made it a public holiday, Human Rights Day, which the whole country observes on 21 March. The people the state had tagged as a threat became the people in whose name the nation takes a day of rest.

I tell that story because it shows what a country can do with a massacre when it is ready to look at it. And I tell it because I want to speak now of a long season of killing in the South-East of Nigeria, in which a people who had been tagged in advance were met with the army, and of the question of whether we are ready, as South Africa was, to look.

Let me begin with the facts as the investigators have recorded them, and let me keep to what is recorded. In October 2015 Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, a group that had grown quickly on the strength of a radio station broadcast from abroad and the grievances of a people who feel shut out of the country, was arrested. Between August 2015 and August 2016, Amnesty International investigated the response of the security forces to the protests that his detention provoked.

Its report, which carried as its title the words of a witness, Bullets Were Raining Everywhere, concluded that at least a hundred and fifty pro-Biafra protesters had been killed in that period, and that about sixty of the deaths had occurred on and around 30 May 2016, when many had gathered in Onitsha and elsewhere to mark the anniversary of the declaration of Biafra in 1967. The army rejected the findings. I wish the reader to hold one thing in mind. Many of the people who were shot that May were gathered on a day they keep for the remembrance of the dead of the war, a thing the republic had never found a way to do for them. They were killed, in other words, in the act of mourning.

Then came the dances. In the last weeks of 2016 the Nigerian Army launched a military exercise in the South-East that it called Operation Python Dance. In September 2017 there was a second, Python Dance II. The names themselves deserve a moment of attention. The army of a republic that had never mourned the dead of the East chose to name its operations in the East after a dance and a reptile. I do not suppose any of those who gave the names meant to wound. That is the point. Those who name an operation after a dance are not thinking of the families who will have to live with it.

The recorded events of September 2017 are these. Amnesty records a military invasion of the home of Nnamdi Kanu, in the compound at Afara-Ukwu near Umuahia, on 10 September, and in the days that followed there were confrontations between troops and members of the movement in Abia State. IPOB alleged that fifteen of its members had been shot dead by soldiers at a checkpoint at Isiala Ngwa on 12 September, with more than twenty wounded. The army has denied that it besieged Kanu’s home. The figures are contested, and they will remain contested, because nothing in the history of the matter suggests that the state has ever tried to establish them. Contested figures are what a state leaves behind when it declines to count.

On the same day, 12 September, more than twenty soldiers from the operation’s convoy broke into the office of the Nigeria Union of Journalists in Abia State, beat the reporters who were there, smashed their phones and held them for some minutes, accusing them of writing stories against the army. A brigadier general later visited the union’s office to apologise and described the conduct of his own men as a disaster of unimaginable proportion. I would ask the reader to look at what that incident discloses. Soldiers who are at ease, who are confident that what they are doing is lawful and honourable, do not break the cameras and telephones of the witnesses. The assault on the journalists suggests that those who did it knew there was something they would not want seen. In the same days, the governor of Abia State declared a three-day curfew in the commercial city of Aba.

Within days came the tag that did what the bullets could not. On 15 September the army declared IPOB a terrorist organisation. On 20 September 2017 a judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, on an application of the Attorney-General of the Federation, made an order proscribing the movement and declaring its activities acts of terrorism. The order was made, as I understand it, in chambers, on an ex parte motion in which the movement was the only named respondent, which is to say that a people’s organisation was banned without being heard.

An appeal court has since upheld the proscription, in January 2025. I am not a lawyer, and I do not set my judgement against that of the courts. But I am an essayist, and I am entitled to observe what the order did in the world. It turned a movement of grievance, of which the bulk of the participants were young and unarmed, into a thing that could be killed in law. After 2017, to be associated with the cause was to be, in the eyes of the state, a terrorist, and a terrorist is a person whose death calls for no explanation.

I want to say this clearly, so that I am not misread. I do not defend armed attacks on police stations, on prisons or on the people of the East. By the record, the military wing of IPOB, the Eastern Security Network, established in December 2020, has been accused of killings and abductions. The sit-at-home orders that began in August 2021, in protest at Kanu’s rendition from Kenya, were enforced with violence and have, by many accounts, cost the poor of the East, the traders and the okada riders and the daily-paid, their daily bread, so that those who claim to speak for the Igbo have in practice inflicted heavy losses on the Igbo.

Amnesty has observed, in its report of August 2025, that the so-called unknown gunmen who terrorise the South-East are in many cases known persons in their communities. Traditional rulers have been killed. Mass graves have been found, one of them, in December 2024, at Aku in Okigwe, in Imo State, where the security task force said it had uncovered the burial place of victims of the militants. Those crimes are crimes, and their victims are among the unsung whom this essay exists to name.

But the security forces also have a record, and it is a record that does not improve with the passing of the years. In the four months from March to June 2021, Amnesty documented the killing of at least a hundred and fifteen people by security forces in the South-East, mainly in Imo, Anambra, Abia and Ebonyi. More than five hundred people were arrested, most of them seized at random from streets and from their homes with no apparent connection to any militant group, and the organisation recorded sixty-two cases of arbitrary arrest, torture and ill-treatment. Some of the people seized were reportedly singled out by tattoos and birthmarks.

Houses were burnt. Air strikes were reported on communities in Orlu and Orsu in February 2021 and, later, in other communities in Imo and in Ihiala. Amnesty’s latest report that I have read, published in August 2025, with the title Attacks and Unlawful Killings in South-East Nigeria: A Decade of Impunity, counts 1,844 people killed between January 2021 and June 2023 alone, by all parties, and names the military operations that have followed one after another: Python Dance in 2016, Python Dance II in 2017, and in October 2023 an operation named Udo Ka, a name that speaks of peace. Its complaint is written into its title, a decade of impunity, and it calls for investigations and prosecutions that have not followed.

I would ask the reader to hold the sheer arithmetic of this in mind. It is a decade. It is thousands. Among the dead and the detained, careful investigators have found many who held no weapon, were part of no movement and had been in no place of any significance except the wrong one. Each of them was somebody’s child. And yet, on the record I have seen, the Federal Republic has not once, in all this time, summoned the nation to a day of mourning for the dead of the South-East, nor set up an inquiry with the power to name them, nor stood before the families to say that a wrong has been done. The army has returned to the South-East more than once, under more than one name, and each time the same grievance has met the same boots.

Behind all this is a more elementary failure, and it is the one that interests me most. The young people who were killed or jailed were making, in their own way, a political argument. Whatever one thinks of the slogan, whatever one thinks of secession, which I do not argue for here, the argument was a real one. It said that the Igbo, who were hunted in 1966 and who lost most in the war, have been kept ever since at the margins of the republic they helped to build, and it said that no one in authority wished to hear it. The state answered that argument by banning it and by sending soldiers. There are two ways to defeat an argument. One is to refute it. The other is to bury it, and the burying of an argument is always done, in the end, with the bodies of the young.

If we had a functional state, most of this would have been avoidable, and I wish to say how. A functional state would have heard the grievance, as a political matter, at the political table, before it became a street. A functional state would have policed protests with the police, trained and equipped for the purpose, and would not have sent soldiers to do the work of constables. A functional state would have charged those accused of crimes, in open court, and would have tried them, and punished the guilty and freed the innocent. A functional state would have counted every death in the first thirty days and published the count. And a functional state, having failed in all of these and having killed in error, would have found it a matter of ordinary honour to say so, to the families, in public. None of this requires genius. It requires a state that believes that its young are its own.

XVI. The Tag Before the Bullet

On 30 January 1972, in the Bogside district of Derry in Northern Ireland, British paratroopers opened fire on a civil rights march. Thirteen people were killed on the day, and a fourteenth died later of his wounds. Most of the dead were young men, and several were teenagers. The army’s first account was that its soldiers had fired on gunmen and nail-bombers, and the tribunal that the British government quickly appointed under Lord Widgery, which reported within three months, largely cleared the soldiers.

So the dead entered the record as men who had it coming. Their families carried that tag for decades, and went on carrying it, while they marched and lobbied and wrote, until a second inquiry, under Lord Saville, which took twelve years from its creation to its report in June 2010, found that none of those shot had posed a threat of causing death or serious injury. The Prime Minister of the day rose in the House of Commons and called the killings unjustified and unjustifiable, and said the word that had been owed for thirty-eight years: it was wrong. Those who had been labelled were innocent, and the label had been the first thing that was killed in them.

I tell this story because of what it says about the order of events in such matters. We tend to think that people are killed, and then, afterwards, they are described. In truth the sequence is often the other way round. The description comes first. A category is made, a name is attached to a class of persons, the name becomes a warrant, and then the killing is merely the carrying out of what has already been decided in language. The tag is the first bullet. It has been fired long before the soldier raises his weapon.

I have listed in this essay the many kinds of death that Nigeria does not mourn, and I have said that behind them all lies a common mechanism, the inability to see the dead as ours. Here I want to name the mechanism in its working form. It is the tag. And Nigeria, I am afraid, is a nation of tags.

Consider how many we have. A young Igbo man who is arrested in the street may be called a Biafran, and the word is meant to close the matter. A boy from the creeks of the Niger Delta may be a militant, a young man in a northern city a miscreant, an almajiri, a Boko Haram suspect, a child at a roadside a bandit’s scout. In the cities, a young man with a laptop, a phone, dreadlocks or a tattoo has been, for years, a presumed fraudster, so that the youth of the country came to fear the very police who were supposed to protect them, and in October 2020 the young people of Nigeria rose to say so, and were answered, at the Lekki toll gate, with bullets, and afterwards with the language of hoodlums. Gunmen who kill and are not found are called, with a coolness that I find almost unbearable, unknown, so that the state’s own ignorance becomes the name of the criminal. Villagers who are burnt in their beds are labelled the casualties of a clash. The poor who die on bad roads, in bad hospitals, in the rain, are labelled accidents.

The tag does its work in three stages. First, it removes the person’s claim to be heard. A young man who is called a terrorist, or a miscreant, or a hoodlum, cannot give evidence on his own behalf, because the word has told us who he is. Second, it removes the claim on our grief. Earlier, in speaking of citizens who die without ceremony, I borrowed from the philosopher Judith Butler the idea of a grievable life. The tag is the very instrument by which a life is made ungrievable. A mother cannot properly weep, in public, for a child who has been called a criminal, because the public has been taught that his death is a kind of arithmetic that comes out right. And third, it removes the claim on memory. The labelled dead are not entered in any register, because a register is a roll of persons, and the tagged are not allowed to be persons.

Nigerians have seen this pattern before, at the highest level. In May 1994, four Ogoni chiefs were murdered, and the military government of the day blamed Ken Saro-Wiwa and the movement that he led. After a trial before a special tribunal that drew condemnation around the world, and after two witnesses had said in later statements that they had been bribed with money and the promise of jobs to give false evidence, Saro-Wiwa and eight others were hanged in Port Harcourt on 10 November 1995.

They had been tagged as murderers, and the tag did its work. Many of the young may not recall how the world recoiled that November. Thirty years afterwards, in June 2025, the Federal Government announced a pardon for the nine. I record it, and I do not mock it. But many Ogoni, as I read them, have said that what the dead are owed is not pardon but exoneration, and the distinction is the whole matter. One pardons a person who has done wrong. To pardon the innocent is to leave the tag on the stone.

There is one more thing to say about the tag, and I must say it against my own. The habit is not the exclusive possession of the state. Among our people, in the politics of the cause, there is a ready use of the same instrument against Igbo who disagree, who are called saboteurs, or traitors, or the attack dogs of the oppressor, and some of those so named, I am told, have paid with their lives. The same logic that destroys the youth of the East at the hands of the army is turned, by others, on the elders and the dissenters. A people cannot ask the state for the dignity of the untagged while distributing the tags of its own. If we want the right to be heard, we must give it.

And I would say a word to the many thousands, perhaps millions, of Nigerians who live under tags of another kind. I mean the families who are said to be backward, the villages said to be violent, the whole peoples portrayed in the press, in the pulpit and in the lazy analysis of the political class as a problem, a threat, a thing to be managed. Portrait by portrait, careless analysis by careless analysis, they are prepared for the day when the portrait justifies what is done to them. It is the work of the writer, the scholar, the editor and the commentator, and I count myself among them, to understand that every irresponsible sentence is a possible licence. We have to think, when we describe a people, that the description may one day be used to decide who may be mourned.

What would it mean to look this squarely in the face, as I think we must? It would mean, first, a public, independent inquiry into the killings in the South-East since 2015, with powers to summon the military and the police as well as the militants, to name the dead, to hear the families in the open, and to publish what it finds without waiting for the permission of those it investigates.

It would mean separating the crime from the cause: trying those who have killed, whether in uniform or out of it, in courts with the doors open, and refusing to let the word terrorist stand in for a verdict. It would mean the release of bodies to families, an accounting for the missing, and compensation, as the Odi award was meant to be, that is actually paid. And it would mean the thing that costs the least and is hardest to give: someone in authority standing before the mothers of the East, and saying, in the plain words that the British Prime Minister found for the families of Derry, that it was wrong.

I do not think this is an impossible demand. I think it is a demand that a country makes of itself when it wants to be a country. A state that can look at what it has done, and weep, and amend, is a state that has begun to deserve the loyalty of those it governs. A state that cannot do so will continue, however many flags it lowers, to produce the one commodity in which it is already rich, which is the family that has been left to mourn alone.

XVII. The Quiet Killers

In the late summer of 1854, a cholera outbreak struck the Soho district of London. Within about ten days, more than five hundred people died in a few streets. The prevailing medical wisdom held that cholera was spread by bad air. A physician named John Snow doubted it. He did something both humble and revolutionary: he went from door to door, and he counted. He marked each death on a map of the neighbourhood, and the dots clustered around a single water pump on Broad Street.

He laid his findings before the parish guardians and persuaded them to remove the handle of the pump. The outbreak, already waning, ended. What matters for our purposes is not merely that he was right. It is that he treated the deaths of poor people as data worth gathering, and he trusted that if the dead were counted and mapped, the cause could be found and the cause could be stopped.

There is, in our country, a category of death that has never been given the honour of a map. These are the quiet killers: the deaths that come not in a single dramatic night but in the slow, unnoticed drip of daily life, from causes that everyone can see and no one is made to answer for.

Begin with the road. It is often said, and it is repeated in many quarters, that road accidents in Nigeria kill more people in a year than violent crime does. The truth, when one looks into it, is more complicated, and in some ways more damning. The Federal Road Safety Corps reported 5,421 road deaths in 2024 and, for 2025, a figure of 5,289, from over ten thousand crashes. By that official count, the roads kill about as many Nigerians in a year as Amnesty International says were killed in the violence of the north and centre, which it put at a little over ten thousand across two years.

But the World Health Organization, using wider methods, estimated 36,722 road deaths in Nigeria for the year 2021, about six times the number that Nigeria itself reported to the World Health Organization for that year. The gap exists because our own records capture only what officers see at the scene, and because, as the Corps itself concedes, many crashes in the congested cities and the quiet rural roads go unreported. If the WHO is anywhere near right, the road is by a large margin the deadliest thing a Nigerian meets in his daily life, deadlier than the gunman, deadlier than the bomb.

It is fair to say, as the official causes do, that speeding and defective vehicles figure largely: the Corps’s own figures attribute nearly half of crashes in one quarter of 2024 to speeding. But the road is not a laboratory in which the driver is the only variable. A speeding car on a smooth, lit, divided highway is not the same hazard as a speeding car on a road that is cratered with potholes, unlit, unmarked, without a barrier or a shoulder, with a collapsed bridge at its end and no ambulance within two hours. A country decides, by its budgets and its contracts, how survivable its mistakes are. Every Nigerian knows the stretch of road that has been under repair for years, the contract awarded and mobilised and abandoned, the minister who tours it for the cameras, the contractor who is seldom, if ever, held to account. That is not an accident; it is a system in which the deaths are the unpriced cost of the profits.

Turn then to the hospital. The World Health Organization and its partners, in estimates published in April 2025, put Nigeria’s maternal deaths in 2023 at about seventy-five thousand, more than a quarter of all maternal deaths on earth, from a country that holds a much smaller fraction of the world’s women. Think of what that means: a woman, in the prime of her life, goes to bring forth a child and does not come home.

Her husband is left with a newborn and a burial. Her older children are left without a mother. Seventy-five thousand, in a year, is roughly two hundred every single day. Here is the death in the hospital corridor where the doctor has emigrated, the theatre where the generator has failed, the clinic that has been promised and never equipped, the road too bad and too dangerous to reach the clinic at all. These are not the acts of enemies. They are the acts of an unresourced system, and, like the road, they are the work of choices made in budget rooms by people who will never need to use the ward.

And add to these the death in the street: the armed robbery on the lonely road, the stray bullet, the kidnap that ends at a roadside. The man who is killed for a phone, or a motorcycle, or the cash he drew for his child’s school fees, and is buried by a few relatives, unreported in any newspaper but the village’s own memory.

There is a name, coined by the scholar Rob Nixon, for violence of this kind. He calls it slow violence, the violence that is gradual and out of sight, that is delayed in its destruction, and that is typically not viewed as violence at all. It is the great problem of mourning. A nation can summon its emotions for an aircraft that falls from the sky, because the aircraft has a single moment and a single image and a list of names. It struggles to summon them for the thousands who die one at a time on a Tuesday afternoon, in ordinary places, for ordinary causes. Yet it is the second kind of death that is the main business of Nigerian mortality.

That is why the three-day mourning proclaimed this week strikes so many of us as a sham, and I understand the anger in the word. I would put it this way: it is not that the grief is false. The grief, in the families, is as true as grief can be. It is that the proclamation measures mourning by the clock and not by the deed. Do the arithmetic that the proclamation invites. By the Federal Road Safety Corps’s own count, about fourteen or fifteen people die on our roads every day, so that across the three days of national mourning some forty-odd Nigerians will have died on the roads, if the averages hold.

By the World Health Organization’s estimate, it would be about three hundred. By the figures for maternal deaths, over six hundred women will die in childbirth in those same three days. And by Amnesty’s figures, about forty-two people will fall to violence. Not one of them will be named at a register in Abuja. A country that mourned each of its preventable dead for three days would never leave off mourning. And that is exactly the point: a nation in permanent mourning should long ago have become a nation in permanent repair.

XVIII. The Families Left Behind

In the winter of 431 to 430 BC, at the end of the first year of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenians held a public funeral. Thucydides describes it with the care of a man who understood that how a city buries its dead is a statement of what the city is. The bones of the fallen were laid out in a tent for three days, so that families might bring their offerings. Then they were carried in cypress coffins on carts, one coffin for each of the ten tribes of Athens, and one further bier was carried empty, draped and decked, for the missing, those whose bodies could not be found. Whoever wished, citizen or stranger, might join the procession, and the women of the families stood at the grave and wailed.

The dead were buried at public expense in the fairest suburb of the city. And then Pericles rose, and in the great oration that has come down to us he did something that I have never forgotten. He turned to the families, to the parents, the widows and the children of the dead, and he spoke to them directly, consoling, but also promising. The city, he said, would bring up the sons of the fallen at public expense until they were grown. That was the reward the state set before the dead and their families alike, and it was a promise a city could keep.

I want to dwell on the empty bier. It is perhaps the finest idea in the whole of Greek civic ritual. A city honoured not only the dead it could bury but the dead it could not find. It made room in the procession for absence itself.

From an aircraft that struck a swamp near a naval base in the creeks of Ilaje, there will be remains to recover, and the recovery will take place in difficult terrain. The Air Force has said that no survivors have been found, and that search-and-rescue operations were activated in coordination with other authorities. The National Emergency Management Agency was reported to have mobilised a team. Families in Abuja, in Lagos, in Benin and in a dozen villages have begun, by now, the cruellest chore of the bereaved: the wait. The wait for confirmation. The wait for remains. The wait, if the remains are not whole, for identification. The wait for a body to be released that can be lowered into a grave in the village where the dead person’s grandmother is buried, because for most of us in Nigeria a death without a burial at home is a death unfinished. These are not secondary matters. For the families, they are the whole of the tragedy.

Reports from the scene sharpen the point. The first rescuers, residents told Vanguard, were their neighbours in canoes, women and men who crossed the water quickly, only to find the aircraft too deeply buried in the swamp to save anyone; naval officers and police followed by speedboat. Divers from the police and the Navy, with the emergency agency and local volunteers, have worked in water the governor estimated at about thirty metres deep. Swamp buggies were brought in, and clothing, fragments and remains were recovered, while the main body of the wreck is reported to lie submerged, with a sonar survey of the swamp bed under way or planned. Jet fuel is said to have fouled the water.

A resident spoke to the Tribune of a noise like thunder and of remains and belongings scattered over ground and water, while the traditional ruler of Igbokoda, the Olu, Oba Afolabi Odidiomo, said the aircraft did not catch fire. Here is the gap that will test the state’s honesty: the distance between a recovery and an identification. A family told that remains have been recovered will ask which, and whose, and when they may bury them. That question deserves a named officer, a timetable and a straight answer, in that order.

Nigerian families know what follows because they have lived it, and my purpose here is to ask what the state owes them, so that the families of the Ondo dead may be spared what others have endured. The state owes, first, information, which must reach the families before the press, in person, with a named officer assigned to each household. It owes the dignified return of remains, with the cost borne by the state and not by the bereaved. It owes prompt and fair compensation, determined by law and not by the mood of an official, and it owes this equally to the families of the civilians, whose claim is no weaker than that of the uniformed. It owes support for the widows, in the form of benefits that arrive without a petition, and for the orphans, in the form of schooling guaranteed until they are grown. It owes, in a word, what Pericles promised.

The Vice-President, Kashim Shettima, has said that the government will stand with the families “beyond these days of mourning.” That is the sentence to hold him to. Three days are easy. The test comes in the third year, when the cameras have gone, the widow’s file is lost between two offices, and a child’s school fees fall due.

The experience of the country, I am afraid, is of a different order. We have heard of next of kin turned away from offices for months on end. We have heard of the benefits of the fallen entangled in processes that exhaust the widow before they enrich her. I am told that when aircraft have fallen in the past, families have struggled to learn what was happening to remains and to recover them, and many have had to take on the airline, the regulator or the state in order to be paid what the law required. Retired servicemen and policemen, who risked their lives for this country, have been reduced to marching against the arrears of their own pensions. A woman who lost her husband to the service of the nation may spend years pursuing a gratuity as if it were a favour.

Here another dialectic opens, between the dead and the living. The state is generous, in its rhetoric, towards the dead, who can no longer ask for anything. It is parsimonious towards the living, who can. Everything about the way we mourn favours the dead, who are safe: the eulogy, the posthumous promotion, the street renamed in their honour. Everything about the way we administer favours the state against the living survivors, who are inconvenient. There is a cynical arithmetic in this, since praise costs nothing and compensation costs money. A country wishing to know whether its mourning is honest has only to ask how much of its public eulogy is converted, within a year, into a payment made, a school fee covered, a roof repaired.

XIX. The Hypocrisy of the Oration

In November 1864, a letter went out over the signature of Abraham Lincoln to a Mrs Lydia Bixby of Boston, who, the Massachusetts authorities had told the President, had lost five sons in the war. It is one of the most celebrated letters in the English language. It speaks of the solemn pride that must be hers in having laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom, and generations of schoolchildren have been taught it as a model of consolation. But the story of the letter is stranger and sadder than its reputation.

Historians have long doubted that Lincoln wrote it; the style, some think, belongs to his secretary, John Hay. And later research suggests that the facts on which it rested were wrong. It appears that perhaps only two of Mrs Bixby’s sons had died in the war; of the others, one had been honourably discharged, one had deserted, and the fate of another is unclear. The most eloquent condolence of a great state was addressed to a woman whose records the state had not got right.

I do not offer this story to ridicule the dead, or Lincoln, or grief. I offer it because it holds, in miniature, the whole problem of official eloquence. The words were beautiful. The paperwork was a mess. And we have inherited, in every political tradition, the temptation to believe that the first can substitute for the second.

Let me speak now about hypocrisy, since the word has been circling this entire essay. There is a kind of hypocrisy that is consciously deceitful, and I do not charge anyone with it in the matter of this week’s deaths. Many of the officials who have spoken probably felt exactly what they said. I have no doubt that the Chief of the Air Staff is troubled. The deeper hypocrisy is structural, and it does not require anyone to be insincere. It is the hypocrisy of a system in which the people who command the grief are not the people who bear the risk.

Consider who flies on aircraft like the one that fell. Consider who sits in the seats of a transport plane crossing the creeks from Benin to Lagos on a routine morning. It is, largely, the junior airman, the technician, the sergeant, the soldier’s wife, the family member of a corporal, the person for whom no private jet is available and no chartered convoy awaits. Consider, now, who stands at the microphones the next day to speak of the nation’s debt. Almost never is it a person whose own family depends on those aircraft.

There is a class in Nigeria that has, over decades, arranged for its own safety on the road, in the air and in the hospital with an efficiency it has never extended to the rest of us. When its members are ill, they often travel abroad. When they travel at home, they are escorted. The risk that the nation’s ordinary servants bear is a risk that their commanders and political masters have, in large part, bought their way out of.

That is the hypocrisy I mean. It is not that the oration is false, but that the orator is exempt. A leader who rides a safe aircraft, in a protected convoy, into a hospital he can leave the country to reach, cannot truly feel what it is to depend on the machines of the state. This explains, I think, why those machines have been so poorly attended to. A system in which the people responsible for maintaining, funding and replacing equipment will never personally ride in it is a system in which the incentives to vigilance are weakest exactly where the stakes are highest.

The week has supplied a set of figures to place beside the argument, though they come from an opposition party and must be weighed as such. The African Democratic Congress, citing official budget data to December 2025, said that of the 34.71 billion naira budgeted for Air Force aircraft maintenance only a small fraction, which it put at about 14 per cent, had been released, while the Presidential Air Fleet had received 20.27 billion of the 20.74 billion allocated, nearly 98 per cent. Its national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, wrote: “Patriotism does not replace spare parts, and condolence messages do not take the place of accountability.”

I cannot audit those numbers from here, and the party says it does not wish to prejudice the inquiry. But they describe, if they are right, the exact arithmetic of exemption: the fleet that carries the powerful is paid for, and the fleet that carries everyone else is honoured. An audit of releases is cheap, and its result should be published whatever it shows.

I would put it as a test, and I would put it to every officeholder in the republic: would you place your own child in that seat? If the answer is no, then the speech you give about the sacrifice of those who did is a speech that should be delivered in a lower voice.

There is, however, another side to the dialectic, and fairness requires me to state it. It is easy to blame leaders for failures that are in part the failures of all of us. A state is the aggregate of its citizens’ habits, and a nation that does not demand accountability will not receive it. We are a people of the funeral and the thanksgiving service, of the grand burial and the loud eulogy.

We spend extravagantly on the farewell and meagrely on the prevention. We hire the biggest canopy and buy the best aso-ebi for a death that proper care might have forestalled, and then we call the loss the will of God. I say this as a person of faith, a Christian whose belief has been enriched by the long patience of the Stoics. I know that there is a kind of acceptance that is wisdom and a kind that is abdication. The Stoic accepts what he cannot change; he does not call the changeable unchangeable. To tell the bereaved that an avoidable loss was simply God’s will is to hand the guilty a pardon in the name of heaven.

The hypocrisy of leaders and the fatalism of the led feed one another. The leaders, knowing that we will submit, grow bolder in their neglect. We, hearing the leaders’ solemn words, grow more willing to submit. Between the two, the dead pile up in silence and a country called the giant of Africa remains a giant of forgetting.

XX. How the Unsung Are Remembered

In July 1995, in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, which had been declared a United Nations safe area, units of the Bosnian Serb army separated and killed more than eight thousand Muslim men and boys. The killers then did what such killers do: they tried to hide the evidence. The bodies were dug up from the first mass graves with bulldozers and scattered into secondary and tertiary graves, so that no single grave would show the scale of the crime. What happened next is one of the most patient acts of remembrance in modern history.

Forensic teams began to recover the bones, often a single bone at a time, and an international commission on missing persons used DNA to match them, one by one, to the blood of surviving relatives. Every year since, on 11 July, the newly identified victims are buried at the memorial centre at Potocari, in rows of white markers that grow longer with each commemoration. The dead of Srebrenica were meant to vanish without a name. They are being returned to their names, slowly, at the pace of science and of love.

I place that story here because it answers the question that has weighed on me through the writing of this essay: how do we remember the unsung, the unknown, those whose names are on no official list and whose lives are carried only in the hearts of those who bore the loss? Srebrenica says the answer is not a miracle but a method. It is done by counting, by naming, by patient return, and by an insistence that no one is too poor, too remote or too late to be found.

Let me say, therefore, how it might be done here, for it must be done in a Nigerian way, using Nigerian materials.

We must begin with the count. The first failure of the Nigerian state with regard to the unsung is that it does not know, and has not seriously tried to know, how many they are. The tallies we rely on come from outside the government: from international human rights organisations, from research projects that scan the press, from journalists who keep their own records, from local church and mosque and village registers. These efforts are heroic, and they should be honoured and funded and given legal status as inputs to an official record. A republic that cannot say how many of its people were killed in a year has no standing to say it is protecting them.

We must go on to the name. In every community that has been attacked, there are people who know who is missing: the village head, the pastor, the imam, the women’s association, the age grade, the umunna, the family elders. They hold the names. They need only a mandate, a modest budget and a protected place to put the names down. Let each local government keep a register of its dead by violence, by accident and by neglect, kept by a clerk and opened to every family, with each name entered once and never removed. It is not an expensive thing. It is a book, a pen, and a decision.

Mr Ejiofor’s remarks on the Owo operation point in the same direction. He praised the cooperation of the Department of State Services, the army and Amotekun, observed that forest guards lack the capacity for such work, and argued for state policing. State police has serious critics in a country of weak institutions, and they deserve a hearing as much as its advocates do. But the underlying observation stands: those who know a place, its tracks and its people, are those who live in it, and a register of the dead, like an early warning, is a local instrument. A nation that means to count and name its unsung must equip those nearest to them, and must also bind them with law, so that local knowledge does not become local score-settling, as the tagging of the young in the South-East has shown.

We must remember in the way our own cultures have always done. Among many of our peoples, a death without rites is an unfinished death, and a person who is not properly mourned is thought to linger. This is not superstition to be corrected; it is a profound statement about the human need for completion. The state need not perform our rites, but it can help create the conditions in which the rites can be held: it can recover and return remains, pay for burials, protect funeral gatherings and grant displaced families the right to bury their dead at home. Our praise-singers, our age grades, our title societies, our churches and mosques already know how to keep names alive in song and recitation. We have the genius for it. We have only not asked the genius to be applied to those who have died in ordinary places.

We must give the nation a day. Not three days announced after a single catastrophe, but one fixed date every year, set by law, on which the whole country remembers every Nigerian who has died before his time, by violence, by accident, by neglect, in uniform or out of it. On that day the names collected in the local registers would be read in the schools, the churches, the mosques and the town halls. The national flag would be lowered not for a general but for a farmer and a nurse and a bus driver. I would not make it a holiday of ease but a holiday of conscience.

And we must write. This is the portion that falls to people like me. It is a duty of the writer, the essayist, the historian and the poet to carry what the state will not. Every society that has survived its atrocities did so partly through the stubbornness of those who would not let the stories die: the Soviet mothers who spoke to a journalist, the Argentine mothers who walked, the Bosnian women who counted bones. Our own tradition of the written word, from the press of the nationalist era to the memoirs of the civil war, is a rich one, and it must continue to hold the state in its eye. What the official register omits, the essay can remember, and what the commission shelves, the book can lift down.

XXI. Towards a Remembering Republic

In December 1992, a German artist named Gunter Demnig laid the first of his small brass plates in the pavement of Cologne, each the size of a cobblestone, and from 1995 he began to set them in numbers. Each bore a name and a few dates, and each was placed in front of the last freely chosen home of someone the Nazis had murdered or driven away: a Jewish grocer, a Roma child, a communist, a priest. He called them Stolpersteine, stumbling stones, because the passer-by does not read them from a height but bends towards them, or stumbles, and in that small act of bending remembers.

The project began as a private act and was resisted by some officials, but it grew, street by street, until today there are more than a hundred thousand such stones in Germany and some thirty other countries. No ministry decreed it. No monument in a capital city says what these stones say. They say it at the doorstep, at the level of the foot, in the grammar of the neighbourhood: here lived a person.

I end my argument with this story because it points to the most hopeful truth in the whole matter. Institutional memory is not an abstraction. It is infrastructure. It is built, like roads and hospitals, out of particular decisions, particular budgets and particular laws, and a nation that wants to remember can choose to build it.

So let me say what a remembering republic would do, and let me say it concretely, since lament without proposal is only another liturgy.

It would, first, publish. Every aircraft accident involving public servants or carrying civilians, whether civil or military, would be investigated under a statutory timetable, with an interim report within thirty days and a final report within a year, laid before the National Assembly and published in full, with the recommendations tracked in a public register until each is implemented or reasoned away. The Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau already has a legal mandate over civil aviation. Its remit, or an equivalent independent body’s, should be extended so that no military transport carrying civilians may be investigated only by the institution that operated it.

This is not an eccentric demand. Within days of the crash, a former governor of Anambra State, Willie Obiano, wrote that the families deserve answers and that the inquiry should examine the aircraft’s maintenance history, while a service organisation, De Norsemen Kclub International, asked for an independent inquiry, publication of its findings and implementation of its recommendations. A prayer-and-support group for the armed forces said that the loss of personnel “should not be allowed to become routine.” By the ledger set down earlier, it already is, and the sentence will mean something only when it is attached to a timetable.

It would, second, count, and I would have the republic accept the full, unflattering measure of that word. A national register of the dead of public service and of public disaster would be established by law, a permanent, publicly accessible record, kept by a statutory body and not by the mood of the day, listing the full names, ranks, hometowns and circumstances of every Nigerian killed in the line of duty or in a disaster attributable to institutional failure. This would not be a gesture. It would be a standing duty to count. And it would include the villagers of Tudun Biri, the displaced of Rann, the worshippers of Owo and the protesters of Lekki, because a register that lists only the uniformed is a register of the state’s own grief and not the nation’s.

It would, third, provide. A statutory fund, with a fixed formula and a fixed timetable, would pay the families of those who die in public service, uniformed and civilian alike, and would be insulated from the discretion of any official. Benefits would be paid on proof of death and not on proof of the widow’s endurance. The orphans of the fallen would be assured their education, as Pericles promised the sons of Athens.

It would, fourth, remember in stone and in school. The National Arcade in Abuja, where the armed forces are remembered each January, would carry the names, and every state would be encouraged to set up its own place where the names of its own dead are inscribed. The history of our disasters, from the aircraft that fell to the towns that burned, would be taught in schools, so that no young Nigerian arrives at adulthood unaware of Ejigbo, of Asaba, of Ikeja, of Rann, of Ilaje.

It would, fifth, answer for the past. The reports that now gather dust would be brought off the shelf. The recommendations of the Oputa Panel, and of every inquiry since, would be debated openly, accepted or rejected with reasons, and acted upon. A country that has asked itself a hard question and then declined to hear the answer has not preserved its innocence; it has only preserved its ignorance.

It would, sixth, treat the quiet killers as the emergencies they are. A government that mourns a crash for three days and lets the roads and the wards kill in silence has misunderstood its first duty. A remembering republic would publish, every year, a single honest count of deaths on the road, in childbirth and in the hospital corridor, set against the budgets and the contracts that bear on each; it would put the abandoned road project and the unfunded ward on the same public ledger as the fallen aircraft; and it would make the awarding and supervising of a road contract a matter in which a failure that kills is a failure that someone answers for by name.

It would also, in the war zones and the burning villages, publish the names of the dead and the progress of every prosecution, so that a statement of condolence is never again the only product of a massacre. And it would extend to the northeast the courtesy of the names that the Air Force has shown this week: a standing register, open to every citizen, of the soldiers who fall, with an officer responsible for informing each family before the press, and a guaranteed schedule for the payment of their benefits.

And it would, seventh and finally, change the conduct of its leaders. The rule would be simple: those who decide upon the equipment, funding and deployment of the machines on which public servants must ride, those who sign the budgets, approve the maintenance and oversee the missions, should carry their share of the responsibility in a form that can be seen. Resignation is not a sacrament, but Mr Takagi of Japan Airlines understood that some losses are so grave that an honourable person puts his own office on the altar. We have not forgotten how to say sorry in Nigeria. We have only forgotten how to mean it with consequences.

I know the objection. These are expensive; the state is poor; priorities are many. To which the reply is that a poor state needs memory more than a rich one, because it has less margin for repeating its errors. What does it cost to publish a report? What does it cost to keep a register? The sums involved are trivial beside the sums routinely lost to waste. The truth is that this is not a question of money. It is a question of whether we believe that the dead are our own.

There is, besides, a debt that these seven do not discharge, and it is the oldest. A remembering republic would go back to the wound at the root. It would open the archives of the war and of the pogroms that preceded it, and publish what the state knows. It would commission, with the Igbo and the peoples of the minority areas of the East at the table, a register of the civilians who died between 1966 and 1970, to be built from the memory of families, churches and age grades while the old are still alive to give it. It would set up a memorial in the capital to those who perished, and give their descendants a day.

It would hold a public inquiry, with power to name, into the killings carried out in the South-East since 2015 by every party, and would try those who killed, in open court, whatever the colour of the uniform. And it would teach all of this in its schools, so that a child in Kano and a child in Umuahia learn the same truth of how the republic was made. I do not say this as a bargain. I say it because a nation that can look at what it did to its own, in plain daylight, has found the only road by which it can become a nation.

Beneath all of these measures lies a deeper work, the work that the foundation itself requires. A country that was joined by force must, if it is to endure, be rejoined by consent, and consent is made out of acknowledged truth. That means a serious national reckoning with the violence of our history, from the burning of Benin and the shooting of the women of Aba, through the coups, the pogroms and the civil war, to Asaba, Odi, the python’s dance in the East and the massacres of our own day: not a commission to be shelved, but a standing public process with the power to name, to recommend and to see its recommendations carried out.

It means a school curriculum in which every Nigerian child learns how the country was made and whom it cost. It means a yearly day on which the whole nation, uniformed and civilian, rich and poor, north and south, remembers the same dead together. These are the small, repeated acts by which strangers become a people. They are the slow work of building a republic that mourns because it loves, and not one that mourns because it is told to.

Epilogue: The Register Left Open

I come back, as one must, to the swamp, and to the long procession of the unnamed that stands behind it: the children of Biafra, the soldiers of Benisheikh, the farmers of Yelwata and Nkalaha, the people of Odi, the young of the East who were tagged before they were shot, the mother who did not return from the delivery room, the traveller on the broken road.

Somewhere in the creeks of Ilaje, close to a naval base in a place whose name I had scarcely known last week, a transport aircraft lies broken in the mud and the mangrove roots. In homes across the country, there are families who have not yet fully accepted that a familiar voice will not call again. In Abuja, a book lies open on a table with a pen beside it. In Lagos and Benin and a dozen other places, there are children who have become, at this moment, the children of the fallen. And somewhere, in a document drawer I cannot see, a report is already being imagined.

I think again of the child I was in the bush near Abiriba, being hushed. It strikes me now that the whole of Nigeria’s public life has taught us a version of that hush. We have been taught to lower our voices when the state has done wrong, to hold our questions, to let the sorrow wash over us and the facts sink beneath it.

And the great duty of our time, if we are to be a country worth the sacrifice of those who die in its service, is to unlearn the hush. We must learn to be a nation that asks, loudly and without contempt, who, how, why and what now, and that does not sit down until the answer has been given.

The dead are not asking for much. They are not asking for monuments or orations. They are asking, I think, for three things. They ask that we say their names correctly. They ask that we find out what happened to them, and tell the truth about it. And they ask that we make it harder for the next person to die as they did. This is a modest request, and the ancient Greek who set an empty bier in the funeral procession for the missing would have understood it at once.

Let the register in Abuja stay open. Let it stay open, not for a week, but as a symbol of a covenant that does not close: that Squadron Leader Aburime and Squadron Leader Man-Ugwueje and Flight Lieutenant Bako and Corporal Uguru and Mrs Ezeh Nneka  and every one of the twenty-five, whatever their number finally proves to be, are ours; that we know their names; and that for as long as we have a country, we will not stop asking what we owe them.

Sources Consulted

This list is in two parts. Part One gives the online reports, official records and reference pages that were opened and checked, each with a clickable link and a note of the specific section, paragraph, report number or page where the supporting passage was found. Part Two gives books, printed reports and other records, with full bibliographic details. Where a page or paragraph could not be seen, the entry says ‘locator not verified’ and no page is claimed. Figures that differ between sources are presented in the text as contested.

Part One: Online sources and official records (clickable)

The Ondo crash

Niche Nigeria, “FULL LIST: NAF releases names of 25 victims of Ondo aircraft crash” (6 October 2026)  (thenicheng.com)

Locator: Numbered list, items 1-25 (crew 1-5, passengers 6-25); every name and rank in Part I was checked against it. The figure of 32 aboard (25 passengers and 7 crew) comes from other press reports that week, not from this page.

Vanguard, NSIB statement on the Ondo crash (October 2026)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: NSIB says it does not investigate military accidents unless formally invited. Also reported at Blueprint: https://blueprint.ng/why-we-cant-probe-ondo-naf-aircraft-crash-nsib/

TVC News, “Igbokoda NAF crash: Aiyedatiwa hails pilot for steering plane away from town” (7 October 2026)  (tvcnews.tv)

Locator: Governor’s statement: aircraft came down about 200 m from the community; pilot steered into the swamp; only the pilot could explain the cause. Used in Part II.

allAfrica, report on the Igbokoda crash and recovery (8 October 2026)  (allafrica.com)

Locator: Recovery operation, swamp depth estimate of about 30 m, the figure of 26 on board attributed to the Air Force, and the governor’s remarks. Used in Parts I, II and XVIII.

Tribune Online, “Military aircraft crash in Igbokoda: eyewitnesses recount horror, Tinubu declares three-day mourning”  (tribuneonlineng.com)

Locator: Resident’s account (noise like thunder, remains scattered) and the Olu of Igbokoda’s statement that the aircraft did not catch fire. Used in Part XVIII.

Arise News, “Our record keeping failure is why we don’t know the exact casualties onboard the NAF plane: Ejiofor” (October 2026)  (youtube.com)

Locator: Studio interview with Mike Ejiofor, former DSS director. I worked from a written summary of the broadcast supplied to me, not from the video itself; his claims are reported as his. Used in Parts III and XX.

Premium Times, “Security forces kill ISWAP commander in Ondo forest” (October 2026)  (premiumtimesng.com)

Locator: Army, DSS and Amotekun operation near Owo; the army’s claims reported as the army’s. Also Arise: https://www.arise.tv/army-dss-amotekun-operation-kills-senior-iswap-commander-in-ondo/. Used in Part IX.

The ICIR, “NAF 931 spent nearly four years in Germany for maintenance before Ondo crash” (6 October 2026)  (icirnigeria.org)

Locator: Aircraft history (delivery March 2010, 2007 contract of about $73 million, Mönchengladbach January 2021 to late December 2024) and the Governor’s remarks on Channels TV on 5 October; the report’s own caution that a long stay does not establish a defect. Used in Parts III and IV.

Daily Trust, “NAF: One crash, too many” (6 October 2026)  (dailytrust.com)

Locator: Loss of contact at about 9:13 a.m.; the count of about twenty military crashes since 2015 (Dornier 228 in 2015, King Air in 2021, Mi-171E in 2023); the minister’s statement on jurisdiction; a local official’s attribution to weather. Used in Parts I, III and IV.

Vanguard, “Why we couldn’t rescue Air Force aircraft crash victims: Igbokoda residents” (6 October 2026)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: Residents’ accounts of the canoe rescue attempt, drizzle, an eyewitness time of about 9:40, and naval and police speedboats. Used in Parts I and XVIII.

The Sun, “Ondo crash: Grief holds sway at DHQ, NAF Base Lagos, others” (7 October 2026)  (thesun.ng)

Locator: An officer’s count of nineteen officers and airmen lost; the Vice-President’s pledge to stand with families “beyond these days of mourning”. Used in Parts I and XVIII.

Channels Television, “Ondo crash has forced Nigeria to look back” (5 October 2026)  (channelstv.com)

Locator: Retrospective of NAF mishaps from 2016 to 2025; quotations on maintenance, investigations and transparency; the Kaduna probe’s 27 findings and eight recommendations. Used in Part III.

Blueprint, “Late Attahiru: AIB submits interim report to NAF” (15 September 2021)  (blueprint.ng)

Locator: Interim report to the Chief of the Air Staff; cause not disclosed; the Bureau’s statement that this was its first direct involvement in a military crash investigation. I did not find a published final report. Used in Part III.

Ripples Nigeria, “Reps minority caucus demands investigations into air mishaps in Nigeria” (22 May 2021)  (ripplesnigeria.com)

Locator: Statement by the Minority Leader for a system-wide investigation after the Kaduna crash. Used in Part III.

Vanguard, “Ondo crash: ADC questions NAF aircraft maintenance funding” (6 October 2026)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: African Democratic Congress statement by Bolaji Abdullahi citing budget releases to December 2025; the party’s figures, not independently audited here. Used in Part XIX.

Vanguard, “NAF aircraft crash: Nigerians deserve to know what went wrong: Obiano” (7 October 2026)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: Statement by Willie Obiano calling for a credible inquiry that looks at maintenance history and publishes its findings. Used in Part XXI.

Vanguard, “Ondo Air Crash: DNKI mourns 25 victims, demands probe into tragedy” (7 October 2026)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: De Norsemen Kclub International: independent inquiry, publication of findings, implementation of recommendations. Used in Part XXI.

The Guardian (Nigeria), “NAF, PSNAFSA mourn 25 victims of Ondo aircraft crash” (7 October 2026)  (guardian.ng)

Locator: Statement by Prayer and Support for Nigerian Armed Forces and Other Security Agencies that the loss of personnel “should not be allowed to become routine”. Used in Part XXI.

Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau, history and mandate  (nsib.gov.ng)

Locator: The Bureau is multimodal (aviation, marine, rail), established by statute in 2022; section number not verified.

Aircraft accidents, in Nigeria and Japan

Japan Transport Safety Board, Aircraft Accident Investigation Report 62-2, JA8119 Boeing 747SR-100 (19 June 1987)  (jtsb.mlit.go.jp)

Locator: Report No. 62-2; page not verified. Bulkhead failure after an improper 1978 tail-strike repair. Accounts of Mr Takagi’s resignation and public apology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123

Japan Airlines, Safety Promotion Center  (jal.com)

Locator: Opened 2006 at Haneda; displays aft-fuselage wreckage.

Aviation Safety Network: NAF C-130, Ejigbo, 26 September 1992  (aviation-safety.net)

Locator: Record NAF911: 159 dead; no manifest; estimates 163-200. The essay says ‘about one hundred and sixty’.

Aviation Safety Network: Bellview Airlines, 22 October 2005  (aviation-safety.net)

Locator: 117 aboard, all killed; AIB Report 2/2009.

Aviation Safety Network: Sosoliso Airlines, 10 December 2005  (aviation-safety.net)

Locator: 108 of 110 killed; about 60 Loyola Jesuit College students; report FMA/AIPB/424.

Aviation Safety Network: ADC Airlines, 29 October 2006  (aviation-safety.net)

Locator: 96 of 105 killed, including the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Maccido; AIB Report 4/2008.

Aviation Safety Network: Dana Air, 3 June 2012  (aviation-safety.net)

Locator: 153 aboard, all killed, plus people on the ground.

Vanguard: Gov. Yakowa, Gen. Azazi and others killed in air crash (December 2012)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: Navy helicopter at Okoroba, Nembe, Bayelsa; six killed.

Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives: Beechcraft 350 Super King Air, Kaduna, 21 May 2021  (baaa-acro.com)

Locator: All 11 aboard killed, including Lt Gen Ibrahim Attahiru.

Roads, hospitals, registration and the census

Africa Check, Factsheet: road safety in Nigeria in the wake of a high-profile crash (February 2026)  (africacheck.org)

Locator: Section ‘How Nigeria Compares Globally’ (WHO estimate of 36,722 for 2021); section ‘What National Data Shows About Road Deaths’ (5,421 deaths from 9,570 crashes in 2024); speeding share of 47.4% in the second quarter of 2024.

WHO, Global status report on road safety 2023: Nigeria country profile  (cdn.who.int)

Locator: Estimated road deaths 36,722 (95% CI 32,053-41,391) for 2021; officially reported 6,205; 17.2 per 100,000. Profile sheet, unnumbered pages. Global report: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240086517

BusinessDay: FRSC records fewer crashes, higher death toll in 2024  (businessday.ng)

Locator: 5,421 deaths from 9,570 crashes in 2024.

Blueprint: The gory 2025 FRSC road traffic report  (blueprint.ng)

Locator: 10,446 crashes and 5,289 deaths in 2025 (FRSC briefing, 4 February 2026). The Daily Nigerian version, https://dailynigerian.com/frsc-records-10446-crashes-5289-deaths-in-2025/, refused automated access, so the identical report was checked here and at National Accord.

WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank Group and UNDESA, Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2023 (2025)  (unfpa.org)

Locator: Executive Summary, p. xvi (as read by the checker): Nigeria about 75,000 maternal deaths in 2023, 28.7% of the global total. The estimate carries a wide uncertainty interval.

Africanews: Northeast Nigeria struggles with maternal mortality as hospitals remain out of reach (26 August 2025)  (africanews.com)

Locator: Opening paragraphs: at least 75,000 maternal deaths in 2023; paragraph not verified.

Nairametrics: NPC, Nigeria records 5 million births annually as death registration remains below 20% (15 July 2026)  (nairametrics.com)

Locator: Briefing by NPC Chairman Dr Aminu Yusuf on 15 July 2026: about 57% of births registered; deaths below 20%. Also Vanguard: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2026/07/npc-millions-of-births-deaths-still-go-unregistered-despite-five-million-annual-births/ . The NPC civil-registration page itself now shows different figures (53% and 10%).

allAfrica (from Vanguard): Nigeria hits 20 years without a census (June 2026)  (allafrica.com)

Locator: Last census 2006; opening paragraph.

Biometric Update: Nigeria may have got its population wrong for two decades (January 2025)  (biometricupdate.com)

Locator: Last census 2006; a census planned for 2023 was postponed.

National Population Commission: census enumeration  (nationalpopulation.gov.ng)

Locator: 2006 provisional total 140,003,542 (the final published figure is 140,431,790); 1991 census about 88.5 million.

CDD Fact-Check: history in the Nigerian curriculum  (cddfactcheck.org)

Locator: History removed from primary and junior secondary under the new basic curriculum from 2009/10.

BusinessDay: FG reintroduces history in education curriculum 13 years after removal (25 November 2022)  (businessday.ng)

Locator: Reintroduction ordered in 2019; teacher training from 2022.

The North-East war, the burning villages and the state as killer

Africanews: Jihadists kill army general and soldiers in attack on Borno State base (10 April 2026)  (africanews.com)

Locator: Brig Gen Oseni Omoh Braimah killed; about 75 km from Maiduguri; ‘one intelligence source’ said eighteen soldiers died.

Human Rights Watch, Nigeria: prioritise security amid rising violence in Benue State (18 June 2025)  (hrw.org)

Locator: Opening paragraphs: governor confirmed 59 deaths; media lists over 100; siege of more than two hours; ‘nobody has been arrested or prosecuted’.

Africanews: Nigeria charges 9 over 2025 Yelwata massacre that killed 150 (2 February 2026)  (africanews.com)

Locator: About 150 killed; nine charged at the Federal High Court, Abuja.

Amnesty International: Nigeria, mounting death toll and looming humanitarian crisis (May 2025)  (amnestyusa.org)

Locator: 10,217 killed 29 May 2023 to 28 May 2025; in Benue all 23 LGAs attacked, over 200 villages sacked, about 450,000 displaced. Also The Guardian (Nigeria): https://guardian.ng/news/nigeria/national/over-10217-nigerians-killed-since-tinubu-took-office-amnesty-international/

ThisDay: The massacre of villagers in Ebonyi (9 February 2025)  (thisdaylive.com)

Locator: Nkalaha, Ishielu LGA, 2 February 2025: at least 15 killed; statements by Governor Nwifuru and Deputy Governor Obila. Also Vanguard: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2025/02/ebonyi-herdsmen-killings-death-toll-rises-to-15-many-still-missing-2/

Vanguard: Bloodbath in Enugu, Fulani herdsmen kill 40 (April 2016)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: Nimbo, Uzo-Uwani LGA, 25 April 2016; at least 40 on the day. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbo_massacre

Human Rights Watch, The Destruction of Odi and Rape in Choba (22 December 1999)  (hrw.org)

Locator: Twelve police killed from 4 November; army entered 20 November; government acknowledged 43 dead on 22 November; HRW: ‘several hundred’ plausible.

Vanguard: Odi invasion, court orders FG to pay N37.6bn compensation (February 2013)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: Federal High Court, Port Harcourt, Justice Lambo Akanbi, 19 February 2013. Settlement of N15bn (2014): https://thetidenewsonline.com/2015/02/02/why-fg-paid-odi-n15bn-compensation (this piece misdates the judgment). Abduction of the compensation committee chairman, 17 July 2015: https://saharareporters.com/2015/07/17/gunmen-abduct-chairman-odi-compensation-committee-bayelsa

Human Rights Watch, Military Revenge in Benue: A Population Under Attack, vol. 14, no. 2(A) (April 2002)  (hrw.org)

Locator: Zaki-Biam, 22-24 October 2001: more than 200 unarmed civilians killed; page not verified.

Al Jazeera: Nigerian military drone attack kills 85 civilians in error (5 December 2023)  (aljazeera.com)

Locator: Tudun Biri, 3 December 2023.

MSF: Nigeria, MSF strongly condemns aerial bombing of camp for displaced people in Rann  (msf.org)

Locator: Rann, 17 January 2017. Red Cross and Red Crescent statement: https://www.icrc.org/en/document/international-red-cross-and-red-crescent-movement-deplores-deaths-civilians-and-6-nigerian (six Nigerian Red Cross staff killed).

Amnesty International: perpetrators must face justice after EndSARS panel confirms shootings at Lekki toll gate  (amnestyusa.org)

Locator: At least 12 protesters killed at Lekki and Alausa on 20 October 2020.

Wikipedia: Owo church attack  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: St Francis Catholic Church, Owo, 5 June 2022; about 40 killed, higher press estimates.

UN OHCHR: Nigeria, UN Committee finds grave and systematic violations persist (September 2025)  (ohchr.org)

Locator: Chibok: 276 taken on 14 April 2014; at least 91 still captive or unaccounted for.

The pogroms, the war and the forgetting

Library of Congress, Nigeria: A Country Study (1991), chapter ‘Civil War’  (countrystudies.us)

Locator: 1966 killings ‘as high as 30,000… probably closer to 8,000 to 10,000’; more than 1 million Igbo returned east; 1-3 million dead in the East. No page numbers on this edition.

Wikipedia: 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Death-toll range and the flight east, citing the Library of Congress study.

Wikipedia: Nigerian Civil War; Britannica: Nigerian Civil War  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: 6 July 1967 to 15 January 1970; combatant deaths 45,000-100,000; civilian deaths 500,000 to 3 million. Britannica overview: https://www.britannica.com/event/Nigerian-Civil-War ; end dates vary by source (12 to 15 January 1970).

Wikipedia: Armed Forces Remembrance Day  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: The date was moved to 15 January from the earlier Commonwealth observance; year of change not verified. See also Jideofor Adibe, Premium Times, 28 January 2025: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/769965-rethinking-15-january-as-nigerias-armed-forces-remembrance-day-by-jideofor-adibe.html

Centre for Nigeria Progress: No victor, no vanquished? Gowon’s memoir reopens Biafra’s bloody ledger  (centrefornigeriaprogress.substack.com)

Locator: The 20-pound policy, abandoned property and the lack of any reckoning.

Central Bank of Nigeria letter (Isong, 18 October 1971), quoted in the USAAfricaDialogue archive: ‘That 20 pounds policy’  (groups.google.com)

Locator: Calls the payment a ‘£20 ex gratia award authorised by the Federal Government’. Secondary quotation of the letter.

Ukaeje, Ubuntu: Journal of Conflict and Social Transformation 10(1&2) (2024)  (journals.uj.ac.za)

Locator: Dates ‘no victor, no vanquished’ to 15 January 1970; the primary text of the broadcast was not located. Also Kobo, Origins (Ohio State), January 2020: https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/nigerian-civil-war-biafra-anniversary

Bird and Ottanelli, ‘The History and Legacy of the Asaba, Nigeria, Massacres’, African Studies Review 54(3), December 2011, pp. 1-26  (muse.jhu.edu)

Locator: Asaba toll estimates (373 documented, 500-800, about 700; some accounts above 1,000); the mass shooting at Ogbe-Osowa on 7 October 1967. DOI 10.1353/arw.2011.0048. Memorial site: https://asabamemorialmonument.org/oct-1967/

Hakeem Yusuf, ‘Human Rights Violations Investigations Panel (Oputa Panel)’, Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, vol. 3 (2013)  (oro.open.ac.uk)

Locator: Inaugurated 14 June 1999; public hearings 24 October 2000 to 9 November 2001; report 2002; more than 10,000 petitions. Page range not verified. Also ATJ Hub: https://atjhub.csvr.org.za/nigeria-human-rights-violations-investigation-commission-1999-2002/

Wikipedia: 2002 Lagos armoury explosion  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Ikeja cantonment, 27 January 2002: at least 1,000 bodies recovered; about 600 in a canal. Underlying BBC, Red Cross and New York Times reports not retrieved.

Boletin Oficial del Estado: Ley 46/1977 (amnesty) and Ley 52/2007 (historical memory)  (boe.es)

Locator: Ley 46/1977, 15 October 1977: BOE no. 248, 17 October 1977, pp. 22765-22766. Ley 52/2007, 26 December 2007: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2007-22296 (art. 11 on searches by descendants).

elDiario.es (Marta Borraz): the exhumation that broke the silence of Franco’s graves, 25 years on (20 October 2025)  (memoriahistorica.org.es)

Locator: Priaranza del Bierzo: exhumation began 21 October 2000; 13 victims; Silva’s grandfather killed 16 October 1936.

MSF: Founding of Médecins Sans Frontières  (msf.org.uk)

Locator: 1968 ICRC team including Max Récamier and Bernard Kouchner in Biafra; foundation on 22 December 1971 (MSF Australia: https://msf.org.au/founding-m%C3%A9decins-sans-fronti%C3%A8res).

The South-East operations, IPOB and the Ogoni Nine

Amnesty International, Attacks and Unlawful Killings in South-East Nigeria: A Decade of Impunity, AFR 44/9363/2025 (August 2025)  (amnesty.org)

Locator: Reference and title confirmed. Page references that were consistent across two readings: p. 13 (invasion of Kanu’s home, 10 September 2017) and p. 19 (Aku grave, 4 December 2024). The 1,844 deaths (January 2021 to June 2023), the operation dates, Ebube Agu, ESN and sit-at-home passages fall in the early pages (about pp. 7-9); exact pages not verified. Press release: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/08/nigeria-thousands-killed-hundreds-forcibly-disappeared-two-years-south-east/

Amnesty International, ‘Bullets were raining everywhere’: deadly repression of pro-Biafra activists, AFR 44/5211/2016 (24 November 2016)  (amnesty.org)

Locator: At least 150 killed since August 2015 (pp. 5 and 24); at least 60 killed and 70 injured ‘on and around 30 May’ (p. 33). Landing page: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr44/5211/2016/en/ ; summary page: https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/bullets-were-raining-everywhere-deadly-repression-of-pro-biafra-activists/

Amnesty International, Nigeria: at least 115 killed by security forces within four months in the South-East (5 August 2021)  (amnesty.org)

Locator: 115 killed March-June 2021; over 500 arrests; 62 cases of arbitrary arrest, ill-treatment and torture. Press release; no separate report number.

Vanguard: Operation Python Dance II, Abia government slams 3-day curfew, soldiers apologise (13 September 2017)  (vanguardngr.com)

Locator: Attack on the NUJ secretariat, Umuahia, 12 September 2017 (more than 20 soldiers); apology by Brig Gen Abdukalifa Ibrahim (‘a disaster of unimaginable proportion’); curfew in Aba 12-14 September.

Channels Television: Federal High Court proscribes IPOB (20 September 2017)  (channelstv.com)

Locator: Justice Abdu Kafarati, suit FHC/ABJ/CS/871/2017, heard in chambers. Whether IPOB was the only named respondent was not confirmed against the court papers.

Premium Times: Appeal Court affirms IPOB’s proscription as terrorist group (30 January 2025)  (premiumtimesng.com)

Locator: Judgment of 30 January 2025, panel led by Justice Hamma Barka. Also Channels: https://www.channelstv.com/2025/01/30/appeal-court-affirms-order-proscribing-ipob-as-terrorist-group/

Amnesty International, In the Dock: Shell’s Complicity in the Arbitrary Execution of the Ogoni Nine, AFR 44/6604/2017 (June 2017)  (amnesty.org)

Locator: Recantations by witnesses Charles Danwi and Naayone Nkpah (p. 10 as read by the checker). Shell denies the allegation.

Wikipedia: Ogoni Nine  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Arrests May 1994; sentence 30 October 1995; hanged in Port Harcourt 10 November 1995.

ThisDay: Tinubu grants full pardon to Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni 9 (12 June 2025)  (thisdaylive.com)

Locator: Pardon and honours, 12 June 2025. Also Channels: https://www.channelstv.com/2025/06/12/tinubu-grants-presidential-pardon-to-ogoni-nine/

allAfrica (Amnesty International): government must clear the names of the executed Ogoni Nine (November 2025)  (allafrica.com)

Locator: The call for exoneration; the underlying Amnesty page could not be loaded.

Human Rights Watch, The Ogoni Crisis: A Case-Study of Military Repression in Southeastern Nigeria (1 July 1995)  (hrw.org)

Locator: Context for the May 1994 killing of four chiefs and the military raids; the report predates the trial and executions.

The colonial foundation and the early massacres

Wikipedia: Watson Commission; Gold Coast disturbances 1948  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, Colonial No. 231 (HMSO, June 1948), HathiTrust record: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006771099 . Page not verified. Shooting at Christiansborg crossroads, 28 February 1948; Superintendent Colin Imray: https://gna.org.gh/2022/02/christianborg-crossroads-shooting-74-years-on/

Wikipedia: Benin Expedition of 1897; Ovonramwen; Benin Bronzes  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Phillips party attacked 4 January 1897; Benin City taken 18 February; Ovonramwen surrendered 5 August 1897. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovonramwen ; about 900 objects at the British Museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_Bronzes

Lobban, Imperial Incarceration (Cambridge University Press, 2021), chapter 6, pp. 198-237  (cambridge.org)

Locator: Supports the deposition of Ovonramwen without trial.

Alan Boisragon, The Benin Massacre (London: Methuen, 1897)  (archive.org)

Locator: Eyewitness account by one of two European survivors; page not verified.

Dubawa: how true is the claim that Flora Shaw coined the name Nigeria  (dubawa.org)

Locator: The Times, 8 January 1897; she proposed the name; adopted officially in 1914.

Lugard, Report on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, and Administration, 1912-1919, Cmd. 468 (HMSO, 1920)  (books.google.com)

Locator: Catalogue record only; page not verified. Smithsonian record: https://www.si.edu/object/report-amalgamation-northern-and-southern-nigeria-and-administration-1912-1919-fd-lugard:siris_sil_922178

The National Archives blog: Ogu Umunwanyi, the Women’s War  (blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk)

Locator: Aba commission report: CO 583/176/8; more than 50 women killed. Report of the Commission of Inquiry… Calabar and Owerri Provinces, December 1929 (Lagos, 1930): WorldCat https://search.worldcat.org/title/Report-of-the-Commission-of-Inquiry-Appointed-to-Inquire-into-the-Disturbances-in-the-Calabar-and-Owerri-Provinces-December-1929/oclc/31635311 ; page not verified.

Van Allen, ‘Aba Riots or Igbo Women’s War?’, Ufahamu 6(1) (1975), pp. 11-39  (escholarship.org)

Locator: ‘More than 50 women dead’; the commission ‘excoriated the soldiers who fired on women’. And ‘Sitting on a Man’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 6(2) (1972), pp. 165-181.

Hansard, 28 November 1949: Disturbances in Nigeria, inquiry  (api.parliament.uk)

Locator: Fitzgerald Commission (chairman Sir William Fitzgerald KC). Report title and Colonial number not verified. Enugu colliery shooting, 18 November 1949, 21 killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Enugu_Colliery_Massacre

Wikipedia: Military dictatorship in Nigeria  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: 1966-79 and 1983-99: 29 years.

NYSC: about the Scheme; Constitution of Nigeria (Constitute Project)  (nysc.gov.ng)

Locator: Decree No. 24 of 22 May 1973. Federal character, section 14(3): https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Nigeria_2011

Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’ (Sorbonne, 11 March 1882), in Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990), trans. Martin Thom  (silo.pub)

Locator: On p. 10 of the web copy: ‘Forgetting… is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’; p. 19: ‘a daily plebiscite’. Page numbers are from the web copy, not a print copy. Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_a_Nation%3F

Stories from other countries

Westminster Abbey: The Unknown Warrior  (westminster-abbey.org)

Locator: Bodies from the Aisne, Somme, Arras and Ypres; Brig Gen L. J. Wyatt with Colonel Gell chose one on the night of 7 November 1920; burial 11 November 1920. CWGC: https://www.cwgc.org/our-work/blog/the-story-of-the-unknown-warrior/

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund: FAQs  (vvmf.org)

Locator: 1,421 entries; Maya Lin, Yale undergraduate; dedicated 13 November 1982; 58,281 names (May 2021).

Wikipedia: Katyn massacre; UPI, Russian documents say Politburo approved Katyn executions (14 October 1992)  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: 21,857 executed; Politburo decision of 5 March 1940; Soviet admission 13 April 1990; documents released October 1992. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/10/14/Russian-documents-say-Politburo-approved-Katyn-executions/6876719035200/

Wikipedia: Severan Tondo  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Antikensammlung Berlin, Altes Museum, inv. 31329; face of Geta erased. Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation (Brill, 2004): series volume not verified.

Infobae: the first round of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (30 April 2023)  (infobae.com)

Locator: First ronda Saturday 30 April 1977, 14 women; Thursdays at 3.30 pm afterwards; white diaper headscarves adopted at the Luján pilgrimage, autumn 1977. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_Plaza_de_Mayo (Azucena Villaflor abducted 10 December 1977).

Wikipedia: Soviet-Afghan War; Zinky Boys  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: War 25 December 1979 to 15 February 1989; Zinky Boys (1989; English translation by Julia and Robin Whitby, 1992). Gravestone claim: no source found; the essay hedges it (‘reportedly’).

South African History Online: Sharpeville massacre, 21 March 1960  (sahistory.org.za)

Locator: 69 killed, about 180 wounded, about 5,000 protesters. Public Holidays Act 36 of 1994 (Human Rights Day, 21 March): https://www.saflii.org/za/legis/num_act/pha1994163/

Wikipedia: Bloody Sunday (1972)  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: 13 killed on the day, a 14th died 16 June 1972; Widgery report 19 April 1972; Saville report 15 June 2010. Saville’s finding that none of the casualties posed a threat of causing death or serious injury is quoted in the Northern Ireland Secretary’s statement of 3 November 2010 (gov.uk). Hansard, 15 June 2010: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2010-06-15/debates/10061522000002/SavilleInquiry (column and speaker not confirmed).

Dickinson College, House Divided: Letter to Lydia Bixby, 21 November 1864  (housedivided.dickinson.edu)

Locator: Burlingame: Mrs Bixby lost two sons; one deserted, one was honourably discharged, one fate unclear. Michael Burlingame, ‘New Light on the Bixby Letter’, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16(1) (Winter 1995), from p. 59: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jala/article/16/1/59/394080/New-Light-on-the-Bixby-Letter

ICTY: Prosecutor v. Krstić (IT-98-33), Trial Judgement, 2 August 2001  (icty.org)

Locator: Para. 1 (‘more than 7,000’); para. 73 (2,028 bodies exhumed); para. 78 (primary mass graves dug up and reburied in remote sites, September-October 1995). Appeals Judgement, 19 April 2004: https://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/acjug/en/krs-aj040419e.htm ; ICMP: https://icmp.int/news/thirty-one-years-after-the-srebrenica-genocide-preserving-facts-honoring-victims-and-supporting-survivors/

Stolpersteine: Wikipedia; Neues Ruhrwort (26 May 2023)  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: First stone laid in Cologne, 16 December 1992; the 100,000th laid in Nuremberg, May 2023 (https://neuesruhrwort.de/2023/05/26/gunter-demnig-verlegt-seinen-100-000-stolperstein-in-nuernberg/).

FMINO: 2026 Armed Forces celebrations and Remembrance Day kick off  (fmino.gov.ng)

Locator: The National Arcade, Eagle Square, Abuja, as the site of Armed Forces Remembrance Day. (The name ‘Remembrance Arcade’ belongs to the Lagos site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Arcade_(Lagos).)

Aberfan, Tulsa, Lidice and the quiet killers

Wikipedia: Aberfan Disaster Tribunal  (en.wikipedia.org)

Locator: Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966, HC 553 (1967), chaired by Lord Justice Edmund Davies: blame rests upon the National Coal Board. 116 children and 28 adults died. Page not verified. Also https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/sum.htm

Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Final Report (February 2001)  (okhistory.org)

Locator: Deaths ‘likely numbering between one and three hundred’ (the wording relayed by the checker); page not verified. Oklahoma Historical Society entry: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013

Lidice Memorial  (lidice-memorial.cz)

Locator: 173 men shot on 10 June 1942; women deported. Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre

UCLA Department of Epidemiology: John Snow and the Broad Street outbreak  (epi-snow.ph.ucla.edu)

Locator: Findings given to the Board of Guardians on 7 September 1854; handle removed on 8 September; outbreak already declining. Second part: https://epi-snow.ph.ucla.edu/Stream2_BSPoutbreak_d.html

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011)  (robnixon.scholar.princeton.edu)

Locator: Definition on p. 2, as quoted at https://www.climatelit.org/topic/capitalism/industry/human-impact/slow-violence/ (page not seen directly). Nixon’s frame is environmental; the essay extends it.

Epigraphs

Thucydides II.43, trans. Richard Crawley (1874), Project Gutenberg ebook 7142  (gutenberg.org)

Locator: ‘For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb’ is Crawley’s wording; Book II, funeral oration. Confirmed at https://blogs.hsc.edu/drjclassics/texts/pericles-funeral-oration/

Mao Zedong, ‘Serve the People’ (8 September 1944), quoting Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An  (marxists.org)

Locator: ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ The Chinese is in the Han shu, chapter 62 (Sima Qian’s biography); ctext.org could not be opened to confirm the printing.

Ecclesiasticus 44:9, King James Version  (kingjamesbibleonline.org)

Locator: Verse quoted in full.

Part Two: Books, printed reports and other records

These works were identified and their bibliographic details checked against catalogue, publisher or library records. Unless a page is given, the page or passage was not seen, and should be checked in the work itself before quotation.

Books and printed reports whose text could not be opened in full

Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin Press, 2012; London: Allen Lane, 2012), ISBN 978-1-59420-482-1  (archive.org)

Locator: On the 20-pound payment and abandoned property. Chapter and page not verified; the independent evidence for the payment is the CBN letter listed in Part One.

John de St. Jorre, The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 437 pp., ISBN 0-395-13934-1

Locator: On the blockade and casualties. Passage and page not verified.

Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 411 pp.  (openlibrary.org)

Locator: Passage not verified.

Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem, eds., Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War (Woodbridge: James Currey/Boydell & Brewer, 2016), ISBN 9781782047735

Locator: Background reading; chapter 12 (Jeyifo on Achebe), pp. 245-264, was identified but not read.

Max Siollun, Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria’s Military Coup Culture (1966-1976) (New York: Algora, 2009), ISBN 9780875867083

Locator: Scholarly account of 1966; passage not verified.

S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Locator: Cited on the Asaba memorial site; not read.

Emma Okocha, Blood on the Niger: The First Black on Black Genocide (New York: TriAtlantic Books, 2006), ISBN 978-0-9788447-9-0

Locator: Title and ISBN confirmed in bibliographic listings; passage not verified.

P. A. Igbafe, Benin under British Administration: The Impact of Colonial Rule on an African Kingdom, 1897-1938 (London: Longman, 1979)

Locator: Page not verified.

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), chapter 3  (hup.harvard.edu)

Locator: Chapter 3 begins on p. 64; the Charleston passage page was not verified.

Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (1915), Book III, chapter V  (gutenberg.org)

Locator: Mourning discussion begins about p. 390; the quotation sometimes cited as p. 397 was seen only in a secondary source.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso), chapter 2  (doubleoperative.com)

Locator: Cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers, p. 9; definition of the nation, p. 6 (edition not stated).

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842); Project Gutenberg ebook 1081  (gutenberg.org)

Locator: Owners paid tax on souls registered at the last census, though some had died; Chichikov’s scheme to pledge them. Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dead-Souls . A scholarly source for the intervals of the revision lists was not found.

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso, 2009), Introduction, pp. 14-15; Precarious Life (Verso, 2004), chapter 2

Locator: Pages for Frames of War as read in a web copy; the page in Precarious Life was not verified.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1 January 1818), three volumes, anonymous  (etc.usf.edu)

Locator: ‘I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.’ Chapter 10 in the 1831 numbering; the 1818 numbering was not verified.

October 2026

aiko.writes2424@gmail.com