I was scrolling through Twitter the other day when a name caught my eye: Pius Adesanmi.
I didn't know him personally, and honestly, when he was alive, I only caught glimpses of his brilliance - a tweet here, a sharp observation there. But looking back at his legacy now, it hits differently.
He moved fluidly between Yoruba cultural memory and global intellectual debates, drawing on proverbs, biblical allusions, and postcolonial theory with equal ease. His writing could pivot from a Soyinka turn of phrase to a Derridean aside, from the cadences of Yoruba oríkì to the clipped irony of French satire. This hybridity was not affectation; it was the natural register of a mind trained in multiple traditions and committed to the idea that African intellectual life must be capacious, porous, and unafraid of complexity.
All of this to say.....He was kinda important to people and systems.
Then, March 10, 2019, happened.
One hundred and fifty-seven people on an Ethiopian Airlines flight. No sickness, no old age - just a routine trip to a conference in Kenya that never landed. It’s mad when you think about it. All that depth, all those intelligent ideas, just gone in a random instant.
The Thinness of the Line
It’s easy to look at a plane crash as a "big" event, but then I look at my brother.
Four months ago, the randomness hit my own front door. My only brother was just walking along the road - maybe he was on his phone, he can’t even remember anything, when he was hit by a bus. It was ghastly. He collapsed on the spot, unconscious, his life suddenly hanging on the choices of strangers.
If it weren't for good Samaritans rushing him to the hospital, I don’t know where we’d be. For hours, while we were just living our lives, he was a "unknown" in a hospital bed, a person without a name until he woke up enough to tell them who we were.
That news... it’s been triggering. Because I can’t stop playing the other versions of the story in my head. What if his head had smashed into the pavement? What if I was finding out about his death from a newspaper headline instead of a hospital recovery room? It’s terrifying because it proves that you can be doing the most mundane thing - something you’ve done a thousand times - and still be caught in a tragedy you didn't see coming.
No Status, No Security
We like to think we can negotiate with fate. We think:
**If I’m successful enough...**
**If I’m careful enough...**
**If I pray enough...**
But these two stories - a world-class professor in the sky and my brother on a random street - prove that life is just incredibly fickle. It’s not about how much money you have or how close you are to power. You can do everything right and still be caught in an "unnatural occurrence."
It Is What It Is
I’m not saying this to be dark. I’m not even saying "live every day like it’s your last," because that’s another cliché manual we try to follow.
Maybe the point is just the fleetingness of it all. We use the planes, we cross the roads, and we carry our plans around like they’re guaranteed. But there is no manual. There is no "if/then" logic to surviving the day.
It’s just life. It’s fragile, it’s fickle, and sometimes, it just is what it is. One day you’re here, making plans for a conference or walking home, and the next, you’re a memory or a miracle.