by Isha Sesay
Dedication
To my beloved mother, Kadi;
your faith continues to guide me
Epigraph
You came back to me
You left me
I waited for you
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine
—TONI MORRISON, Beloved
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Source Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
THE SINGING WAS SO SOFT AT FIRST, I THOUGHT MY MIND WAS PLAYING tricks. I stopped unpacking my frayed leather duffel and stood completely still. With my head half-cocked, my neck craning, I waited, expectant, in my bare hotel room. Then I heard it again. This time, the haunting medley of voices filling the air was unmistakable. But who was singing?
I was in Yola, northern Nigeria, in December 2016, counting down the hours till I set off on a pilgrimage of sorts—to witness the long-awaited return home of the twenty-one Chibok girls. Just a few weeks earlier, much of the world had been stunned by their sudden release, after years in Boko Haram captivity. Now the girls were finally returning to families and to a community desperate to welcome them back to the very place from which they’d been stolen. Their homecoming was under way and I was covering the emotional journey for CNN.
A host of thoughts ran through my head as I tried to make sense of the music. I knew the CNN team was staying in the same hotel as the girls. I also knew the building was on lockdown, surrounded by a ring of armed Nigerian security forces—access was severely restricted, so it was unlikely that a choir had made its way onto the grounds.
The singing got louder, even more joyful. The harmonies pulled at me, insistent, drawing me out from the safety of my room. I was no longer wearing my hastily purchased abaya, a long, loose-fitting garment typically worn by women in parts of the Muslim world. The dark, shapeless cloak was meant to mask my body-hugging jeans and T-shirt, sparing me from the likelihood of disapproving looks in this predominantly Muslim, conservative corner of Nigeria. Wearing the abaya was also my attempt to blend in and maintain a lower profile. After more than a decade on CNN International, I had become an easily recognizable face to viewers throughout Africa. Now I was worried my appearance might trigger unwanted publicity, which in turn could create unforeseen dangers. After all, the threat of Boko Haram attacks was still very much an active concern and part of day-to-day life in this region of Nigeria.
But for now, offended sensibilities were the farthest thing from my mind. I needed to find out who was singing. My heart raced as I turned the key to unlock my room and stepped out into the white-tiled corridor. The hallway was empty. I found only the glow of the midafternoon West African sun coupled with rising voices in the near distance. I stood in the golden light, letting the waves of sound wash over me, while I tried to figure out which way to go. As the row of rooms to my right offered up only silence, I was pretty certain the exuberant echoes were coming from the other direction.
I had barely taken ten steps when Mel, the bodyguard assigned to me by CNN, blocked my path. He’d been given the unenviable task of tracing my every move throughout this assignment. We’d first worked together in 2014, and now, more than two years later, he’d become all too familiar with my habit of agreeing to stay in one place only to then wander off from that very spot. It felt like he was starting to develop eyes at the back of his head because he was always hovering nearby whenever I tried to break away.
“Mel, who’s singing?” I asked.
A warm smile slowly unfurled across his broad face, uncovering the wide gap between his top front teeth. “It’s the girls,” he replied.
The girls! I excitedly repeated to myself. The sound of rhythmic clapping now joined the melding voices. I could feel their energy and emotions rising and I had to find them. But since we hadn’t been at the hotel long, I was confused, without any clear idea of which way to go. From the look on my face, Mel knew exactly what I was thinking. Before I could even get the words out, he spoke. “I know where they are. Come with me.”
From the very first moment, two years earlier, when I’d learned that Boko Haram militants had stormed a girls’ boarding school in northeastern Nigeria and made off into the darkness with 276 girls, the search for the missing Chibok girls had dominated my life. On the night they disappeared, April 14, 2014, I was on the other side of the world, in Atlanta, Georgia, where I’d been living and working as a CNN anchor and correspondent for close to a decade, thousands of miles away from the continent I’d grown up on. During my career as a broadcast journalist, I’d covered hundreds of stories: some tales of tragedy and injustice, others of devastated hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Yet no other story struck me with such force, or took such deep and permanent root within my being, as the abduction of the Chibok girls.
In the early days of the story, details of what had happened in that far-flung town trickled out slowly, and what emerged made this tragedy all the more personal for me. The missing girls were poor, born to parents of limited education and opportunities, from homes without distinction, relegated to the overlooked margins of Nigeria’s status-conscious society. The mere fact that these girls were still going to school in the first place, in a region distinguished for being home to one of the largest out-of-school populations in the world, made each and every one of them heroic in my eyes. They knew that education could change the trajectory of their lives, and just as important, improve the livelihoods of their loved ones. They may have been born into a world with narrow expectations for them, but these girls were striving for so much more. I instantly recognized the course of their preabduction lives because in many ways, it mirrored a story I had known my whole life. Like the Chibok girls, my mother, Kadiatu Abibatu Conteh, had also wanted more, and this desire had set her on a unique path decades earlier in neighboring Sierra Leone. Her choices and determination, in turn, had given me the life I have now.
My mother was born to poor, uneducated parents in Rotifunk, a small, underdeveloped town in Sierra Leone’s southeast. Like Chibok, it has long been a place of dusty roads lit at night primarily by star-filled skies. My grandmother, Mammy Iye, sold fresh peppers, homemade peanut butter, and peppermints in the loud, bustling local market, while my grandfather, Pa Amadou Conteh, was far more devoted to his Muslim faith than making money. The family home lacked electricity and running water, which meant my mother’s childhood was framed by trips to the river to fill buckets and studying by lamplight, much like millions of other women and girls throughout Chibok and other parts of Africa today. Added to these physical hardships were emotional trials. My grandfather’s other wife, Mammy Yenken, devoted her energies to haranguing Pa C
onteh to stop him from paying my mother’s school fees. Yet in spite of the constant tussle between progress and deep-seated tradition within her home, and notwithstanding the lack of female role models to inspire and guide her, young Kadi excelled in school and went on to win scholarships and awards. This success took her farther and farther away from her family’s rural beginnings, and ultimately across the Atlantic Ocean to England. Thanks to the lottery of life, I was born in London to African parents who were not only highly educated but also progressive thinkers. If not for fate, twinned with my mother’s childhood determination, I could just as easily have started off in a place not much different from Chibok and been one of the millions of girls facing countless obstacles to gain an education. Instead, my parents saw educating me as a priority, and I considered the freedom to dream up countless different paths to my future a birthright—all of which cemented the foundation for the life I have today. I am a living testament to the transformative power of education, and that truth never leaves me.
Before being stolen from their school beds, the Chibok girls had essentially been tackling the same journey my mother had made. That fact bound me to them in deep ways. The notion that Islamic militants tore them from their path because of inherent misogyny, combined with an opposition to the formal education of women, made me more than distressed. It also lit a fire within me. As a journalist, I fully committed myself to covering what had happened to the girls from Chibok, and I hoped and prayed that I’d see the day they were returned to their broken community. I believed their grieving families deserved answers to the long-neglected questions of their whereabouts, and I felt strongly that this story shouldn’t be allowed to simply slip away from the global consciousness.
When the Chibok girls first disappeared, for what now seems like a brief moment, their plight held the gaze of celebrities worldwide, including then–first lady Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé, and Alicia Keys, along with myriad global political leaders. The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls flooded social media platforms. Within this arena, fierce advocates both known and unknown stood shoulder to shoulder literally and technologically with Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) activists, demanding the Nigerian government do whatever was required to secure the release of the missing and reunite them with their families. In the United States, with the click of a button and the whoosh of a social media posting, everyone, including the global media, was all in.
Until they weren’t.
As the flow of information about the hundreds of girls and the details of hostage negotiations ebbed away, so too did the gaze of much of the world. Almost two and a half years later, on October 13, 2016, twenty-one of them were suddenly set free by Boko Haram—the product of months-long secret negotiations led by Zannah Mustapha, a former Nigerian lawyer, and officials within the Swiss embassy in Nigeria. The same team would go on to secure the release of eighty-two more girls months later, in May 2017.
The moment I heard the news of the twenty-one being freed I dropped everything, grabbed a hastily purchased suitcase, and jumped on a plane to Nigeria that same day. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, a chance to shift attention away from the troubling view of these girls as ciphers for loss, a stolen cache of nameless, faceless black bodies. Now the world would share in the triumph of their return.
But instead of a huge worldwide celebration, the coverage was minimal. In America, it seemed the only thing ratings-obsessed news executives were prepared to extensively focus on was the race to the bottom between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would face off with each other at the beginning of November. Meanwhile, even the limited reporting of the twenty-one girls who’d been released failed to gain traction among the US public. This wasn’t simply because of a news cycle in hyperdrive, thanks to the frenzied politics of the moment. There was also something else at play that underpinned the relatively muted reaction to the girls’ release. In large sections of US society, the suffering of black and brown people—and in particular, black and brown women—is readily accepted and cast aside, a reality borne out by this nation’s history.
People had moved on.
But I remained undeterred.
So here I was, a couple of days before Christmas in Yola, a city in Nigeria’s restive northeast, preparing to set off the next morning on a long, dangerous road trip to Chibok. The newly freed twenty-one girls were heading home for the first time since they’d been abducted in 2014. They would be with their loved ones on Christmas day, a holiday of deep significance and celebrated like no other by Chibok’s devoutly Christian community. After everything the girls had endured, the prospect of them being welcomed back at this particular time of year filled me with joy. The homecoming also represented a triumph of their families’ unfailing Christian faith. I knew from conversations with some of the girls’ loved ones over the years that their faith had comforted them and strengthened their hopes of their children one day returning, long after they’d been forgotten by much of the world.
This trip was my chance to bring the Chibok girls’ story full circle. It was also an opportunity to try once more to resurrect public interest in this mass abduction. Far too many Americans have viewed Boko Haram as a purely Nigerian problem despite the fact that in 2011 the terror outfit was able to plan and execute a suicide bomb attack on the United Nations’ headquarters in Abuja that killed at least eighteen people. Fast-forward a couple of years, and in 2015 the Islamist group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). I’d long believed the United States was in no position to be so dismissive of Boko Haram.
I must admit that I undertook my decision to make the journey with the twenty-one girls with a great deal of pain and difficulty. My mother had suffered a stroke just three weeks earlier and I’d been at her bedside ever since. To follow the girls meant abandoning, at least temporarily, that duty. I was stuck, interrogating my values, my priorities, and loyalties, questions I returned to repeatedly during the journey, each time struck anew by pangs of guilt. Many times, in fact, I wondered if my effort to present the story of the twenty-one girls’ homecoming to the rest of the world was worth such personal torment.
But as I followed Mel to the source of the jubilant singing, everything I felt signaled I’d made the right choice. When I finally stood outside the room where the group was gathered, their beautiful, soaring voices crowded out any lingering doubts. I was exactly where I needed to be.
I knocked gently and waited. Moments later, one of the girls cracked the door, and as she did, the chorus of voices swept past us and filled the passageway. By this point I was a familiar face, having met the twenty-one in the first few days after their release and weeks later traveled with them to Yola. I smiled and mumbled that I’d like to join them. She grinned back shyly and stepped aside. I could feel Mel following me. Having a burly male presence in such a small space might have made the girls uncomfortable, so I quickly explained my concern and asked him to get Tim, our self-effacing cameraman, instead.
All the girls were crammed into the midsize hotel room, arrayed in brightly colored blouses, ankle-length skirts, and head wraps. The jam-packed room was a canvas of bold reds, blues, and yellows. My arrival didn’t interrupt their singing, though a few gave me small half smiles. Others looked as if they were far away, lost in reverie. I quickly realized they were singing Christian praise songs and many of them were holding Bibles: this was their daily evening worship—a time for exultation and prayer. Many of the girls sat on the bed, while others perched on the writing desk, and the remaining handful shared the few uncomfortable-looking chairs in the room. I spotted an unoccupied nightstand to the right of the bed and quickly made a beeline for it. From my corner, I found myself clapping along with the group while they sang. Though I quickly became swept up in the emotion of the room, I was struck by the serenity on the girls’ faces. There was no sign of pain, anger, fear, or dark emotion in their expressions. How were these girls able to manifest such peace and joyfulnes
s after being held captive for more than two years, after witnessing the worst of humanity? I struggled to make sense of it. Yet here they were, twenty-one girls with their spirits seemingly untainted, creating a sound so beautiful my own heart was buoyed beside theirs.
Tim soon arrived with his camera and positioned himself in a corner by the door to unobtrusively capture the singing and clapping. At first I worried that the girls would find his presence upsetting, but they were so focused on their singing that they remained oblivious to him. The girls took turns leading the songs. One would sing a few lines unaccompanied before the rest swooped in to carry the remaining verses higher and louder. It seemed to me that they’d developed a way of supporting and encouraging each other that was palpable in their singing. I felt cocooned by their voices and could have stayed there for as long as they had the breath to sing.
But after half an hour, their voices trailed off and the girls reached for their Bibles, ready to begin studying. I motioned to Tim for us to leave. My departure, like my arrival, was barely acknowledged. With heads bowed, the girls were immersed.
I stepped back into the corridor and looked around. Their voices had carried me far beyond the walls of that hotel room, and now I’d come back to earth—a little dazed, maybe even a little sad that it was over.
My thoughts turned to the long day ahead, and I felt a surge of anxiety kick in. Only one other CNN crew had made it to Chibok after the 2014 kidnapping. Our senior international correspondent Nima Elbagir, a dear friend and outstanding journalist, had led a team to the previously little-known town. On the way there, though, their car had been involved in a serious accident that left some in the crew injured. Road traffic accidents are one thing, clearly beyond anyone’s control, but I also knew I was deliberately taking on a different kind of risk that involved militant forces with bloody intent. CNN had flown in Andrew Jones, a British security risk specialist (SRS) to oversee all the security assessments and preparations for the journey. I was going to have to wear an abaya, a headscarf, and a bulletproof vest the entire time I was on the move to protect myself. Andrew was also tasked with checking in with our CNN handlers back in Atlanta via satellite phone at preset times. And before receiving the final green light to set off on this assignment, I’d had to supply critical body identification and next-of-kin details in the event things went very wrong. A part of me simply wanted to shrug off the concerns of the executives far away in Atlanta and toss out the majority of the stifling security measures, but as Andrew made clear, that was impossible. This was Boko Haram we were facing, and the threat they posed was high. I’d be traveling in a convoy along a route that had seen several ambushes in the recent past. If Boko Haram caught wind that the stolen girls and an international journalist were making their way along open roads to Chibok, it would be easy to orchestrate a roadside attack or a kidnapping.