Okene did not attend the funerals of his crewmates. He has explained this in interviews: he feared the families’ reactions, feared being asked — or accused — of bearing responsibility for a survival that they might interpret as having come at the cost of his colleagues. “I couldn’t go because I didn’t know what the family will say, thinking ‘why is he the only one to survive?'” he told reporters.
This fear is the specific social form of survivor’s guilt: not just the internal question of why one person survived when others did not, but the external reality that the survivors of mass casualties are sometimes perceived, by those who lost people, as having done something wrong by surviving. The logic is not rational, but the emotion behind it is real, and the social pressure it creates is real too.
## The Social Reaction: Faith, Suspicion, and the Black Magic Accusation
The response to Okene’s survival in Nigeria was not uniformly celebratory. This is one of the less-discussed elements of his story in international coverage, which tended to frame the rescue as an unambiguous triumph. Within Nigeria, the response was more complicated.
Nigeria is, as Okene himself has noted in interviews, a highly religious society in which the boundary between faith and superstition — or between faith and the attribution of unusual events to supernatural causes — is more porous than in the secular public cultures of Western Europe or North America. Extraordinary events are routinely interpreted through frameworks that include the possibility of occult influence. A person who survived when eleven did not, in conditions that seemed to defy ordinary probability, was for some Nigerians an occasion for a different kind of question than “how did the physics allow this.”