Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree

by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

  “Your daughter Monica jumped out. She’s hurt, and can’t walk,” somebody told him. But he didn’t find them. He did find two other girls who had managed to escape, choked with dust and horror, and he took them home.

  In the months and years after the kidnapping, the parents heard many things about the fate of their daughters. Rumors in the village said that they were taken by boat across Lake Chad, or over the hills of Gwoza, and that they were still among the caverns and valleys on the border with Cameroon. They said that the girls from Chibok were forced to convert, which in certain cases turned out to be true: according to a secret diary written by some of the survivors, on one occasion they were threatened to be burned with gasoline if they did not; at another time, they were told that they would be allowed to go home to their families only if they all converted. There were also many false rumors: that they were sold as slaves for two thousand naira apiece, or about seven dollars; and that they were learning to fight and kill, trained to cut prisoners’ throats, or used as teachers to instruct the newcomers about the Quran (and whip them if they made mistakes).

  The Nigerian government said that it had negotiated with Boko Haram, but the talks failed several times.

  Meanwhile, the Chibok parents did not know what to believe, so they tried to verify the news themselves. At one point, in March 2016, a twelve-year-old suicide bomber was arrested in Cameroon before she could detonate the explosives strapped to her body. She claimed that she was from Chibok. Dorcas Yakubu’s mother, Esther, stayed up late, waiting for a phone call. She thought that they would call her to let her know that the girl was her daughter; she even started planning the food she would cook to welcome her home. Yana Galang, mother of seventeen-year-old Rifkatu, another kidnapped Chibok student, was supposed to travel to Cameroon to verify the identity of the girl.

  Yana has had a difficult life. Her husband left her for another wife in Maiduguri, and she has seven more children to feed working in the fields, but her determination is boundless. Just after the abduction, she was photographed sitting on the steps of her home, next to an open suitcase where she kept Rifkatu’s few remaining dresses—orange and blue, white and pink—like a captured rainbow. She kept them there so that Rifkatu could find her things intact when she returned. Yana talked about her daughter as a fragile girl who was often sick but always in a good mood.

  Rifkatu worked too much: in addition to studying and helping with the house chores, she braided hair for half the village because she wanted to help her mother financially, and when she saw Yana frown and worry, she would do anything to make her smile. After secondary school, Rifkatu could not continue her studies because she didn’t have the money to go to university. She had to get married and move to Lagos.

  During one of our most recent phone calls, Yana told me that she was tired of talking about Rifkatu. She didn’t want to speak of a past that, despite its hardships, she missed greatly. In the end, Yana and another member of the Chibok parents association who were supposed to go to Cameroon to identify the detained girl did not go. Instead they were just shown photographs, from which they concluded that the suspected suicide bomber wasn’t a Chibok girl.

  Boko Haram is infamous for using girls as young as seven as suicide bombers. From June 2014 to January 2016, according to the Long War Journal, an American nonprofit news website that reports on the war on terror, 105 women were used in suicide attacks in Nigeria. However, many people consider it unlikely that the Chibok captives were ever used as suicide bombers. It seems that, because of their notoriety, they were considered precious as bargaining chips or propaganda tools. To the world they have become a symbol of the violence committed by the militants, but Boko Haram—who followed the news closely—has turned them into a megaphone to advertise its ideology and demonstrate its strength. The paradox is that international attention might have made them more difficult to save.

  The Chibok girls were reportedly “not forced” to wed the militants, but marriage was offered to them as a “choice”—although it did not happen without pressure. Those who refused were beaten and forced to serve as slaves to the militants’ wives, who in turn became brutal with their former friends. According to survivors, some of the girls were also taken as concubines.

  Among those who married is said to be the daughter of Lawan Zanna, the current secretary of the Parents of the Abducted Girls association. He imagined something different for Aisha. Asked whether he wanted her to get married at eighteen, he told me: “No, no, no.” He hadn’t even allowed her to have a cell phone because he was afraid it would distract her from her studies.

  On Monday, April 14, Aisha asked him: “What gift will you give me at the end of the year?”

  “If you get good grades, then I will send you to university,” he replied. He hoped that his daughter would choose to study medicine. Of course, after she graduated he would also get her a phone.

  One of Aisha’s best friends, Hajara Isa, who could recite the Quran with the voice of an angel, had escaped from an arranged marriage three years before, at the age of fifteen. It was Hajara’s aunt from Chibok who convinced the mother to wait three years to let the girl attend high school and “make something of herself in society.”

  In a souvenir photo she took at school, Hajara appeared with a golden-yellow head scarf over her luxurious black hair, and a dress in the same color. Her eyes were traced with black kohl, and her lips tinged with a touch of red. She looked very different in the first video released by Boko Haram, where all the girls were wearing hijabs of gray or black, covering them from head to toe. They were sitting with the palms of their hands turned skyward or their arms stretched atop their knees. They had a lost look, and their voices mechanically recited verses from the Quran.

  Hajara was the third to speak: “I am a Muslim from birth and my parents are Muslim as well. Contrary to what others have said, this group has treated us with love and care. I hope that other women will join us.”

  She seemed calm. It was impossible to tell what was going through her mind.

  Her aunt said that she was supposed to participate in a prestigious Quran recitation contest in the state of Zamfara, but destiny brought her to recite her holy book for a group of killers.

  Following Nigerian armed forces’ operations, about three thousand women and girls have been rescued or managed to escape. None of them was from Chibok—until May 2016.

  In June 2015, I went to Yola, a town in Adamawa State, where four hundred thousand displaced people (more than the population of the town) lived in forty-one informal refugee camps and a handful of government camps; 677 women had just been rescued and taken there, and the majority were pregnant. Everybody had a story about how the jihadists massacred the men and forced the women to have children by Boko Haram militants.

  Religious leaders intervened to invite their families to welcome the women back, but their reintegration is difficult in both Christian and Muslim communities—especially in a society where there is a strong culture of honor based on a woman’s body and her virginity.

  At an informal camp in front of the Saint Theresa church, I met a ten-year-old girl, Semo. “I saw them enter the houses and kill the men, cutting their throats, shooting or burning them alive,” she told me staring at the ground. “In the Sambisa forest, we lived in tin shacks. They taught us the Quran. They fed us two or three times a day: rice, maize, or yams. At night, they took some of the older girls; they brought them back in the morning. I cried and they asked me why, but I didn’t answer. I was thinking of my parents.”

  In the refugee camp, Semo was living with displaced people from her hometown who protected her, but they told me that pregnant women would not be welcome. “It is better if they get an abortion.”

  Some people believe that Boko Haram’s children will inherit their fathers’ ideology and they will be a danger for the community. Even before any Chibok girl was freed, there were rumors about one of them coming back home at night and killing her sister in her sleep; another
story said that a Chibok girl had killed her entire family.

  Finally, in May 2016, more than two years after being kidnapped, the first Chibok girl was found wandering on the outskirts of the Sambisa forest by a group of soldiers and civilian vigilantes. Her name is Amina Ali. She was clutching a four-month-old baby and was in the company of a suspected Boko Haram militant, Mohammed, who claimed to be her husband.

  Her rescue sparked new attention in the international media. The twenty-one-year-old and her daughter met with President Buhari, who held the child, Safiya, in front of the cameras. Mohammed was arrested.

  Afterward, Amina did not return home. She was kept in a secret location in the capital, Abuja, for what the Nigerian government called a “restoration process.”

  Her mother, Binta Ali, was allowed to spend two months with her, but then she returned to Chibok. She is a widow who lost eleven of her thirteen children to different illnesses; Amina and her older brother, Noah, are her only family. According to the village doctor, she tried to commit suicide after Amina was seized. When she saw her daughter again for the first time, in May 2016, Binta Ali shouted her name: “Amina, Amina!” Then she hugged her and didn’t let go, making Amina lose her balance. “Please, Mum, take it easy, relax,” she said. “I never thought I would ever see you again, wipe your tears. God has made it possible for us to see each other again.”

  In August 2016, Amina gave Adaobi an interview. “I just want to go home,” she said, speaking softly. “I am not scared of Boko Haram—they are not my God.”

  Before the abduction she had planned to go to university. After escaping the forest, she thought that she would get a sewing machine so that she could earn something making clothes. Eventually, she decided to resume her studies. Amina missed the father of her four-month-old baby girl, whom she married a year earlier. She said that they weren’t rescued, they had chosen to escape together: “I want him to know that I am still thinking about him. Just because we got separated, that does not mean that I don’t think about him.”

  She spoke about her experience of hunger in the forest, where the young women resorted to eating raw maize to survive. She said that some had died, suffered broken legs, or gone deaf due to explosions and air strikes by the Nigerian military. In August 2016, the terrorist group released another video showing the dead bodies of a dozen captives: a masked man said that they were killed in a government air strike. Amina confirmed that some of her classmates died in a bombing, but it had happened over a year before. She expressed confidence that the other girls could be freed. “In the same way God rescued me, he will also rescue them.”

  Two months later, in October 2016, her words were partially fulfilled. The first twenty-one Chibok girls were released. Their families drove to the capital through military checkpoints and braved terrorist attacks. Finally, they embraced their emaciated daughters, amid singing and dancing. In May 2017, eighty-two more girls were freed. In both cases they were reportedly exchanged for Boko Haram commanders and an undisclosed ransom running millions of dollars, following negotiations between the Nigerian government and the militants. The deal was brokered by the Swiss government and the International Red Cross and mediated by a lawyer from Maiduguri, Zannah Mustapha. An army raid into the forest liberated another girl, and yet another was found thanks to interrogation of suspects.

  In 2007, Mustapha founded the Future Prowess Islamic Foundation school, offering free education, meals, and health care to both children born to Boko Haram fighters and those orphaned by the group’s insurgency. He refused to close it, despite Boko Haram’s attacks in the region, as he feared that the war was creating a generation of children with no education. With the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross, he also provided humanitarian assistance to the widows of Boko Haram militants, at a time when they were being arrested and their houses demolished by the government. Therefore, the insurgents respected him and the ICRC.

  Mustapha denied that “any of the 103 girls were touched by anybody. None of them were abused.” When I asked him how he knew, he replied: “I asked if they were abused, and they said no. One said that she had been married for three months before the abduction and she gave birth to a baby from before.”

  At the time, the rescued girls identified dozens of their classmates who had married fighters, and twelve who had died during Nigerian air force strikes, in childbirth, or from unknown illnesses. They also recognized some of the faces of the Boko Haram fighters on the government’s most-wanted list.

  The negotiations were complicated by the fact that Boko Haram has split. Initially faithful to Al Qaeda, in 2014 the group declared allegiance to ISIS. In August 2016 a faction, endorsed by ISIS, left Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s group. Abu Musab Al Barnawi, the son of Boko Haram founder Muhammad Yusuf, is the faction’s leader—or rather, the “governor” of the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, as they like to call it. He disagrees with Shekau’s attacks against Muslims based on the idea that those who choose not to engage in jihad are apostates who should be killed. But he promised more violence against Christians and their churches. Some experts believed that the girls still in captivity are held by Shekau’s faction, which was said to be poorly armed and increasingly surrounded in the Sambisa forest. There is also a possibility that the two groups will fight each other, thus helping the government.

  On May 12, 2017, Boko Haram published another video in which Dorcas Yakubu—now called Maida—appeared. This time, only her eyes were visible through the slit in her niqab. She didn’t call herself a “prisoner” but a “bride,” and she said that everyone should convert to Islam. “I don’t want to go back to Chibok, I don’t want to live in a town of unbelievers,” she said.

  According to negotiator Zannah Mustapha, Dorcas and a few others have refused to go home. It’s difficult to understand why. Do they feel fear or shame? Do they really identify with their kidnappers? Are they unwilling to leave behind the lives they have built while in captivity? After all, three years is a long time. Clinical psychologist Dr. Fatima Akilu, head of Nigeria’s deradicalization program, says that being a jihadi wife has its advantages over the “normal” life in a patriarchal society: they have power, slaves who clean and cook for them, and even the respect of men. When they are freed, kidnapped women face challenges reintegrating into a society that stigmatizes them.

  The Chibok girls who have returned since 2016 discovered that they are not completely free. Initially they were not allowed to go back to their homes; they had to live in government buildings where they received medical and psychological help. There were fears that some might have been radicalized—that they identified with Boko Haram and could be a threat to other civilians. The government was also worried that the girls could be in danger if they returned home, that they could be kidnapped again. In September 2017, the 103 girls began a government-sponsored special catch-up course at the American University of Nigeria in Yola, but during their studies they were not allowed to leave the premises of the school.

  After completing the course, the girls hoped that they would finally be permitted to go home.

  Dorcas Yakubu’s parents refuse to accept that their daughter might not want to come back. They think that maybe some of the girls are being forced to stay by their Boko Haram husbands and are just pretending, waiting to find a chance to escape. They ignore schoolmates who say that Dorcas was so radicalized that they feared her.

  The sewing machine, her secret graduation gift, sits gathering dust in a forgotten corner in Chibok.

  There are still more than one hundred Chibok girls in captivity along with many other women from other Nigerian towns. In addition, many of those who were freed have not been able to return to a normal life, because of stigmatization by the community and/or because of their own radicalization. What happened in Sambisa changed them forever. The Chibok girls are the most famous part of a lesser-known story. Even if all of them come home, the insurgency will still be there. Bringing peace to northeaster
n Nigeria is a process that will take a long time.

  —Viviana Mazza

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the dozens of Boko Haram victims who trusted us with their stories, in tremendous and shocking detail. We pray that they receive all the help they need to continue with their education and with the rest of their lives.

  More Resources

  WEBSITES

  #BringBackOurGirls

  www.bringbackourgirls.ng/

  ARTICLES

  “I Just Want to Go Home,” Says First Chibok Schoolgirl Rescued from Boko Haram

  http://news.trust.org/item/20160816181948-nw9n7/ • Thomson Reuters Foundation • August 16, 2016

  Chibok Diaries: Chronicling a Boko Haram Kidnapping

  www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41570252 • BBC • October 23, 2017

  Nigeria Faces Mounting Pressure to Rescue Girls Abducted by Boko Haram 1,000 Days Ago

  http://news.trust.org/item/20170111110515-xdyne/ • Thomson Reuters Foundation • January 11, 2017

  The Man Who Brokered the Deal to Release the Chibok Girls

  www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39928628 • BBC • May 17, 2017

  Letter from Africa: Freed Boko Haram “Wives” Return to Captors

  www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40704569 • BBC • July 26, 2017

  Nigeria’s Chibok Girls Say Kidnap by Boko Haram Was Accidental

  www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-boko-haram-chibok/exclusive-nigerias-chibok-girls-say-kidnap-by-boko-haram-was-accidental-idUSKCN1AX0AY • Reuters • August 17, 2017

  Power, Sex and Slaves: Nigeria Battles Beliefs of Boko Haram Brides

  http://news.trust.org/item/20170208060545-tibww/ • Thomson Reuters Foundation • February 8, 2017

  OP-EDS

  What’s Worse Than a Girl Being Kidnapped?

  www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/whats-worse-than-a-girl-being-kidnapped.html • New York Times • April 17, 2016