“I’m Not Afraid”: The 15 Year Old Who Walked Out of 56 Days in Captivity

Oyo State – Bello Hassan is fifteen years old, and he wants to go back to school. That single sentence carries more weight than it should, because for 56 days this summer, school was the last place anyone thought Bello would see again.

He was one of 44 pupils and teachers seized on the morning of May 15, when armed men stormed three schools in the Esiele and Yawota communities of Oriire Local Government Area in Oyo State. What began as an ordinary school day ended with Bello and dozens of others marched at gunpoint into the forest that borders the Old Oyo National Park.

For nearly two months, his name existed only on a list of the missing. His family did not know, from one day to the next, whether he was alive. Then, on July 10, after a monthlong security operation that tracked the kidnappers’ shifting hideouts and cut off their supply lines, Bello walked free.

Six days later, in a video shared online by a local community page, Oyo_Matters, Bello spoke publicly for the first time about what those 56 days had been like. He did not dwell on fear. He spoke instead about wanting to return to the classroom, about the ordinary future he still expects to have.

“I’m not afraid,” he said, in a line that has since travelled well beyond his own community, becoming something people are repeating back to each other as a kind of proof that a 15 year old boy can survive an ordeal that would break most adults and still choose, deliberately, to not let it define him.

His account joins a small but growing collection of testimonies from the Oriire victims, each one filling in a different corner of what those 56 days actually looked like from the inside. Some describe long nightly treks through the bush, moved from one hiding place to another whenever the kidnappers suspected soldiers were closing in. Others describe hunger, exhaustion, and children carried by older pupils when their legs simply gave out.

What makes Bello’s account distinct is not the horror in it. It is the absence of it in his telling. He is not minimising what happened. He is describing, in the plain language of a teenager, what it feels like to have already decided the worst is behind him.

Security agencies say nine suspected kidnappers were neutralised during the rescue operation and eight others arrested, though the wider criminal network believed to be sheltering behind the same forest terrain remains only partially dismantled. For families like Bello’s, that unfinished business is a separate worry, one that sits alongside the relief of having him home.

For now, Bello is doing the thing that 15 year olds who have not just survived 56 days in captivity are supposed to be doing: talking about school, about the people he missed, about picking back up where he left off. It is a small, deliberate act of ordinariness, and after everything, it might be the most powerful thing he could have said.