The question, in some quarters, was: how did he arrange this? What did he do that the others did not, on a plane beyond the physical?
The accusation that circulated in some Nigerian social contexts was that Okene had survived through the use of “black magic” — a term that in the Nigerian context encompasses a range of folk beliefs about supernatural intervention, sacrifice, and the use of occult power for personal advantage. The accusation is, when examined, the logical extension of a specific cultural framework for interpreting unusual survival: if you are alive and eleven others are dead, and if human agency is suspected rather than pure chance, then what kind of human agency could have produced this outcome?
Okene encountered this directly when he recounted his experience at his local church. The priest — the designated spiritual authority of the specific Christian community Okene belonged to — asked whether he had used black magic.
Okene’s reported reaction was shock: “I was so surprised! How could a man of God be saying this?”
The priest’s question, framed from inside a religious institution that officially opposes occult practice, reflects the degree to which the black magic interpretation had penetrated even the institutions that might have been expected to reject it. For a man who had spent sixty-plus hours in the dark praying to God and bargaining for his life, to be accused by a priest of the opposite kind of supernatural engagement was a specific kind of wound.
He avoided the crew’s funerals partly because of this: the families’ grief, combined with the broader social suspicion, created an environment in which his presence at gatherings of mourning might have provoked confrontation rather than providing comfort.