The #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. (Photo by Ayoola Salako via Unsplash)
I woke up today with a kind of heaviness. It is the kind one might easily attribute to accumulated exhaustion, the slow burn of a long semester, the grind and hustle that have come to define my life as a graduate student. But it feels like more than that. There is also a restlessness of spirit, a kind of wariness that is all too familiar. It is the fatigue that comes not from work but from living in tension, from inhabiting a dialogic space where one’s lived reality constantly collides with the world’s indifference.
Scrolling through social media, I am reminded that today marks the fifth anniversary of the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. And suddenly, I realize that the heaviness I felt upon waking is not only fatigue. It is anxiety, not the kind that anticipates the future, but the kind induced by the knowledge of a past that refuses to stay past. It is an anxiety of purpose, a recognition that something unresolved still hums beneath the surface of our lives. Soon I am sifting through articles written by other young Nigerians, essays and reflections from those who, like me, were shaped by that season of outrage and hope. Many of them write about leaving, how the events that followed the protests, the government’s denial, the massacres, the slow erasure of our voices, pushed them into exile. They write about how a movement that began as a call for dignity ended in disillusionment, and how, for many, the only form of survival left was departure.
I, too, left.
Sometimes I think what broke was not only our political faith, but our imaginative one. The young Nigerians who filled the streets then were not merely protesting police brutality; we were rehearsing the possibility of another country, one that worked, one that was kind, one that saw us. In those days, we spoke to each other with a tenderness that is rare in our history.
I have seen the exodus. I have met Nigerians in different corners of the western world, in classrooms, cafés, train stations, and on lonely walks back from work, all of us trying, in our own ways, to start over. We speak with a mix of pride and shame about our departures: pride because we dared to seek better lives, shame because leaving feels like a betrayal of the dream we once held together. Perhaps five years is too short a time to make such a claim, but I, too, have become wearied by the diaspora. I understand now what the late Sound Sultan meant when he sang “Ajo o ma le dabi ile o”—the journey can never be like home. There is a fatigue that comes from perpetual displacement, from the knowledge that even your rest is borrowed. To think of what it means to run is to think of what it means to lose one’s coordinates. What does it mean when your life, your friendships, your language, and your sense of belonging become reconfigured by a singular event? The #EndSARS protests did not just change our politics; they changed our grammar of living. It taught us that hope can be fatal, that to believe in a future for Nigeria might itself be a dangerous act.
And yet, we keep returning to the question: what does it mean to be Nigerian? To remain Nigerian? To continue to interrogate that identity in a foreign land where your humanity is sometimes questioned? Whenever I speak about Nigeria with people who have not lived through it, I find myself caught between explanation and defense. I want to speak of home with affection, but also with honesty. I want to speak of corruption without confirming stereotypes. I want to speak of pain without turning it into spectacle. The rhetoric of many conservative observers, both Nigerian and foreign, often circles back to this: if life abroad is so difficult, why not return home? But therein lies the wound. We do want to return. Many of us imagine it daily, the smell of rain on red soil, the banter of Lagos traffic, the taste of suya at night. But what is home if not a place of rest? And that place called Nigeria has not felt like home for a long time.
For those of us who still insist on calling it home, what we hold on to is not the nation as it is, but the idea of what it could have been. We cling to an ideal that propelled us to fight for it during that October back in 2020. We were a collective of dreamers. Brief strangers morphing into comrades. Cynics turning into believers. We were naïve, perhaps, but that naivety was also courage. We believed that if we stood long enough, sang loud enough, documented everything, then the truth would become undeniable.
But the government answered us with bullets.
In the five years since the event, I have constantly returned to the discursive terrain that made the protests happen. The brief moments of hope. The times when we thought that our government might listen to our demands. It is difficult to articulate the kind of disillusionment that follows the betrayal that arrived with those bullets. The realization that your country can look upon your unarmed body and still pull the trigger. That your government can deny your death while the world watches. There is a psychic violence in that erasure that no exile can soften. It lingers like an aftertaste in the mouth. Even now, thousands of miles away, I still flinch when I hear sirens. I still dream of the videos: bodies on the ground, the bloodied flag, the live Instagram video upon which the horror was televised.
Sometimes I think what broke was not only our political faith, but our imaginative one. The young Nigerians who filled the streets then were not merely protesting police brutality; we were rehearsing the possibility of another country, one that worked, one that was kind, one that saw us. In those days, we spoke to each other with a tenderness that is rare in our history. There were no tribes, no denominations, no hierarchies, only shared exhaustion and a desire to be free. It felt, for a brief, flickering moment, like we were building a language of care that could sustain us. To lose that language is a kind of bereavement. It leaves a silence that travel cannot cure. I have learned that diaspora is not simply distance; it is a continuous negotiation between gratitude and grief. Gratitude because you escaped; grief because escape was necessary. In the West, one learns quickly how to perform thankfulness, to smile through the awkwardness of belonging, to insist that you are fine, that you are “lucky.” But beneath that performance lies a quieter question: what does survival mean when it costs you the right to return?
Every October, that question returns. It returns in conversations, in the faces of those who could not leave, in the arguments we have with ourselves about whether the protests were worth it. Some say they were not, that nothing changed. But I think something did, even if we cannot yet name it. Something in us refuses to forget. The state may erase the archives, rewrite the stories, vilify the dead, but memory is stubborn. It survives in the smallest gestures: in the way our laughter often ends in sighs, in the way we still, somehow, believe that another Nigeria is imaginable.
Perhaps that is why the heaviness I woke up with this morning feels different. It is not only grief; it is also inheritance. To carry the memory of #EndSARS is to carry a kind of moral debt, the awareness that history is watching, that those who died have become part of our vocabulary of resistance. Their absence has become a form of presence, urging us to speak, to write, to remember. Still, I am tired. Tired of the distance, of the performance of optimism, of watching the same cycle of betrayal repeat itself back home. But fatigue, I have learned, is not always defeat. Sometimes it is simply the body acknowledging what the mind refuses to accept: that to love a country like Nigeria is to live in permanent contradiction. It is to grieve and to hope in the same breath.
