321: THE REPUBLIC OF GRIEF

Photo: January 2018

It’s been 20 years.

April 2025: There’s a book/research/public engagement project I desire to work on about this, but I need funding and the right environment to do so. In case I never do, this is what the book would have been about.

At eight years old, I was initiated into the Republic of Grief, which introduced itself to me as a land of irreparable and irresolvable loss. My brother was one of 60 students who died in the Sosoliso plane crash on 10 December 2005 in Port Harcourt. The students were returning for the Christmas holiday from a “field of dreams,” Loyola Jesuit College (LJC), founded ten years earlier under the auspices of the global Jesuit community and USAID. 321: The Republic of Grief is a book project about the afterlife of a personal and national tragedy: the three plane crashes Nigeria suffered between October 2005 and October 2006.

Flights Bellview (aircraft name: Resilience) from Lagos to Abuja in October 2005, Sosoliso from Abuja to Port Harcourt in December 2005, and ADC from Abuja to Sokoto in October 2006 killed a total of 321 people on board. Victims included national icons such as the Sultan of Sokoto, the first ever female West African ENT surgeon, the renowned evangelist Bimbo Odukoya, and the chairman of the Nigeria Railway Corporation. It was a period of reckoning which drew international attention, including condolences from the Pope and led to the creation of new institutions, from schools (e.g. Jesuit Memorial College) to the independent aviation regulatory body of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA).

Over the past 5 years, I’ve been reflecting on my personal experience of the Sosoliso crash and the years that followed. The first outcome of this reflection is the essay ‘The Fire in my Memory’, which won the inaugural Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction (2023) and was long-listed for the 2023 Wasafiri Life Writing Prize. While that essay is about Nigeria happening to me as a child, writing it opened me up to an irresistible line of inquiry on how Nigerians are making meaning of–and finding healing for–the wounds the country inflicts on its people every day. My brother’s death was only a landmark in the line of tragedies I had witnessed as a child growing up in Aba at the turn of the century with Bakassi boys, rotting bodies on the streets on Sunday mornings, and Eedris Abdulkareem’s street anthem ‘Nigeria jaga jaga, everything scatter scatter’.

2005 was also only six years into Nigeria’s post-military era and the collective Nigerian psyche had been numbed by brutality, degradation, and resignation to not being able to ask anything of our country, our government, or the public. In their 2010 book, Encountering the Nigerian State, the sociologists Obadare and Adebanwi argue that to encounter the Nigerian state is to face a particular kind of vulgarity: ‘an excess of death’. With 321, I want to take an unflinching and intimate look at these three plane crashes as a significant example of this excess, mushrooming where state failure meets citizen communal responsibility.

I think of 321 in the spirit of the following books that deal similarly with personal tragedies in a national/collective context:

Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (for how tenderly and intimately it portrays the impact of Haiti’s political history on her family), excerpt here: https://www.npr.org/2007/09/15/14370538/excerpt-brother-im-dying
Emmanuel Iduma’s I Am Still With You (for its exploration of intertwined national trauma and personal grief over the Biafran war in Nigeria), excerpt here: https://brittlepaper.com/2023/05/excerpt-i-am-still-with-you-by-emmanuel-iduma/
Alexis Okeowo’s A Moonless Starless Sky (for its story-driven, research-backed journalism on ordinary people surviving extremism across Africa), excerpt here: https://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm/book_number/3649/a-moonless-starless-sky.
Junot Diaz’s The Brief Life of Oscar Wao (for its genre remixing and its layering of personal misfortune with the long shadow of authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic), excerpt here: https://www.npr.org/2008/10/21/95836721/excerpt-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao

With 321: A Republic of Grief, I want to ask: How do Nigerians create accountability for our collective tragedies of negligence? With what narratives and what actions? What does it take to effect structural change in Nigeria?

In line with my project Studio Styles which ran from 2020-2025 on Nigerians’ experiences of social healing, connection, and respite, I want to use 321 to explore the role of community in building those narratives and taking transformative action in the aftermath of the tragedies.

Many saw the death of those 321 victims, especially the 60 children, as “the sacrifice of the innocents, in order that a new life, a new Nigeria might emerge,” as Fr Peter Schneller, the president of LJC at the time, wrote for America Magazine. To what extent have we upheld all the vows we made in 2005 to change public infrastructure, especially in the aviation, education, and healthcare sectors?

2025–2026 will mark 20 years since the three crashes. The heart of this project is dedicated to all bereaved people, and its goal is to honour the spirit of deep love, responsibility and the redemptive power of community.

Feature in Tender Photo

The Fire in My Memory, on life after the Sosoliso plane crash (winner of 2023 Abebi Award)