I was aware that this was going to be a very busy weekend for me, so I tried as much as possible to finish my article for the week quite early. I had been working on a piece I was actually very eager to have published, so I was pleased to have gotten it out of the way. Then, on Saturday night, I went on X.
I was scrolling casually when the stories of September 11 started appearing on my timeline. I read a few, then another, and another. Eventually, I searched the keyword “9/11” and found myself going down a rabbit hole I had not expected. I spent almost the entire night reading the stories of the victims and looking at their photographs.
What affected me most, however, were the calls and voice messages they left behind. There was something profoundly heartbreaking about hearing people who some had no idea they were making their final calls. Some were calling their spouses, some their parents, some their friends, while others were simply trying to understand what was happening; others were providing critical details. Twenty-five years later, their voices are still here.
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I am not sure I’ve thought of 9/11 in a long time. I was still young when it happened, perhaps too young to understand the politics, geopolitics or the full meaning of terrorism, but I remember the chaos and confusion. It was an event that took over almost every television set in Nigeria as people watched CNN and tried to make sense of what was unfolding in America. I remember being particularly angry when I learned that the people responsible claimed to be Muslims. Even at that age, I knew enough about my faith to understand that what they had done was not what Islam preaches. I did not have the vocabulary then to explain extremism or terrorism, but I knew that murdering innocent people was certainly not an expression of the Islam I knew.
Interestingly, September 11 was also the first opinion piece I ever wrote. I was young, and it was certainly not the kind of polished article I would write today, but the events affected me enough that I felt compelled to put my thoughts into words. Looking back, I realise that I was witnessing not only one of the defining events of my childhood but also, in a very small way, the beginning of my interest in geopolitics and my journey as a writer.
What happened that morning is now one of the most documented events in modern history. Four commercial aircraft were hijacked. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, another struck the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew attempted to regain control of the aircraft. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and left the world watching in disbelief as the towers collapsed.
But the images we remember can sometimes obscure the people who were at the centre of them. As I went through the stories last night, I found myself learning about the lives of people whose names I had never known. Their occupations, their families, their personalities, their plans for that day. Some had gone to work as they did every morning. Some had made calls before leaving home. Some had children they expected to see that evening. None knew that an ordinary Tuesday morning was about to become the final day of their lives.
Then there were the first responders. Firefighters, police officers, paramedics and other emergency workers moved towards the buildings while thousands of others were trying desperately to get away. Many of them died in the attempt to save others. Those who survived carried the consequences of that day long afterward, including serious illnesses associated with exposure at Ground Zero and the psychological burden of what they had witnessed.
For the families of those who died, however, the aftermath was not measured in hours or days. It became part of their lives. Children grew up without parents. Spouses had to continue raising families alone. Parents buried their children. Anniversaries, birthdays and family milestones were forever marked by the absence of someone who should have been there. The attacks lasted only a few hours; the grief lasted a lifetime.
And then there was the world that emerged from those few hours. The United States launched the War on Terror, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan and later the invasion of Iraq. Global security policy changed dramatically. International security changed, air travel changed, intelligence and surveillance changed, Governments strengthened counterterrorism laws and capabilities and American foreign policy shifted. The effects extended far beyond the United States, influencing conflicts, governments, migration and international relations for years to come. A few hours in September 2001 would go on to shape decisions that affected millions of people who had never been anywhere near New York or Washington that morning.
The wars that followed would claim many more lives, displace millions of people and shape international politics for decades. For a generation, terrorism and counterterrorism became part of the vocabulary of everyday life. September 11 therefore cannot be understood only as an event that happened in New York and Washington. Its consequences travelled across borders and continued long after the smoke had cleared.
Muslims were also inevitably affected by the aftermath. The attackers claimed an Islamic justification for their actions, and this placed ordinary Muslims around the world in the difficult position of having to distinguish their faith from an extremist ideology that claimed to represent it. For many Muslims, who knew instinctively that the attacks had nothing to do with the Islam we understood and practice, the years that followed brought a much more complicated relationship with how the religion was perceived and discussed globally. But even that is only one small part of the much larger story of what September 11 changed.
Twenty-five years later, however, I think there is value in returning to September 11 without allowing the enormity of its geopolitical consequences to completely overshadow the people who experienced the day itself. After spending that night reading about the victims, I kept coming back to the same thought: before September 11 became history, it was a morning in the lives of ordinary people. Their families did not lose a statistic that morning. They lost someone they loved.
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What stays with me after spending last night reading those stories is not only the footage of the towers or the political decisions that followed. It is the ordinary nature of the lives that were interrupted. People who had gone to work. People travelling to meetings. People making telephone calls. People expecting to go home.
And perhaps that is why those final calls are so difficult to listen to. There is an intimacy to hearing someone’s voice when they do not know they are speaking for the last time or perhaps some of them knew. Their words were never intended to become part of history, yet history preserved them.
When I first watched September 11 unfold on television. I was too young to understand the politics, the ideology or the decisions that would follow; I simply knew that something terrible had happened. Twenty-five years later, I understand much more about the world that emerged from that day, but one thing remains unchanged: thousands of people went about their lives that morning believing they would return home, and they did not.
Their families went on without them, their children grew up without them, and their voices, preserved in those final calls, became some of the last traces of lives that ended without warning. Twenty-five years later, we remember September 11 not only because of what happened that morning, but because of everything that came after it. Perhaps most importantly, we should remember that before it became history, it was simply a morning in the lives of nearly 3,000 people who never got to see the end of that day.
