The article I chose is from The Guardian, "'Give us his body to bury': a mother's six-year fight for justice for son killed in Nigeria's anti-police protests" by Pelumi Salako (14 July 2026). In October 2020, Pelumi Onifade, a 20-year-old journalism intern, was filming an #EndSars protest in Lagos when, witnesses say, he was shot and dragged into a police van. A relative found his body in a morgue, but it was gone before the family arrived. A 2026 inquest confirmed it through his mother's DNA, yet it has not been returned, and no one has been held responsible. "His name will never depart from my household," says his mother, Bosede.
Salako lets one mother stand in front of the death toll, at least 56 by Amnesty's count. It works: a statistic records that a person died and a mother records who he was. But a single feature cannot carry the history behind the gun. Nigeria's national police force was formed under British colonial rule in 1930, as an instrument for governing subjects, and without that fact SARS reads as just one bad unit, not an inheritance.
I chose this article because I have known streets like this one since my childhood in Bangladesh. Bangladesh and Nigeria were both ruled by Britain, and both have shot young people for questioning the state. There, I grew up with the story of Begum Rokeya, who wrote under British rule about women kept behind purdah, watched inside their own homes. A police force and a father work through different machinery, one through law and impunity, the other through faith and fear, but both need silence. The real question is who holds the gaze and who gets to break it. Pelumi broke it with a camera. Purple Hibiscus argues this inside one family: freedom begins when someone refuses that silence, and the body pays for the refusal.
Adichie builds this through Eugene. Under military rule, he publishes the Standard against the regime, and his editor, Ade Coker, is killed by a package bomb. In public Eugene is brave, but at home he is the regime. He beats Mama until she miscarries, and after Nsukka he pours boiling water on Kambili's and Jaja's feet, telling Kambili, "That is what you do to yourself when you walk into sin. You burn your feet" (194). The word "yourself" moves the burn from his hand to her feet, and the violence arrives in the language of care. This violence also has a colonial source. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe wrote the missionaries' arrival; Adichie writes their converts, and opens with "Things started to fall apart at home." Eugene allows his children fifteen minutes with his father, Papa-Nnukwu, and adopts a British accent with white clergy like Father Benedict, what Homi Bhabha, in "Of Mimicry and Man," calls colonial mimicry, a copy of the colonizer that is "almost the same, but not quite." The colony left in 1960, but Eugene kept a version of it in one house.
Adichie does not blame the faith itself. Ifeoma's world is Catholic too, yet Father Amadi sings an Igbo praise song during the rosary, and Kambili watches Papa-Nnukwu pray and finds no heathen there. The difference is whether faith leaves room for the Igbo world. In that room, refusal becomes possible. When Jaja refuses communion, Kambili compares his defiance to Ifeoma's hibiscus, "rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do" (16). Adichie names two freedoms here, the crowd's and the household's, and the article shows how crushing the first reaches into a home. Kambili's first refusal is smaller. When Eugene tears Amaka's painting of Papa-Nnukwu, she curls over the pieces while he kicks her, and she is hospitalized. She lost the painting, but she did not let go.
Neither Adichie nor Salako pretends refusal is enough. Mama's poison ends Eugene's rule but not her silence, and Jaja goes to prison in her place. Bosede refuses to forget; the state keeps her son's body. Both texts show freedom beginning in refusal, and both are honest that refusal cannot return a body or restore a voice.