Last week, I shared a poster of a missing Black girl called Samaria Ayanle on my Instagram. The next morning someone told me she’d been found dead. It’s tragic but I didn’t think much more of it. Then I saw the news. It turns out she’d been dead for three weeks. The questions began. Why did I find out about this so late? And if she was missing for three weeks, why didn’t more people share the information online?
Ayanle was studying at a London university. When she went missing, six of her friends created an Instagram page called ‘@haveyouseensamaria’ after getting increasingly worried following her disappearance. I saw her missing persons poster on an Instagram page made specifically for missing Black people, which was shared by a Black friend of mine.
