Her nose is pointed. Her lips are thin. Her hair is black and shiny, so long and so straight, as if you could thread your needle and stitch a loose hem with each strand.
In her hand is a pen and notebook.
I wonder if I will remember how to hold a pen. I wonder what my handwriting looks like now.
“Is it okay for me to ask you some questions?” she asks.
I nod. I have forgotten how to say no.
She talks rapidly, shooting her words through her nose, so I am happy to have the man interpret, even though I still remember some of the English I learned in school.
“How old are you?”
“What is the name of your village?”
“When were you kidnapped?”
From time to time, she scribbles.
The questions become more and more difficult as she proceeds, experiences I am ashamed to share, especially not with a stranger. My fingers twist and twirl around each other in my lap, like tadpoles in a pond.
I stop answering.
“It’s important that you tell her your story,” the man says. “You have to tell her everything that happened. That is the only way the world can know, so that they can continue to look for the other stolen girls and rescue them from Boko Haram.”
My story could help find Sarah?
And maybe Jacob as well?
“There were also boys taken,” I say. “They didn’t take only girls.”
“Good. You have to tell her everything. Everything. That’s the only way the world can know.”
Questions and Answers
THE WOMAN FROM THE United States of America is back yet again with more questions for answers that will help the world find Sarah and Jacob.
I still cannot take my eyes away from her hair.
“You can touch my hair if you want,” she says.
She smiles.
I smile.
Aisha
I WHIMPER.
I snivel.
I blubber.
I bawl.
At long last, I am shedding tears for my precious friend Aisha.
The woman from the United States of America does not know Aisha and neither does the man from Bring Back Our Girls. Still, the two of them cry along with me, and give me tissues to dry my eyes.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I TAKE THE BOOK from her and stare at the curious artwork.
An old man in a hat, and a boy with golden hair waving a piece of paper.
Purple and yellow cover, brown pages, 192 in total, illustrations in black-and-white.
“I hope you like it,” says the woman from the United States of America. “I got it specially for you.”
A book specially for me?
“Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory is opening at last!” I read silently from the back flap. “But only five lucky children will be allowed inside.”
Amazing. Another world strange and new.
Suddenly, like an eagle trapped in a coop but whose heart remains in the sky, I am eager to break loose and fly high.
Whatever happens next, whatever lies ahead, I want to go back to school.
Found
“I WANT TO SEE the list of names,” he says. “I was informed that some of our daughters are here, some girls from our village.”
I recognize his voice as soon as I hear it.
I freeze.
The inflections, the emphasis on the first, second, and third words of his sentences, the firmness mixed with gentleness . . . everything is familiar.
I turn.
He leans his hands on the table, talking to the man sitting with the laptop.
I swing my head away, hiding in shame.
Too late. He has already seen me.
He screams my name and hops over five people’s heads to get to me.
He grabs my neck and gathers me into his arms.
“Thank you, God! Your mother never stopped praying that God would bring you back home to her! She knew that you would come home one day!”
There are tears in Pastor Moses’s eyes.
I cry.
To think that I will soon hear “Ya Ta” again.
Afterword: The Chosen Generation
WE COULD CALL THEM “the Chosen Generation,” borrowing from a popular Nigerian gospel song. They are girls that were supposed to be more fortunate than their mothers. They had better access to education. They would have a chance to make their dreams come true. Yet something changed along the way.
Since 2009, the terrorist group Boko Haram has been fighting an armed insurgency with the aim of creating an Islamic state in northern Nigeria. More than twenty thousand people have been killed and over two million displaced by the fighting, and, in a disturbing trend, thousands of women and girls have been abducted and raped.
One of these abductions received worldwide media coverage, at least for a while: on April 14, 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their secondary school dormitory in Chibok, a small town in northeast Nigeria. In the middle of the night, they put the students on trucks and carried them away into the darkness of the Sambisa forest. Fifty-seven girls managed to escape by jumping off the trucks as they trundled into the night; 219 were taken away.
Yet to this day, few people around the world know any of these young women’s names. They are just numbers. They are faceless.
Adaobi and I—a Nigerian and an Italian, a local woman and a foreigner—decided to document this tragedy in a way that nobody else had done: from the point of view of the girls and their families. We met in Abuja about one year after the Chibok kidnapping. I wanted to write a book for teenagers, and I had gotten in touch with the Bring Back Our Girls activists, who were campaigning for the girls’ return. I didn’t know Adaobi, but after reading an article of hers that appeared in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera—a moving letter to the kidnapped girls—I contacted her via email. She said she was also thinking about writing a book.
We decided to embark on this project together. I was thinking about nonfiction, while Adaobi wanted to write a novel because—as she pointed out—we didn’t know how this story would end. I flew to Nigeria; I had arranged to meet some of the girls’ families who had fled to Abuja, and we went to their houses together. We conducted interviews with the girls’ parents—some in person and others over the phone. In 2016, we published another book in Italy, Ragazze Rubate (Mondadori), which is half fiction and half nonfiction; and I participated in a project led by Adaobi for the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, a Nigerian organization that wanted to collect every name and story of the Chibok girls.
There were challenges. It could be painful for the parents to talk; sometimes when I called them on the phone, I sensed that they had hoped it would be somebody bringing news rather than another journalist asking more questions. However, they often decided to talk to the media because it was their only way to keep the story alive. Some of the accounts contradicted one another, either because parents weren’t completely honest or because they simply did not know much about their daughters’ lives.
The biggest challenge for me was access to the most remote areas of Nigeria. When Adaobi managed to go to Chibok with a group of journalists, we decided that, because the situation was still volatile, I would endanger them because I am white and I would have attracted attention to the group. I had to stay behind. Despite the challenges, we followed developments closely every day for years, getting to know the parents and hoping for the girls’ return.
We learned about their best friends and favorite songs. We could imagine their daily lives: helping their mothers and fathers in the house and on the farm. They taught their siblings and played with them. They lived in a part of Nigeria where losing a child to infection, fever, diarrhea, and other treatable maladies is a common experience for mothers—109 out of every 1,000 children die in northeast Nigeria, the highest infant mortality rate in the country.
They lived in Borno State, where women marry early, and the fact that they were going to school wa
s impressive. More than half of the teenage girls in this part of the country have never studied at all, and only three out of ten will go to high school. After marriage, only a few continue to go, and that is only with the consent of their husbands.
We wanted these girls to be seen not just as numbers but as the curious, ambitious, and lovely daughters whom their families wanted to see again.
We wanted their parents’ anguish to be understood. Their daughters were taken alive, but not knowing what had happened to them was, in some ways, worse than if they had died. Their parents couldn’t mourn. They lived in limbo.
Rebecca Yishaku is one of the fifty-seven Chibok girls who escaped by jumping from the truck.
Rebecca was twenty-one, with a round face and lips like blooming flowers. When I interviewed her, she had returned to school, but had moved to Abuja, where she lived with an older sister. She liked to wear gold hoops in her ears and her hair gathered atop her head in a colorful scarf. Her widening hips announced her womanhood, but her voice remained like that of a child.
What struck me when I talked to her over the phone was the incredible guilt that she feels for leaving behind her best friend, Saraya Yanga. A year and a half after the kidnapping, Rebecca told me that she still saw Saraya and the other abducted girls in her nightmares. She pictured them deep in the forest, and they asked her how it was that she could have abandoned them.
Rebecca and Saraya had met in school three years earlier. They commissioned identical outfits with short pink and yellow skirts, orange tops, and shoes to match; they planned to wear them to the end-of-school celebration. They didn’t want to get married after high school like many girls their age in the village. They wanted to continue their education. But first, they had to finish their secondary school exams, which would take place on April 14. Then they would be off to the next adventure: the university in Maiduguri.
Maiduguri, eighty miles away from Chibok, with its bustling, tree-lined streets, businesses, and bookstores, seemed like a big city to the girls from the village. It has a population of more than a million people and is home to one of the best universities in Nigeria. “Saraya wanted to study law, while I wanted to study economics because I like math,” Rebecca told me.
Maiduguri was also the birthplace of Boko Haram.
Despite Nigeria being the largest oil producer in Africa, corrupt political elites monopolized the oil wealth while the vast majority of the citizens have seen little or no economic benefits, even in the oil-producing regions of the southern Niger Delta. Following numerous coups and countercoups, a fragile democracy emerged, but the country, with its 186 million inhabitants and more than 500 different ethnicities, remained roughly divided in two parts: the Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south with its Western-style education that had been spread by missionaries. A steep drop in agricultural production has damaged the mostly agrarian northern part of the country, with the resultant rural to urban migration.
The poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy in the north proved to be a breeding ground for extremism. Beginning around the year 2000, twelve northern Nigerian states, including Borno, adopted Sharia law: a collection of rules and principles based on an interpretation of Islam’s sacred texts. Amputations and floggings, which had been banned, were reintroduced as punishments. Sharia coexisted, often contentiously, with civil law. Northern politicians had pushed for it; they used Sharia as a way to boost their popularity among the local population by promising a just society in the name of Islam. Corruption and abuse were still rampant, however, and people grew dissatisfied. Radical religious groups—including the one that would later become Boko Haram—initially allied themselves with those politicians, but later they turned against them.
In 2002, when Rebecca was just eight, a preacher named Muhammad Yusuf had founded a new mosque in Maiduguri after being cast out from other mosques for his extremist views. In his speeches, he laid blame on Western influence and education for the corruption of Nigeria’s leaders. Northern Nigerians began to call his movement Boko Haram, which means “Western education is forbidden.” His followers—some of whom were unemployed students and graduates—were mostly peaceful in spreading the group’s ideas, despite some local skirmishes with policemen and rumors that they were stockpiling weapons. In 2007, following doctrinal differences between Yusuf and his former mentor, the latter was murdered inside his mosque.
When Rebecca was fifteen, in the summer of 2009, Boko Haram started an armed rebellion against the state to install a government based on Islamic law. The incident that sparked it was the killing of seventeen members by an anti-robbery task force after their alleged refusal to wear helmets while driving motorcycles at a funeral procession; this was largely seen as a pretext in a climate of building tension. Militants embarked on a violent and coordinated spree across northern Nigeria. The army crackdown left more than eight hundred people dead in five days, mostly members of the sect. Yusuf was arrested and executed, his mosque burned to the ground. But soon a new leader, Abubakar Shekau, was in place. He was more of an extremist than the founder. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he shouted in one of his videos. “Now our religion is Kill! Kill! Kill!” He sent his followers to attack not only police and government facilities, but also both Christian and Muslim civilian targets.
On Sunday, April 13, 2014, Rebecca spent the day celebrating her sister Naomi’s wedding in one of the dozens of churches that dotted the village of Chibok, springing up among the mud-brick houses along with several mosques. In the 1920s, missionaries from the Church of the Brethren, a denomination founded in Germany three hundred years ago, settled in this town in Borno State. Most of the sixty thousand village inhabitants were Christian, but there were also Muslim and mixed-religion families. Lawan Zanna, the secretary of the Parents of the Abducted Girls association, who is Muslim and whose daughter is one of the kidnapped girls, told me that people from the two faiths lived peacefully together, sometimes as part of the same family. For instance, he is Muslim but has Christian relatives. One of the kidnapped girls, Hauwa Musa, who lived in Chibok with her Muslim grandmother, chose to convert to Islam, even though her father was Christian.
Like Rebecca, several of the kidnapped Chibok girls had spent the previous Sunday celebrating family weddings; one even got married several days before she was abducted. April, together with December, is the month for weddings in Chibok. No farming is done, so people are freer to attend. The militants from Boko Haram had attacked wedding parties in other villages in Borno State before the Chibok kidnapping. One time they pretended to be among the guests and opened fire on the other revelers, Christian and Muslim alike, as they were delivering their gifts. Another time they massacred the faithful after a Muslim wedding. Fortunately, this had never happened in Chibok, but the northeast was in a state of emergency, and the government was underestimating the crisis gripping this part of the country.
Fear of Boko Haram existed in both communities, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Everyone knew that schools were a target too; the militants had burned fifty of them in Borno State, and another sixty had closed out of fear. In the neighboring state of Yobe, Boko Haram had locked fifty-nine male students in their dormitory and burned them alive. In Chibok, school had been suspended for a month but then had reopened. The Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok was the only one for miles that was open for end-of-year exams.
On Monday, April 14, hundreds of boys and girls from the town and the surrounding area passed through the gate of the Chibok school. The boys were day students, while the girls were boarders. After her English test, Rebecca returned to her dormitory to study for the next day’s exams. Soon dusk began to rob the light of the day, leaving a pleasant coolness in exchange. With no electricity, the girls retired to their rooms, some of them using flashlights to read in the dark, and others drifting off to sleep.
It was a quarter to midnight when Rebecca woke with a start to the sound of shooting. Suddenly, she heard the rumble of motorbikes. A group of men
entered the school. They were wearing military uniforms. One after the other, they filled the courtyard with the intense smell of their sweat. There were dozens, all of them armed with guns.
They forced the girls into the courtyard, just like a morning assembly. The two watchmen who were supposed to guard the entrance to the school weren’t there. It’s over, thought Rebecca. But to her surprise, she remained calm. She felt like she was the only girl who had not shed a tear.
According to different survivors’ accounts, the men asked where they could find the “brick-making machine” or the “engine block”: it appears that their initial purpose was not to kidnap the girls but to steal machinery to use for house building or vehicles that they wrongly thought was kept in the school. In the pantry they only found sacks of rice, beans, pasta, and corn, which they loaded onto a truck. Then they began dousing the school with gasoline and setting fire to the classrooms and the abandoned teachers’ quarters.
One of the men ordered the girls to wear their hijabs, but only a few took their veils out of their bag, put them on their heads, and wrapped them around their necks. The others remained seated in silence.
“You’re Christian; you don’t have a hijab, eh? Are you all Christian?”
The girls nodded.
“Does that mean we have to kill them?” asked one of the militants.
“Yes, we have to burn them too!” commanded another.
“No. Take all of them, Christian and Muslim. Let’s go!” decided the captain. “Get up! Get up! And follow the road!”
The girls began to walk through the darkness, their only source of light the headlights from the truck and motorbikes. They were a human sea, at once silent, then trembling and crying. Whoever resisted or stopped was subject to a blow from a koboko. With Saraya beside her, Rebecca cast tears from her mind and looked for an opportunity to escape.
They walked and walked, for at least half an hour, and then they stopped under a tree. There were open pickups waiting, and the militants were loading some of the food onto them. Then they announced: “If you want to live, get on board. If you want to die, stay here!” Rebecca climbed up onto one of the trucks, Saraya at her side, and the others did the same. They were pressed together like in a cattle car, crouching among the sacks of rice and corn.
Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree Page 13