By ABUBAKAR ADAM IBRAHIM

Why I Wrote Damage: The Buried Wounds of Nigeria’s Military Past

THIS week, my latest book, Damage, arrived in the hands of readers through my Nigerian publisher, Masobe Books. Seeing my fifth book of fiction finally enter the world fills me with an indescribable sense of gratitude. I think of the readers who have waited patiently for it, and I hope the novel travels far, finds its audience and begins the conversations I have long wanted it to provoke.

Yet Damage, my third novel, has taken an unusually long and winding route to publication. Like the River Niger carving its way towards the Atlantic and shaping the delta at Nigeria’s southern edge, the book meandered, doubled back and disappeared into the landscape of forgetting before finally reaching the sea of waiting hands. Its journey has been almost as complicated as the history it attempts to confront.

A Story Born from Nigeria’s Unfinished Past

When I began writing Damage, Nigeria was still navigating the consequences of decades of military rule. The country had experienced the shock of General Sani Abacha’s death in June 1998, at a time when his regime appeared to be preparing the machinery for its continued hold on power. That unexpected turn helped open the way for a transition that eventually brought the military era to an end and ushered in civilian democratic rule on 29 May 1999.

In the years that followed, we moved through different stages of democratic adjustment. Initially, we were almost startled by the possibility of a new political order. Then, whenever the government stumbled or public institutions failed, we often heard that democracy was still young and needed time to mature. Eventually, however, that explanation became less convincing. The system continued to reproduce familiar patterns of abuse, mismanagement and disregard for the people, often without the need to pretend that everything was merely a consequence of democratic inexperience.

Throughout these transitions, one question continued to trouble me: What had decades of military rule done to our collective imagination, our relationships and our understanding of power?

We had spent years discussing political transitions, elections and the return to civilian government. Yet I felt that we had not adequately explored how military interventions had reshaped our national psyche, how authoritarian habits had entered civilian institutions, or how the damage had travelled beyond public life into the intimate spaces of families and relationships.

The military had not merely governed the country. Its interventions had altered the boundaries between authority and citizenship, coercion and obedience, silence and survival. Those effects did not disappear when soldiers returned to the barracks. They lingered in institutions, homes, memories and the ways people learned to navigate power.

That unresolved history became the ground on which I began to imagine Damage.

The Pain That Never Reached the Record

Nigeria made an important attempt to confront the abuses of military rule through the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, popularly known as the Oputa Panel. The commission received thousands of petitions concerning human rights violations during the period from 15 January 1966, when Nigeria experienced its first military coup, to 29 May 1999, when military rule ended.

The hearings provided an opportunity for victims to speak about their experiences and seek public acknowledgement of the wrongs they had suffered. Nevertheless, a public process can only document the experiences that reach it. Many Nigerians told their stories, but countless others never appeared before the panel. Some may not have known how to participate; others may have lacked the courage, confidence or circumstances necessary to expose their pain.

Still others may have carried their experiences in silence because speaking could threaten their families, reputations, livelihoods or personal safety.

I became interested in that space between the history recorded in official proceedings and the history that remained buried inside individuals and households. What happens to the people whose experiences never enter the public record? What becomes of a wound that a person cannot name, acknowledge or share? And what happens when that unspoken pain travels from one generation to another?

In that neglected space, I found the beginnings of Nasrin Amin, the central character in Damage. She carries a secret pain for decades until the burden becomes impossible to contain. When she finally confronts the person she believes inflicted that pain upon her, she forces three generations of her family to reckon with a history they have never fully understood.

Each generation must confront the past differently. Each must also contend with the consequences of what was done, what was concealed and what was allowed to remain unspoken.

Why Nasrin Had to Confront Her Past

When I decided to write Damage, my primary intention was to tell the story of a woman who chooses to confront her darkest secret and the person she believes caused her suffering. I wanted to explore what happens when someone who has spent years carrying a private burden finally refuses to remain silent.

However, as I developed the story, I became increasingly interested in the structures that make abuse possible and silence sustainable. Individual wrongdoing rarely exists in a vacuum. It often finds protection in systems of authority, cultural expectations, institutional loyalties and social arrangements that discourage victims from speaking.

Consequently, Nasrin’s confrontation offered me a way to examine how power structures, cultural practices and collective attitudes can shield perpetrators. I wanted to consider how a society can teach people to endure pain rather than challenge its source, and how institutions can protect those who cause harm while leaving victims to manage the consequences alone.

These questions also allowed me to explore the relationship between public history and private suffering. A country may declare the end of an authoritarian era, but its citizens do not automatically recover from the injuries inflicted during that period. Families may continue to live with secrets, institutions may reproduce old habits, and people may struggle to distinguish inherited fear from the demands of the present.

For me, Damage became a way to bring those questions into the lives of characters whose experiences are personal, intimate and deeply entangled with Nigeria’s larger history.

The Novel I Left Behind

After I completed the manuscript, I did what I sometimes do with my writing: I abandoned it.

For years, Damage remained somewhere in my digital files, gathering what I can only describe as electronic dust. Meanwhile, I moved on to other projects, wrote other books and watched them make their way into publication. The novel existed, but I did not return to it with the urgency it deserved.

Then my doctoral research at the University of Iowa brought me back to the questions that had inspired it.

I was examining how Nigeria’s history of authoritarian rule had shaped journalism and the practice of journalism. I became particularly interested in the ways this legacy continues to influence journalists, the legal framework surrounding their work, and the conduct of law enforcement towards the press.

As I explored these issues, I began to recognise the persistence of authoritarian habits in institutions that were supposed to operate under democratic rule. The past was not simply something we had left behind. It continued to shape the present through inherited practices, assumptions and relationships with power.

That realisation reminded me of the novel I had written years earlier. Damage had explored another expression of the same legacy: the way authoritarianism and the culture of silence could penetrate families, shape personal relationships and determine what people felt permitted to say.

I returned to the manuscript, dug it out of its digital hiding place, polished it and decided to give it another chance. More importantly, I wanted the world to meet these characters and see how they had carried their burdens for decades.

In retrospect, the time away may have helped me understand more clearly why the story mattered. The questions that had led me to write it had continued to follow me into my research and my understanding of Nigeria. The manuscript was waiting, but I had also been gathering new ways to read it.

The Perpetrator Can Also Be Damaged

One of the most unsettling insights I gained while writing Damage was the realisation that perpetrators do not always understand themselves as victims of anything. They may see only their authority, their entitlement or their ability to impose their will on others.

Yet some are also products of the systems they serve. They may have been shaped by institutions that normalise violence, reward obedience and treat domination as a legitimate expression of power. Others may become trapped by their own greed, cruelty or moral corruption.

I must be clear, however: recognising the forces that shape a perpetrator does not absolve that person of responsibility. Understanding how someone becomes capable of causing harm is not the same as excusing the harm they cause. Context can deepen our understanding of wrongdoing without removing accountability.

This distinction is important to my understanding of Nigeria’s military history. The military intervened repeatedly in the country’s civic and political life, exercising power over institutions and citizens. Yet those interventions also damaged the military itself by entangling it in the consequences of political rule, weakening the boundaries between military responsibility and civilian authority.

I explore this argument more extensively in a forthcoming essay for Granta. In Damage, I approach a related question through the experiences of individuals and families: how does a system that enables one person to harm another also shape, deform and ultimately damage the people who sustain it?

The answers are neither simple nor uniform. Nevertheless, I believe we must examine the full human consequences of authoritarian power if we hope to understand the society it leaves behind.

Three Generations Living with One History

Although Damage engages with large questions about power, institutions and national memory, its heart belongs to three generations of Nigerians struggling to live with a secret history.

That history is approaching the edge of forgetting because we have never fully processed it. Yet its influence remains visible in our individual lives, our institutions and our collective behaviour. We continue to carry pains whose origins we may not completely understand, while the circumstances that produced them may have changed or disappeared.

For me, the three generations in the novel make it possible to explore how history travels. The first generation may carry the original injury; the second may inherit the silence surrounding it; the third may encounter fragments of the past without knowing why they matter. Each generation therefore faces a different relationship with memory, responsibility and truth.

The process of confronting that history can produce different consequences for each person. Speaking may bring relief, but it can also disrupt families and expose truths that people have spent years trying to conceal. Silence may preserve a fragile peace, yet it can also allow the original harm to continue shaping lives long after the event itself.

I wanted to explore these contradictions rather than offer an easy resolution. History is rarely tidy, and the human beings who live through it do not always emerge with clear answers.

Why We Must Remember Where We Came From

Nigeria has now experienced 27 years of uninterrupted civilian democratic rule since May 1999. These have not necessarily been the best years in our history, and democracy has not delivered every promise Nigerians hoped it would fulfil. Nevertheless, we must remember the circumstances from which we emerged.

An entire generation has now been born, grown up and begun raising families under civilian rule without experiencing the uncertainty and arbitrariness associated with military government. That is a significant change, and it is worth recognising.

At the same time, the distance between generations creates a risk. When the immediate experience of authoritarian rule fades, its consequences can become harder to understand. Memories may lose their sharp edges, while nostalgia begins to transform a difficult past into something deceptively attractive.

I worry about the possibility of romanticising military rule simply because younger Nigerians have not experienced its daily realities. The apparent order of an authoritarian system can seem appealing when people encounter it only through stories, slogans or selective memories. The injuries, fear and arbitrary exercise of power that accompanied it may seem distant, even unreal.

This is why I consider it important to preserve the experiences of those who lived through that period. We cannot evaluate the present honestly if we refuse to remember the past, nor can we make informed decisions about our future if we allow history to dissolve into nostalgia.

For me, Damage is an attempt to document that history through the pain of its victims, the resilience of its survivors and the courage of those who decide to challenge the silence. It is a novel about what happens when a society fails to confront its wounds and about the difficult work required to bring those wounds into the open.

What Five Books Have Taught Me

With the publication of Damage, I have now authored five books of fiction. I feel deeply grateful that these books exist and continue to find readers, including people who encounter them years—or even more than a decade—after their publication.

I am also moderately content that I have played a small part in documenting who we are. Through fiction, I have tried to capture our contemporary history, our dreams and aspirations, our failures and triumphs, our joys and sorrows, and the many contradictions that make us human.

Literature offers us a mirror, although the reflection it provides is not always comfortable. Through stories, we can recognise our flaws, examine the scars we carry and acknowledge the strength that has helped us survive. We can see the beauty in our lives alongside the mess in our backgrounds, and we can begin to understand what we have endured to arrive at the present.

That recognition matters because a mirror does more than show us what we look like. It can also help us see what requires repair and what deserves appreciation. It allows us to confront the parts of ourselves we might otherwise prefer to ignore.

Ultimately, I do not expect a storyteller to solve a nation’s problems. I hope, however, that stories can help us ask better questions, recognise the experiences of others and understand ourselves with greater honesty.

If Damage can help readers confront an overlooked part of our history, recognise the people who continue to live with its consequences and question the silences that allow suffering to persist, then I will feel that the long journey of this novel has been worthwhile.

A storyteller can hardly hope for more than to help a people look into the mirror of literature, recognise themselves and begin to understand what needs fixing—and what deserves to be held close.