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To read Chibueze Darlington Anuonye’s edited nonfiction anthology on the #EndSARS protest, Who Gave the Order? A History of a People’s Movement (Masobe Books, 2025), is to engage in an act of self-excavation. This is especially true for anyone, like me, who witnessed the movement. I am reminded of what it meant to live through such a precarious time. Looking back, as Anuonye and the contributors have done, shows how the nation’s troubles were hiding beneath the belly of police brutality, only to explode and confront all issues, including personal losses, power abuses, generational tension, and the exclusion of queer lives.

Although many accounts of #EndSARS have conventionally centered on Lekki, Lagos, Anuonye’s recollection of the protests in Owerri in his introduction reminds us that the violence was larger than Lekki and very much national in scope. Despite threats and attacks in the days and weeks of the protest, young Nigerians across the country felt an arresting longing to participate wherever they were. That cogent desire is what Basit Jamiu in “Reshaping the Self” describes as a force. A similar sense of that desire appears in Ayomide Ifenaike’s “Zombies in Lagos.” After circulating #EndSARS hashtags on social media, the desire to be part of the movement toward freedom propels Ifenaike to seek sponsorship to travel to Lekki, likely because the destination received the most online attention. But Ifenaike would later learn that what he sought in Lekki could be found in Gberigbe, his community, where he would later join the protest. The Lekki tollgate, however, would become what Anuonye calls a “cemetery of youthful lives and dreams” after the Nigerian military opened fire on unarmed protesters who were only waving the Nigerian flag.

The Lekki tollgate would become a “cemetery of youthful lives and dreams” after the Nigerian military opened fire on unarmed protesters who were only waving the Nigerian flag.

What, then, was the crime of the young Nigerians murdered at the 2020 #EndSARS protest? As Abubakar Adam Ibrahim writes in “It Was Supposed to Be Different,” the young people’s only demand was that “the police point their guns away from them.” This demand for restraint in the face of unchecked power also resonates in Ukamaka Olisakwe’s “Happy, Really,” where Cee’s story exposes the entrenched privileges and arbitrary authority wielded by the Nigerian police officers and their spouses. Yet it was for making this demand that these young people were killed. Even their death has been refuted by the Nigerian government. Whereas a piece like Abubakar Ndakotsu’s “The Death of Tomorrow” challenges the claim of no causality through the telling of the story of Kolo, who is fatally wounded by military gunshots at the tollgate, which leads to Kolo’s death days later. As Kolo is someone’s son, someone’s brother, and friend, so also is Ifeanyi in Esther Okonkwo’s “Fences.” Okonkwo humanizes another SARS victim, Ifeanyi, by chronicling what life was like for the boy before his arrest by the infamous security outfit. Ifeanyi is someone’s friend, who is able to love and be loved. When SARS victims are not people’s sons or friends like Kolo and Ifeanyi, they are people’s fathers, like the father of Iruoma Chukwuebuka’s friend, as the writer recounts in “What Kills People Is Somewhere around Them.” The man suffers and dies in the hands of the mindless security agents. 

The anthology suggests that SARS victims are not only those detained and tortured but also those who, like in Chibueze Ukwoma’s “I Am Somebody,” flee at the sight or sound of the police. The police were no longer anyone’s friends. This pervasive mistrust is so deep that even gestures of police camaraderie are received with suspicion by Nigerian citizens living outside Nigeria. Nnamdi Oguike comes face-to-face with the friendship of a UK police officer, whose mere Christmas wish reveals to Oguike the many contradictions in the Nigerian police. Oguike, as he says and as it is true for many other Nigerians, cannot look a Nigerian policeman in the eye. He recalls SARS and the disappearance of young Nigerians who are not only killed but also have their bodies dissolved with acid, which denies the deceased victims a grave and denies their loved ones the little privilege of closure. “To cling onto loss without closure is a terrible thing,” Oguike writes.

Are older generations of Nigerians complicit victims and perpetrators of the SARS agenda? In Zenas Ubere’s “What You Saw,” generational tension emerges around protest tactics, as older Nigerians advocate restraint in contrast to youths’ disruptive road blockages. Recounting an exchange with a bus passenger of his father’s generation, Ubere insists that “blocking roads is still effective” and refutes his father’s plea for withdrawal from the protest by asserting that “we, young people, were the actual victims of SARS violence.” The essay conveys the sense that the older generation’s preference for milder protest may signal a troubling complacency about the nation’s continued deterioration.

Although the #EndSARS protest called for freedom from state violence, it failed to extend that demand to queer lives.

Although the #EndSARS protest called for freedom from state violence, it failed to extend that demand to queer lives. In “Let the Kite Perch,” Mazpa Ejikem interrogates this contradiction by challenging the homophobia of nonqueer protesters who dictate how queer individuals should articulate and demand their liberation. Ola W. Halim extends this critique in “Bonfires in Sunset Cities,” where he exposes how queer Nigerians endure bullying that cannot be reported to the police, given officers’ complicity in the arrest of those labeled “suspected gays.” Countering claims that #EndSARS was unconcerned with queer lives, TJ Benson, in his essay titled with the hashtag sign “#,” argues that since police routinely searched young people’s phones for evidence to classify them as either “scammers” or “homosexuals,” it should be unsurprising to anyone that queer protesters carried placards to insist that queer lives mattered within the movement.

Who Gave the Order? conveys the sense that the police brutality on human bodies that led to the protest was only one manifestation of Nigeria’s broader problem. That the protest continues to stir minds and elicit reflection to this day attests to the movement’s dynamics, nonmonolithic formation, and obvious ethical overlaps. The meanings of the movement have since expanded, with this anthology standing as one contribution to a growing canon. At the same time, the volume accounts for the movement’s internal fractures, particularly the exclusion of queer lives from claims to freedom, thereby revealing how even well-meaning struggles can reproduce structures of exclusion. Assembling these contributors from different parts of the country who witnessed the movement from various vantage points affirms the Igbo proverb that one does not stand at a place to view a masquerade. Where the #EndSARS movement is the big masquerade, this volume becomes the collective movement around the mask to capture its full form and essence.

Stanford University