Editor’s Note: In partnership with The 2023 Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction, Isele Magazine publishes the winner, the runner-up, and the notable essays selected by the curators of the award. Immaculata Abba’s “The Fire in My Memory” is the winner. 

Award Founder’s Note: The inaugural winner of The Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction is “The Fire In Our Memory” – a deeply moving and brilliantly written ode to a brother lost to the wickedness of a country set to kill its people. Rooted in rituals of collective loss and grief, the writer shows us the power of memory to heal not just a person, but a family and even a people. Stunning sentences sprawling with feeling and aching tenderness, “The Fire In Our Memory” is exactly the kind of work this essay seeks to honour. We are forever changed by encountering this work. 

In my parents’ parlour, there is a wood-framed family photograph almost the same size as the TV mounted beside it on the wall. On the day I wrote the seed of this essay (as an Instagram caption), NEPA (or EEDC now) had taken light and I was still sitting on the red leather single-seater in front of the TV. The afternoon was quiet, save for the videos playing automatically from my social media feeds and the distant voices of people and cars on the street. As I scrolled down my Twitter timeline, I saw the news of the fire on Otedola Bridge in Lagos caused by a petrol tanker explosion. The fire, another failure of Nigerian infrastructure, careless loss of lives… the trifecta that hauls me very quickly past rage to helplessness. I looked up from my phone screen to the wall in front of me and thought only of the sister of the tanker driver, the children of the other driver he crashed into, the spouses of the pedestrians caught in the explosion—those who will have to live many more days of this tragedy. In the family photo on the wall, we look complete; there is no space to speak of my brother, KC, whom new visitors will never know.

On December 10, 2005, my brother, KC, 59 other students from Loyola Jesuit College, and 48 other passengers were on the Sosoliso flight 1145 from Abuja that crash-landed on the airport tarmac in Port-Harcourt. There were only two survivors: one student and one flight attendant. As family members watched from inside the arrival terminal, passengers died on impact, from the smoke, from the fire. Seven who survived the tarmac fire died eventually in hospitals where we were told that there wasn’t enough oxygen, this or that. The bodies of ten passengers burnt beyond recognition so that families argued and fought over them saying, “no, this is my child’s bone structure, I know it.” There was a mass burial for the unrecognised.

I was at home in Aba on the evening of the crash. My mother had gone to the market to buy a carton of Indomie (KC’s favourite: plain onion flavour), plantains, coconuts and whatever else. She was making a feast for her best friend’s first day back from boarding school. The anticipation was light and steadfast, the promise as sure as the sky. I helped cut onions and pound peppers while CeCe Winnas and Don Moen songs played on my mother’s Nokia phone which she had placed on the window-sill in front of the sink. When my mother received the phone call, I was standing on a bench that allowed me reach the kitchen tap as I washed bowls and chopping boards. I handed the phone to her and her face registered not an emergency but an enquiry.

“Someone get me the car keys.”

“What happened? Mummy, where are you going?”

“Nowhere. My friend just called me to pick up something. Watch the rice, I’ll come back soon.”

*

My father had gone to our village earlier that week to oversee the construction work going on in the family house he was building. This was the house where my sisters and I were going to have our traditional wedding ceremonies, a house I believed my brothers were to inherit. Word had it that the house was going to be ready just in time for Christmas in two weeks. That evening, instead of calling with updates on the house, he called to say he’d be back in the morning with Mummy and KC. For dinner, my four siblings, our help, Aunty Chidi, and I ate the coconut jollof rice Mummy was cooking before the call. And before our gateman turned off the generator, lying in bed heel to heel, six of us made lists of ways we thought boarding school would have changed KC and the things we hoped he would bring back from Abuja. We made our guesses based on months before: KC had travelled with his best friends to Jos for a national primary school Maths competition. He had returned with the Lost Book of Nostradamus and stories—of the beautiful landscape, of new foods, and of haggling in the market by himself.

That night, Aunty Chidi was overly protective of her radio and overly watchful of what we were doing or watching on the TV. She wore a veneer of that look that said ‘To be a child again’ and I thought that maybe she found our over-excitement amusing, indulgent even. When we said our night prayers, she prayed especially for Mummy, KC and his friends. At the time, I thought she was acting weirdly because she wanted to relate to our joy but could not. The next morning, she complained that she did not sleep because our youngest, two years old then, thrashed and cried violently all night. Outside our gate, men with night-party-looking eyes hung around our street. There were stacked plastic chairs and empty Star bottles littered around. I loved the idea that my father had organized a party to celebrate KC’s first term at secondary school. KC always knew how to take a compliment, a congratulations. He was definitely worth this turn-out, I thought.

The Sunday morning passed as Sunday mornings did. Watching from my father’s window as I swept his room, I saw that the number of men with night-party-looking eyes hanging around our compound increased but there wasn’t a commensurate increase in noise levels. When I went down to greet them, they shook my hand but none of them held my gaze. Then, a family friend’s car drove in and in the back seat was my mother splayed with her head on her friend’s lap. We asked where our brother was and why she was like that. Did Daddy have an accident? Mummy, where is your car, is Daddy bringing KC back with it? 

I did not wait for her to say it, I realised I knew. Two months earlier, I had dreamt a dream so black that I had to be out of school for a week. In the dream, a teacher at our primary school who had died the year before and a man I did not recognise had come to my parents’ house to tell me that my brother was dead. The men around the gate, Aunty Chidi’s special prayer and her eyes on the radio and TV, the look on her face… After we followed our mother—and the women holding her up by her left and right arms—to the living room, I sieved my body through the many bodies standing and sitting around and made my way behind the two-seater couch and cried my first knowing tears. There, I had my first experience of a world in which KC would never talk back. My mother was still trying to find the words, she was still saying, “In everything, give thanks.” 

*

KC had to be buried that day. Mummy had found his body after spending the night trawling hospitals first, then mortuaries. I made a memory for myself out of the stories she told that afternoon. As she narrated, I saw her go from ward to ward, crying and singing with the other parents. I saw as she entered a ward and met yet another child who was not hers. I saw her shout at one of the cleaning staff to stop sweeping up the harmattan dust near one of the children in the wards. And so it went: throughout the day, I narrated myself out of it. When we got to the village and his casket was brought to my grandfather, I watched from on top of a mound, as if from the centre of a tornado, as people pushed bodies, mine and theirs, to get close to the casket. Many years later, whenever I thought back to that moment, that memory, I would wonder if I should have pushed through as well to see my brother’s body one last time. But was that my brother? A body mutilated by its motherland, was that my brother?

*

Every time I write about my brother, I make him possible again. 

Visitors can see him here.

*

“Someone, somewhere was paid to do something and they did not do their job.” My friend Tiwatayo says to me every time we discuss yet another such Nigerian tragedy. Visit Wikipedia and it will tell you that “Firemen in the airport handling the crash stated bad weather conditions were present.” The page does not tell you that the airport did not have a fire service and so it was the victims’ families with connections in Shell’s Port-Harcourt office who called on the company’s private fire service to attend to the crash. The Wikipedia page says nothing about the fact that the plane was manufactured in 1973 and was sold to Sosoliso when, after years of use, it no longer met European aviation standards. It says nothing of the fact that, in an earlier flight, the plane had made unusual noises and was scheduled for maintenance that never happened. It says nothing about the fact that the runway lights at the airport were off because the airport lacked electricity at the time. Instead, it will tell you that the Nigeria Accident Investigation Bureau places the responsibility for the crash squarely at the feet of the late flight crew who continued the approach beyond the Decision Altitude without having the runway in sight.

*

The crash defined my childhood. Before the crash, my family was friends with only one other bereaved family, the Kamanus. Chibuzo, their first son, was KC’s best friend, had gone on that Jos maths trip and had sat beside him on that flight. My social circle changed as families of the bereaved in my city found consolation in each other. Classmates whom I had only ever encountered on the class register became my sleepover friends. Sleepovers even became a thing. And it was not just the circles that changed; everything changed really. Some parents’ opened charity foundations and community organisations in honour of their late children. Some others stopped working. Nine months after the crash, eight younger siblings of the ‘Sixty Angels’ were admitted into the same school, Loyola Jesuit College. My only other surviving brother was one of the eight. My parents took different flights to send him off to the school. “Affliction shall not rise a second time”, we all chorused that year, alongside “It is well.”

*

And that was what you saw on the outside. Beyond the front doors where bereaved families set up condolence alters, inside our bodies, everything changed in the months and years after the tragedy was no longer news. My mother says my younger brother suddenly became hairy and that his face started to change. For me, soon after KC’s death, puberty struck my eight-year-old body and an ulcer grew in my stomach. But what stuns me the most these days when I go back to 2006 was the IVF processes that some of the women in our bereaved community—including my mother—went through, in search(?) of another child. For some of these women, this was a process of many years. One of them finally had their miracle baby two years ago, fifteen years down the line. In my family, another son eventually came, six years later, though he died from childbirth complications. In those six years, I had watched and listened to the discussions around my mother’s IVF procedures. I accompanied her to clinic appointments and stayed overnight with her and other women. I even made friends with one other woman who saw so much of her late youngest daughter in me that I began to think I was beautiful despite my body’s pudgy pubertal mess. 

On some days, it felt as though my mother’s IVF process was the journey she had to make to travel back to meet her son, her best friend. On other days, I heard whispers of how my family needed a backup son. One boy left in the family was too risky for my father’s lineage. One night in those days, I dreamt that my brother returned from school after a couple of years and apologised for all the stress. He finished cooking the coconut jollof rice our mother had to abandon that fateful afternoon, paid his hospital bills and took me to the airport tarmac. There, we knelt down under the hot harmattan sun, each with a brush and an iron bucket of soapy water, scrubbing the blood and soot off the concrete. In another dream, a fire began on one end of our city and blazed through it. I heard about the fire while I was in school so I started running with my friends. We ran for our lives for what felt like a lifetime and we could still not outrun the fire. As I ran, each time I looked back, I saw that no matter the outcome, I would never be able to return to the world before the fire. We eventually ran ahead enough to reach streets where the people had not yet started fleeing. My friends and I ran straight for the hospital and there were all these doctors trying to save the life of a baby in an incubator. I still remember the shouting back and forth between me and the doctors. “You have to run, the race is so long I don’t think the baby will make it if you try to save it but you, you have to run!” I kept saying. I still remember that when I woke up Aunty Chidi was the only one awake. She was still in the kitchen, cleaning up in the dark after a long evening of pounding and extracting akwu for our Sunday rice and stew lunch.

*

I went on to attend Loyola Jesuit College three years after the crash and touched everything my brother touched before he died. I beat myself up when I could not attend morning mass daily like I was told he did. They said he never missed mass that one term he spent in school and that he even fainted in the chapel one morning because he was sick but still chose mass over the clinic. I made friends with the girl that had had a crush on him and sometimes looking at his classmates, I imagined him among them.

In response to the tragedy, the senior school students formed a political consciousness group called ‘Concerned Students Association’ which I eventually joined when I entered SS2. When it was formed, the Concerned Students had the task of reaching out to leaders in public offices asking them to sign a commitment to honour their duty so that tragedies of negligence like the crash do not happen again. Who was not enraged or dumbfounded by the tragedy? I believe the modest goal at first was sixty signatures. By the time I had joined, some of the signatories in previous years had left office, and some had probably been arrested by the EFCC. We talked about the irony amongst ourselves and did not harbour grand illusions of what our student campaign could achieve. 

The group itself, at some point, also became a microcosm—or caricature if you like—of the very system it tried to hold accountable. It was one of the few groups whose activities permitted students to leave the school premises during term time, and so this was high currency power. Highly regarded as it was because of its moral ambitions and its connections to our Sixty Angels, it also became a means to accruing social capital at best, and a nepotistic venture at worst. There were practical benefits to being in the group whose immediately-perceived necessity overshadowed any ultimate aim of getting public-office-holders to sign a promise you knew they could not fulfill. Last I heard, the initiative died a couple of years ago, its back broken by the politics of scarcity and social capital.

*

At my brother’s funeral that day, it was decided that all my nuclear family members had to give eulogies. Aunty Chidi told my siblings and me that we all had to say the following phrase, no more, no less: “Daddy loves KC. Mummy loves KC. We all love KC but God loves him most.” I wonder now if she was afraid of what we might have spoken outside the template. If we faced that unending truth as it was, came to terms with the birth of an everlasting sigh in each one of us? Would our speech have been too embarrassing? Was she afraid we would have had to think about how we were feeling? About what had actually just happened? 

Anyway, we agreed to her instruction and when it was our turn to go up to the altar, the four of us who could form sentences at the time spoke as we had been told, one after the other:

“Daddy loves KC. Mummy loves KC. We all love KC but God loves him most.”

By the fourth person, there was a muffled chuckle from the congregation.

About the Author:

Immaculata Abba is a writer, researcher and artist whose work explores how Africans are making a living. She was a 2022 writer-in-residence at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. Her work has been screened, exhibited and published widely on platforms such as the BFI London and Lolwe.

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay