“We need to jump out,” whispered Rebecca.
“I’m scared,” Saraya cried.
All around the trucks buzzed the motorbikes, each one carrying three militants. If they tried to jump, they would be seen.
“God help us,” prayed Rebecca.
But Saraya began to cry even harder. “You can’t. I won’t let you. You could get hurt. If you fall, you’ll die.”
“If I die, at least my family will have a body to cry over.” Rebecca prayed a second and a third time. Then she squeezed her friend’s hand and jumped over the side.
She landed on the ground and sprung to her feet. She dove under a tree and pressed her belly into the cold earth. After the next vehicle passed, she sought refuge under a large bush, and she waited for the last sound of the engines to die away and for the dust to settle. She waited, straining her ears for the sound of Saraya’s voice. Then she plunged blindly into the maze of acacias, dogonyaro, and baobabs where one could get lost even during the day. She ran hour after hour, without stopping for anything: not her bloody feet, nor the branches that scratched her face, nor hunger, nor thirst. She pushed her legs forward. Her heart sank like a stone: Saraya had let go of her hand.
At the first light of dawn, she saw an unmistakable sign that she was on the right track. On the horizon she could see the smoke rising from her school as it burned. When she arrived at the nearby village of Bawa, the people surrounded her: “Our girl!”
They took her back to the school in Chibok. All that remained were the blackened walls and gutted roofs, the twisted frames of bunk beds and the books, binders, and uniforms that lay scattered across the ground. The families of many students had gathered there looking for their loved ones. Many of them were in shock and in tears. Her father was among them; he cried as he embraced her.
“Where are the others?” everyone asked.
“They aren’t here anymore.” Rebecca sighed. “My friends aren’t here anymore.”
More than two hundred fathers, uncles, and brothers gathered on motorbikes, determined to follow the tire tracks left by the militants. They had collected twelve thousand naira, about forty-three dollars, to offer as ransom. They were armed with old rifles, swords, and amulets.
They followed a trail of hair bands caught in trees, shreds of blue-checkered fabric, and discarded shoes.
They pressed forward into the Sambisa forest, zigzagging between the potholes. They arrived in a clearing where a few huts sat clustered. A group of women poked their heads out of the doorways.
“We’re coming from Chibok; our girls have been kidnapped.”
The women said they had seen the trucks. “But we can’t go with you. The most that we can do is show you which way they went.”
They came to a stream and pushed their bikes across the small bridge. The whole forest was plunged into absolute silence. No tweeting of birds, no rustle of lizards. A shepherd stepped out from the bush with his goats. “Sure, I saw your girls. Keep going this way and you’ll find them.”
After a while they arrived at a fork in the road. There was another old shepherd there. He seemed surprised to see them. “Yes, this is the way. They made them get out of the trucks and they took them on foot into the heart of Sambisa. But if you go in there like this, with those meager weapons and without the help of soldiers, you’ll be killed together with your daughters. Turn around, wait for reinforcements. I’ve never seen anyone other than the men from Boko Haram go into this part of the forest and come back alive.”
Evening fell. There were fifteen men left. They thought of their wives who would become widows, and their sons and daughters who would become orphans. They cried like children as they turned their bikes toward Chibok.
From deep in the forest came the echo of machine guns. The militants were training. Their daughters were so close.
After the Chibok kidnapping, a movement called Bring Back Our Girls was born out of rage and frustration against a government that had not taken the threat of Boko Haram seriously and was not doing enough to free the hostages.
The activists have met every day next to the Abuja Hilton, a few feet from the Fountain of Unity, and in other big cities, far away from Chibok, but they have helped draw attention to the forgotten plight in the northeast of their country.
In May 2014, more than four million people used the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls—including Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Michelle Obama—to express their solidarity with the relatives of the kidnapped students. Malala went to Nigeria that summer, met with Rebecca Yishaku and four other escapees, and criticized the government’s weak efforts to free their kidnapped friends. World leaders from the United States to China promised to help find the girls. In particular, the US and UK governments conducted surveillance operations. Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan welcomed financial and logistical aid and assistance by the US, the UK, and France. For its part, the US government was concerned about sending military help and about stronger cooperation with the Nigerian army, which had been accused of human rights violations, including the killing of innocent civilians in sweeps for Boko Haram.
The Nigerian government banned the Bring Back Our Girls protests at one point, explaining that there was a risk of their gatherings being targeted by suicide bombers. Supporters of the government pelted the activists with rocks and bottles and threw and scattered their chairs at the sit-ins. In the 2015 presidential election, Goodluck Jonathan was defeated by Muhammadu Buhari, a former Nigerian army major general. His loss was due in part to his handling of the Chibok crisis and his underestimation of the Boko Haram threat; in 2014 the group managed to declare a caliphate in the northeastern states under its control. President Buhari has confronted Boko Haram more seriously, working as part of a military coalition with Cameroon, Chad, Benin, and Niger, which share a border with Nigeria and are also heavily affected by the militants. After Buhari’s election, military relations with America have warmed.
Nothing has stopped the activists. For the first anniversary of the kidnapping on April 14, 2015, they marched through Abuja with red tape covering their mouths. I went to one of the protests, in June 2015, where a woman in a red hijab standing in front of a sign with the slogan “Bring Back Our Girls” was shouting with her fist in the air:
“What do we demand?”
“To bring our girls back home: Now! Alive!” the other activists in red shirts responded, seated on plastic chairs in the humid afternoon.
“What are we asking for?”
“The truth! Nothing but the truth!”
“When will we stop?”
“Only when our girls come home alive!”
“What are we fighting for?”
“For the soul of Nigeria!”
“The struggle for the Chibok girls is the struggle for the soul of Nigeria!”
After more than two years, however, many relatives had stopped going to the meetings. Some of them died from what they call high blood pressure, which might be another name for a broken heart. Many families fled Chibok after repeated attacks by Boko Haram. Some of them found refuge in the periphery of Abuja, but they didn’t have the money to make the daily trip to the Fountain of Unity.
One of the most vocal mothers is Esther Yakubu. Her daughter Dorcas was seized two months before her sixteenth birthday.
When I first called, her husband Yakubu Kabu answered the phone; he seemed unsure whether to meet with me. That day, two French television journalists had visited the family; Esther cried on camera remembering her daughter Dorcas, and she felt sick. In the last two years Esther had asked for help from the government, had joined the protests, and had even gone on TV to plead her case. She had heard it all: false claims and false reports, including ones that maintained that her child had been released or that she hadn’t really been kidnapped in the first place, that it was all a political plot. At one point, Esther refused to eat. She stopped sleeping. She was like a candle burning down to its base. Her husband felt that E
sther had endured enough and didn’t want her to meet any more reporters, but in the end the couple changed their mind; talking about Dorcas was painful, but they needed to fight for her.
They welcomed Adaobi and me into a small room on the outskirts of Abuja, where they had moved to escape the renewed attacks by Boko Haram in Chibok. Kabu had worked as a driver, Esther as a municipal employee, but now they were both unemployed. Yet they still made sure they would send their other four children to school.
It was a very hot summer day with a single fan blowing in the corner. Dorcas’s parents and their four younger children—Happy, Marvelous, Messi, and Mercy—sat on a mattress on the floor. The room was bare, except for framed pictures of Esther and Kabu. She was wearing her cap and gown; her picture was taken after she graduated from the polytechnic in Maiduguri. Esther had promised her daughter that if she got good grades, she would allow her to continue her education as well, but had also planned for her to take a sewing course, because it would be useful in case she could not find work. In fact, Esther had already bought her a sewing machine. Dorcas didn’t know; it was going to be a surprise graduation gift.
Although they lived in Chibok, Dorcas transferred to the local secondary school only a few months before the kidnapping. She was initially studying in Maiduguri, but something had happened that had really upset her: Boko Haram had kidnapped two boys off the street. They were swallowed up by the Sambisa forest, probably to be turned into militants. Dorcas didn’t know the boys, said her mother, but the same thing could happen to anyone. Along the road, frightened boys would ride their bikes carrying bows and arrows to defend themselves, but they would be useless against the AK-47s of Boko Haram. Eventually the road to Maiduguri, littered with the carcasses of dead cars, was closed. It would take two days to get to the city now, passing through the tiny villages in the surrounding area. Vigilantes would stop every car, brandishing machetes and ordering them to turn on their windshield wipers; they were often disconnected if there were weapons hidden under the hood.
Chibok seemed safer. However, there had been some alarms. Esther Yakubu and other parents consider the school authorities responsible for the kidnapping, although they can’t say whether it was a plot or negligence. All the teachers sleeping on campus that night had fled when Boko Haram attacked, abandoning the students.
The last time Dorcas came home was three weeks before April 14. Her last words to her mother were: “I’m praying that the last exam goes well!” Dorcas slept at the dorms so that she could concentrate on her studies, but also because the vice principal had forbidden the girls from leaving the school grounds, even with a five-day break between one test and the next. While some girls risked punishment—jumping over the low wall that surrounded the campus and running home—Dorcas had followed the rules and stayed at school all weekend.
Esther told us that one evening, several weeks before the kidnapping, some of the secondary school’s girls had shouted: “Boko Haram! Boko Haram!” They climbed the gate and ran toward the village. They thought they had seen men approaching the school. Her youngest sister, Happy, was among the girls who ran home, while Dorcas had gone to fetch water from the well and barely noticed. After that episode, the principal gathered the students and assured them that they had only mistaken some girls in pants for the militants. Both the principal and a senior army officer from the local garrison gave them an order: “If you really do see Boko Haram, don’t shout. Don’t run. Stay inside and gather together.” Because of this order, when the militants went to the school, the girls did not try to escape and were easily captured by Boko Haram. “If they had told them: ‘Do not scream, but try to escape,’ they would have run,” Esther said.
Some survivors have related another detail to journalists: A few days before the kidnapping, the girls saw the vice principal pick up a piece of paper from the ground. It said, “BOKO HARAM IS COMING.” They wondered whether the exams would be postponed and the school closed again, but the principal had reassured them that there was only one thing coming for them: the exams.
Esther showed us a photo of Dorcas that was taken in the sunny courtyard of her school on April 13, the day before she was kidnapped. She had given it to a massa vendor who lived near her home so that she would deliver it to her parents. They planned to use it in an almanac, to give as a gift to friends and relatives waiting to celebrate the graduation of their firstborn daughter. It turned out to be the last contact they had with Dorcas.
Dorcas and her mother, Esther, had the same almond-shaped eyes and decisive character. Esther remembers an obedient girl who woke up at dawn, collected water at the river, prepared supper, and bathed her four younger siblings, all while singing gospel songs. Her favorite was “I Know Who I Am,” which is popular on the radio as well as in churches in Nigeria.
We are a chosen generation
Called forth to show His excellence
All I require for life, God has given me
And I know who I am.
Happy still sings “We Are a Chosen Generation” alone. It’s all that is left of her sister. When she talked about her she smiled, but the smile would suddenly fade away.
Dorcas shared her secrets with two people. The first was her grandma, Hauwa, who suffered for Dorcas’s loss as if her own child had been taken from her womb, said Esther. Her second confidante was Saraya Stover, her best friend. Dorcas’s sister Happy explained that Dorcas and Saraya were inseparable. “They ate from the same plate, they sang the same songs.” One of them wanted to be a teacher, the other a doctor. They were kidnapped together.
About one year after our meeting, in the summer of 2016, Esther’s belief that her daughter was still alive was vindicated. On August 14, Dorcas appeared for the first time in a Boko Haram video: she was the spokesperson for dozens of veiled girls who were prisoners just like her. She introduced herself as Maida, her middle name. “We are not happy here. I plead with our parents to meet with the government in order to release the Boko Haram men kept as prisoners, so that we can also be released.” Her face was visible but Esther and Kabu also clearly recognized her voice. It was the first proof that she was alive.
The Church of the Brethren, known as EYN—the Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa of Nigeria—is the most popular church in Chibok. Before the kidnapping and the displacement of many residents, Sundays would see seven hundred people arrive for the English service at seven a.m. and more than one thousand for the Hausa service at a quarter to ten.
Reverend Enoch Mark had moved to Chibok with his family about a year before to lead the congregation. His daughter Monica Enoch was also abducted on April 14. The reverend told me that she might be dead. One night she appeared to him in a dream wearing a long white dress, standing in the center of an open field, beneath an iron staircase suspended in the air. “Monica slowly climbed, step by step toward heaven,” he said. Later on, however, Adaobi learned from the survivors that Monica might still be alive and could be one of the first girls who decided to marry a Boko Haram fighter, thinking that it would make it easier to escape.
Initially, Reverend Mark became a spokesperson for the parents of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls, but he told me that he was sidelined and threatened because of his fierce criticism of the government and of Boko Haram. He moved to the town of Mubi until Boko Haram attacked it, and then to Minna, where the family scraped by selling firewood.
The reverend could not remember his first daughter’s birthday. He thinks that it was sometime in June 1993. He said that Monica’s life revolved around God and that she would wake up at four a.m. humming her favorite hymn: “In the morning, early in the morning, I will rise and praise the Lord.” He didn’t tell me, however, that before the kidnapping Monica had married a soldier and had a child. She left him after her family discovered that the soldier had another wife and didn’t tell the reverend and his daughter, who only discovered it later.
On that Monday in April, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Monica led the prayer in the Ghana Room at Chibok�
�s secondary school. The Ghana Room was where the girls would meet, crouching on the floor, reading the Bible, praising the Creator, and, one after the other, adding a personal request, such as for Him to intercede on their behalf in the coming exams.
The reverend said he lost another daughter on April 14, since he had also adopted Monica’s best friend, Sarah Samuel. A few months before the kidnapping, Sarah and her family had escaped from the nearby village of Banki, on the border with Cameroon, which had been attacked by Boko Haram. Adaobi and I interviewed her parents, Samuel and Rebecca Yaga, in the village of Kobi Makaranta in Abuja, where they had fled.
Sarah’s father left his daughter behind in Chibok so that she could finish her exams. According to Reverend Enoch, instead of staying with her uncle, Sarah moved to his house and he took her in as one of his own.
On April 14, in the middle of the night, the phone rang in the reverend’s house. It was a friend from the neighboring village. “A convoy of pickups and four-by-fours. They’re overflowing. Boko Haram is coming.”
Reverend Enoch Mark tried not to panic. He thought about the small platoon of fifteen soldiers stationed in Chibok and tried to call their post. During the sixth try, an explosion blew out the windows of his house. Then he ran with his wife and children into the forest. They found themselves together with other fleeing families, and the soldiers he’d been trying to call.
It was then that they heard the screams. Keen. Desperate. They came from the school. It was his daughters.
It went on for three minutes, but it felt like hours. Then a silence fell that chilled their blood even more than the screams.
At the first light of morning, the reverend went to search for Monica and Sarah in the forest.
Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree Page 14