2002 — Remembering Igandu

On June 24, 2002, a packed passenger train at Igandu, Tanzania, lost its brakes climbing a hill and rolled backward at terrifying speed, racing past two stations before slamming into a freight train. A journey that should have carried people safely over a hill became, in moments, one of Tanzania's worst disasters.

The Tanzanian government reported 281 dead and more than 400 injured. Eighty-eight bodies could never be identified and were buried in a mass grave outside Dodoma. Those unidentified dead give Igandu its deepest sorrow: families left without certainty, and a nation left to remember together. We remember Igandu.