Death came like a storm, shaking every soul around it. It was painful, yet also powerful. It brought people together. It reminded us that life was fragile, and every moment counted. Growing up in Sokoto, in northern Nigeria, death was not something we took lightly. It was not a casual topic, not something we discussed in passing. It was sacred. Mysterious. Frightening. And as children, we feared it deeply.
By Usman Mohammed Binji
I remember how the news of someone’s death would travel like wildfire through our community. The air would change. Conversations would stop. Adults would lower their voices, and someone would mutter, “Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un,” with trembling lips. We, the children, would freeze. We didn’t understand everything, but we understood one thing: someone had crossed a line they would never return from. And that thought alone was terrifying.
We were not allowed to go near a corpse. If someone died, we were sent to the neighbour’s house or kept behind closed doors. Even hearing the word kabarin gawa (grave of the dead) was enough to give us chills. At night, we told stories of spirits and shadows. The cemetery was a place we avoided like a curse. We’d run past it during the day and refuse to walk near it after sunset.
Sometimes we’d see the funeral from a distance—men carrying a wooden plank with a white shroud on it, their heads bowed, moving slowly to the graveyard. It felt like the whole world paused for that moment. That image haunted us more than any nightmare.
Back then, death was rare. It wasn’t something we saw often. When someone died, the entire town mourned. People cried with their chests. Neighbours stayed around with rosaries in their hands, murmuring prayers. Men looked lost.
Even as a mark of respect, old women would remove their shoes as they passed the group of mourning men seated outside the house of the deceased. There was a quiet reverence in the way people moved, in the way voices dropped around the grieving. Younger children like us would stop going to the house of the deceased for months, not just out of sadness, but out of a deep fear that the spirit of the dead might capture us too.
But today… Things are different.
Now, death is everywhere. It’s on the radio. On our phones. In casual conversations. We hear of killings every day—on farms, on highways, in markets. Bandits strike villages in the night, and by morning, we’ve added more names to our growing list of the dead. In some places, children now hear gunshots more than lullabies. They talk about attacks the way we used to talk about rain.
We no longer shiver when we hear someone has died. We’ve become used to it. We’ve become tired. And that childhood fear we once had—the sacred awe, the heavy silence—it’s gone. Now we scroll past death announcements. We bury people and return to life like nothing happened. The mourning neighbours no longer hold rosaries but discuss politics and soccer. Our hearts are numb.
Sometimes I miss those days when death scared us. When it made us think, made us pray, made us kind. When it was rare, and so it felt important. Maybe that fear was a gift. Maybe it kept us human.
I long for a time when death made us pause—not because we feared the grave, but because we respected life.
May Allah grant solace to all the departed souls. Ameen.
