Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

  As individuals and as a country, to know the intention of groups like Boko Haram and to still look away from the Chibok girls is to betray our shared humanity. The horrors that these girls have endured do not belong in a Nigerian vacuum. The place for every single one of them is right at the heart of the conversation about the global threats America is facing, and the development of a more holistic counterterrorism response that might just make all of us a little safer.

  Chapter Three

  A SEA OF PARCHED EARTH: THIS IS HOW CHIBOK LOOKS TO A VISITOR arriving here for the first time. The land, a patchwork of bald spots and swathes of straw-like savanna grass, lies flat for long stretches until bulging rock hills suddenly rise up and break the monotony. With the Sahara to the north, this is a forlorn-looking place of subdued yellows and hushed browns, bursts of green from gnarly trees. Straggly bushes haphazardly dot the desertlike terrain as nature’s only concession in this muted landscape.

  At every turn, the poverty that has long stalked this area and its population of just under seventy thousand is on display. The heart of Chibok, a dilapidated town center, sits bare except for a handful of half-empty stores and market stalls. Money is hard to come by in these parts, so business is often slow, leaving traders crouching in doorways or lounging outdoors in the shade with little to do other than swat flies and trade pleasantries with passersby. There are no paved roads, only uneven, dusty paths, which most locals navigate on foot or by some means of transportation with two wheels. You won’t find indoor plumbing or electricity in the unpainted mud brick homes, and it’s a rarity in the faded, crumbling cement ones. With only one mobile network and four telecom masts covering this area of approximately 840 square miles, cell phone service ranges from spotty to nonexistent. What you will find throughout this semiarid corner of the world are farms because, first and foremost, these are peaceful farming people. It’s a way of life that goes back multiple generations in most families and runs deep in the blood of Chibok’s Christians, who make up 90 percent of this community. According to their traditional beliefs, the land is the foundation of wealth, and farming must always be undertaken seriously. The earth is to be loved and revered, never bought or sold, only passed by inheritance from one family member to another. This long-held connection to the land is the main reason some Chibok residents have refused to move on from the area despite countless years without decent infrastructure or basic services and more recently, the ever-present threat of Boko Haram violence. Instead, they stay to work the hardscrabble earth, growing crops for personal use and as a source of income. This community’s enduring relationship with farming isn’t the product of chance, but rather a bond carefully, patiently fostered over time.

  For the daughters of Chibok, the land carries an additional significance. They are typically given a small plot before they reach puberty—a pathway to developing an early sense of responsibility as well as financial independence. This nurturing of female autonomy in a part of the world where it is much more common to curb female independence stands out as remarkable—making this harmonious Christian-majority town, nestled deep within a Muslim-majority region, all the more noteworthy.

  Yet for Priscilla, Mary, Saa, and Dorcas, four Chibok girls born in the late 1990s, the trials and traditions of life in this part of the world were nothing out of the ordinary. After all, their entire childhoods had been spent in northeastern Nigeria, and it was all they’d ever known. The young lives of these four very different girls had largely followed the same script, played out in simple homes and rudimentary primary schools, each act shaped by their hardworking parents. Before their personal bedrooms gave way to the bustling dormitories of their secondary school years, life as they knew it was a quintessentially undramatic affair.

  As far back as Priscilla could remember, her parents had worked the land. It was never easy. They made their living from growing maize, beans, and groundnuts (peanuts). The latter is a highly profitable but time-consuming crop that more often than not is beset by weeds, disease, or pests—or sometimes all three at once. In keeping with local tradition, before she turned twelve, this tall, slender girl with doe-like eyes and a shy smile was given her very own piece of land, carved from the larger family plot and located a short ten-minute walk from their home. Priscilla had never experienced this kind of excitement before, and the thrill of ownership never faded. In contrast, the appeal of preparing the soil, planting the seeds, controlling the weeds, and harvesting her groundnuts disappeared almost immediately. Priscilla’s lack of enthusiasm for farming never bothered her father, Mallum. He had eight children and Priscilla was his fifth-born and by far his favorite. So the fact that she didn’t care for tilling or toiling wasn’t a problem. Whenever she visited the patch, if her father was there working on the family plot, he always stopped and urged Priscilla to find a comfortable place to sit and rest. Then this elderly man with his reed-thin frame and wizened features would busy himself with the backbreaking work of tending to his daughter’s crop of groundnuts. By the time she was a teenager, whenever she was back from boarding school for the holidays, whether it was on the farm or at home, Mallum wanted her close by. He loved these opportunities to regale his daughter with stories from his past and lessons for her future.

  Rather than out with her father working the land, Priscilla was more likely to be found with Rachel, her mother, in the family’s outdoor cooking area. Here she learned the intricacies of preparing local Nigerian dishes, with their many stages of grinding, chopping, peeling, boiling, frying, and always copiously seasoning. By her late teens, Priscilla confidently boasted about her cooking skills and how much her family enjoyed her signature dish made from kuka, the leaves of the Baobab tree, cooked with meat, beans, spices, and oil.

  Priscilla’s lifetime ambition, however, lay far beyond the kitchen. From the time she was a young girl at her local primary school she dreamed of becoming a doctor, and that dream was still firmly in place when she left home for the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok. With her parents in tow, Priscilla traveled for just under an hour by car to her new boarding school, ready to start junior secondary one (JSS1), the first of six years of schooling on offer. Originally built in the 1940s by American missionaries from the Illinois-based Church of the Brethren, the Girls Secondary School didn’t become a government institution, with the mission of educating the children of Chibok and nearby areas, until the 1970s.

  Beyond the school’s wrought iron gates stood a cluster of nearly two dozen single-story buildings. These boxy, utilitarian structures housed classrooms, dorms, staff quarters, and a kitchen and storage room. New students like Priscilla were greeted by unwelcoming metal doors and banks of large windows, many of which had lost their glass at some unknown point in the past. Almost all the buildings were painted the same dusky yellow, which matched the sandy soil they were built on. In the blinding light of the sun, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the school was actually folding into its surroundings, becoming less real in front of your eyes. The main classroom bloc was the exception to this color rule. It stood awkwardly apart with its blue-green walls, an ironic touch that brought to mind sea foam in this parched, semiarid landscape.

  By the time twelve-year old Priscilla showed up on her first day, it had become routine in Chibok for most girls to complete primary school and then progress to secondary school. Compared with the rest of Borno State, in which Chibok is located, where more than 70 percent of primary-school-age girls are out of school, the percentage of girls progressing in their education in Chibok represents by far one of the highest rates in Nigeria. To move beyond the boundaries of this mainly Christian community is to find oneself in locales in northern Nigeria where more than 50 percent of girls will have already marked the defining milestone of marriage before they can turn their minds to celebrating their sixteenth birthday. In most towns and villages up and down this region, conservative Islam and restrictive social mores lay the groundwork for gender inequity. All the while in Chibok, educatio
n and opportunity are prized every bit as much for girls as for boys, further confirming this town’s status as an anomaly in this problem-ridden part of the world.

  Neither of Priscilla’s parents was formally educated, but they worked hard to pay her secondary-school fees, which amounted to a little under ten US dollars a year. And they wholeheartedly championed their daughter’s vison for the future. During school breaks, her parents ceaselessly prodded and reminded her to stay focused on her studies. As she made her way through secondary school, Priscilla increasingly understood her responsibilities, as well as the idea that whatever success she achieved was not simply to make her life better, it also had to usher in good things for those she loved most. It was this “benefit for all factor” that motivated Priscilla every bit as much as it spurred on her parents’ support for her education.

  They needed her to succeed because money was perennially tight in their family. Their day-to-day existence was shaped by the challenges of life in a mud brick house with no running water, no power or cooling, and having to rely on the land to feed, clothe, and cover every expense. Yet an overwhelming love shone through all the hardships and deprivation. Memories of her large family eating and playing together formed the foundation of Priscilla’s young life and sense of self. And in times of trouble, it was to these memories that she returned again and again in search of comfort.

  Mary’s parents, Gaji and Felicie, were also full-time farmers without a formal education. But they grew a larger assortment of crops than Priscilla’s family did—beans, groundnuts, guinea corn, and okra—which afforded them a relatively more comfortable life and the ability to buy their daughter frequent treats. They’d wanted siblings for her, but that wish remained unfulfilled. This meant their round-faced daughter, with her long, gangly limbs and warm, infectious giggle, was the center of their lives, and they took every opportunity to spoil her. When she was younger, before her departure for secondary school, Mary particularly looked forward to her father’s homecomings every Wednesday, because most times he showed up with a small gift. Often it was fruit, but on occasion it was a new dress. In time, she’d amassed quite a collection of outfits. As the years passed and Mary returned home during the school breaks, the gift giving continued, but there was never any doubt as to which dress from her father was her favorite. The moment he had pulled the yellow gown out of the bag, she had fallen in love with it. Mary adored the brightness, its intricate beadwork around the neckline, and its length just above her knee. Years later, when the dress was lost in a blaze in her home, she’d wept bitterly.

  Mary kept her ever-growing pile of gifts in her large bedroom, along with her books, a desk, and a small stereo. Her father had purchased the latter on one of his trips to Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.

  The sound system was undoubtedly special to Mary, but it wasn’t her most prized childhood possession. That title actually belonged to her bed, though not because it was exceptional looking. It was just a basic frame with a yellow foam mattress, but it facilitated her favorite pastime: sleeping. Whenever she wasn’t at school, she retreated to her bedroom at every possible opportunity, kicked off her slippers, and gleefully dove into bed. Mary was at her happiest in this spot, stretched out beneath the covers, seemingly without a care in the world, even when she had a long list of chores to complete. Most days her parents turned a blind eye to the hours of lazing around. They even pretended to believe Mary when she lied about repeated headaches, which meant she couldn’t possibly get out of bed to help her mother in the kitchen—yet again.

  They let her get away with it most days, but not always. There were those mornings before the sun was blazing in the sky when her mother put her foot down and stormed into Mary’s room. “Wake up! Up! Come and help me in the kitchen. Now!” Felicie’s tone made it abundantly clear that there would be no game playing that day. Without delay, a sheepish-looking Mary rolled herself out of bed and followed her short, plump mother to the kitchen. Soon lying in bed was a distant memory, as task after task was assigned to her: washing dishes, drawing water from the well, sweeping the house, and on some days grinding maize into semo, a fine cornmeal. The cooking of semo itself is a grueling process that requires no small amount of patience and elbow strength. Ladles of water are scooped into a pot containing the cornmeal and continuously stirred until a gooey, spongy mass appears. The sight of women, doubled over pots with lips drawn, beads of sweat dotting creased brows as they stir, fold, twist, and whip their version of semo into a doughy, squishy blob is a common memory for many who’ve spent significant amounts of time in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana. In Mary’s household, while her mother’s arm grew heavy and sore from turning over the semo, there’d always be a pot of gloopy soup or stewed vegetables cooking, to be eaten with the squishy balls of cornmeal.

  For most Chibok families living off the land, barring Sundays, bad weather, a major family emergency, or the celebration of Christian holidays, part of every day is spent on the farm, for at least one if not both parents. Unlike Priscilla’s family plot, which was barely a ten-minute walk from home, Mary’s family farm was thirty to forty minutes away. Several times a week while she was still in primary school, once all the cooking was done, Felicie carefully would fill dishes with the piping-hot food and pack them into a basket before they set off for the farm. Often Mary’s father had already been hard at work for several hours. But the food they brought would be his breakfast and provided a needed break, one of the few he allowed himself to take throughout the day. With stomachs rumbling, Mary, Felicie, and Gaji always settled under a tree to enjoy the tasty home-cooked meal. Mother and daughter ate together from the same dish, while her father had a plate all to himself. In those moments, sitting there flanked by her parents, Mary’s stomach and heart were completely full.

  Leaving for the Government Girls Secondary School, which was two hours away from her beloved home, had been terribly painful for Mary. The very first time her parents dropped her off, she wept uncontrollably. The mere thought of being separated from loved ones seemed life-ending to the then twelve-year-old Mary. She bemoaned the quality of the school’s meals, which had to be eaten outside classrooms or in dormitories because there was no dining hall, and each time left her with a stomachache. Then there was the strict discipline, which essentially amounted to a whipping with a cane or being made to kneel down on the concrete floor whenever a school rule was broken. All of it triggered a steady stream of complaints from Mary. The constant upset became another excuse for her parents to spoil their only child even more, leading to a constant supply of edible treats, on-demand pocket money, and promises of weekly parental visits. But nothing could take away the homesickness she felt, so she cried throughout her six years at the school. Her tears fell even faster whenever a visit home ended and it was time to head back to the dorms. For all the emotional distress, there was never a conversation about her leaving the school. As far as Mary’s parents were concerned, she had to get an education, and if that meant crying every day for years, then so be it.

  Felicie dreamed of her Mary one day becoming a state governor or maybe even president of Nigeria. She never tired of reminding her daughter how such accomplishments would ease the family’s financial burdens. So along with the treats and pocket money came the words “focus” and “study.” In primary school, Mary had pictured herself becoming an airline pilot, but that began to seem less attractive as she made her way through secondary school. She ultimately settled on the idea of becoming an accountant, an odd choice given her weak math skills. But by her calculation, accountants were always in demand and commanded hefty salaries, which would be a boon to her and her doting parents.

  For Chibok’s Christians, devotion to the land is matched only by their passion for Jesus Christ; these are the twin tenets of life in this community. From birth to death, the focus is on God above and what comes from the earth beneath their feet. For these Christians, most of whom belong to the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (Ekklesiyar Yan uw
a a Nigeria, or EYN), faith isn’t a hidden-away, occasional pursuit; it is a fervent, communal, all-consuming affair, the center of which is daily worship. Every morning in almost every single Christian home in Chibok, the same ritual has played out for decades, adults and children rising from beds and mattresses, wiping sleep from their eyes, readying themselves to worship and praise the Lord.

  This identical scene also played out about an hour’s drive from Chibok in Askira, where Saa and her family lived. Saa can’t remember a time when her Christian faith didn’t frame her life. As the daughter of a onetime pastor turned Bible class teacher, she was introduced to the concept of God when she was still a baby. Some of her earliest memories include being with her parents and five brothers at five a.m. for morning devotion and then gathering again in the evenings. As soon as she was old enough, her parents sent her off to Sunday school. As the years went by, a host of church groups increasingly occupied her time, and this pretty girl with full cheeks and a quiet confidence fostered a deep faith.