Academics mourn colleagues lost in Ethiopian Airlines crash

Several scientists and university lecturers—many of them African—have been named as passengers on an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed on 10 March, killing all onboard.

Pius Adesanmi (pictured), a Canadian-Nigerian professor of English working at Carleton University in Ottawa, was among the 157 people who perished when the plane went down on Sunday morning between Ethiopia and Kenya. 

Adesanmi, who worked at the university’s Institute of African Studies, “was a towering figure in African and post-colonial scholarship and his sudden loss is a tragedy”, said Benoit-Antoine Bacon, the university’s president and vice-chancellor, in a statement.