by Isha Sesay
Thanks to the teacher’s salary her father received and income gained from selling the extra corn, beans, and peanuts they grew on their large plot of land, Saa enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. Her big house sat in a large compound with two mango trees and was separated from the neighbors by a fence. The family boasted their own well and generator. They also owned a couple of cows as well as sheep and goats; so if money was ever a problem, they could sell some of their livestock for extra cash.
But if there’d been money problems during her young years, Saa was never aware of them. She was a happy, though on occasion whiny child, especially when she wasn’t getting her way. Being the only girl in the family definitely came with its perks, like having her own bedroom, as well as a television and DVD player, which made Saa a standout among friends in her corner of Askira.
Saa’s love of school started back when she was a pupil in the neighborhood’s Low Cost Primary School. Her older brother Peter, with whom she shared a birthday four years apart, was also enrolled there at the same time, which was an unending source of joy for his little sister. Saa enjoyed nothing more than trailing her brother all over the small compound, though how pleased he was with the situation remained unknown. Even in primary school she was an outstanding student. Finishing within the top three in her class brought gifts of money or clothes. When she finished top in primary 5, her father, Moses—whom she lovingly called “Baba,” the Hausa word for father—bought her the bicycle Saa had been so eager to own. She’d already spent hours learning how to ride on her brothers’ bikes, so by the time her beautiful pink two-wheeler arrived, she was ready to go fearlessly flying around the yard. The only person she readily allowed on her bike was her beloved brother Peter. The rest of her brothers were forbidden from even touching it. When it came to Saa’s friends, once again she had to think long and hard about whether they deserved such a treat.
For all the perks that came with being the only girl in her family, there were also disadvantages. Being saddled with almost all the household chores was probably the most annoying of all. Throughout Chibok and the other towns and villages spread across Nigeria’s north, most girls are expected to start their day washing dishes, collecting water, sweeping the floors, and helping their mothers in the kitchen, and only once those chores are done can they turn their thoughts to learning. After school, another to-do list waited: collect more water, clean the house, help prepare food, and wash more dishes. Like most girls in this region, Saa’s mother, Rebecca, began preparing her for this path of servitude as soon as she could. But unlike most of her schoolmates, Saa wasn’t even in her teens when her mother began traveling with the church choir, and she found herself with the responsibility of running the household and ensuring that her five brothers and father were fed and cared for. It was an enormous undertaking for an eleven-year-old girl, and though she asked for help from her siblings, she was quickly rebuffed—even by Ayuba, who was four years younger, but still felt empowered enough to reject her pleas. “Housework is for females,” he said, before sauntering off proudly.
In her mother’s absence, Saa knew there was no point turning to her father for help. Unlike her mother, who could talk and talk and talk, her baba said little. His preference was to lie under the mango tree in their yard and listen to the radio. The only time he could be relied on to intervene was if he actually saw one of his children engaged in a troubling act. In those moments he would call the entire family together to talk things through and pray. All of this meant Saa was left to juggle her schoolwork and the responsibility of running the household on her own.
While her parents had no qualms about loading all the domestic chores onto Saa’s shoulders, they also strongly supported her passion for school. In fact, they were devoted advocates for education thanks to the time her father had spent in a pastors’ training school, where he learned basic English, and in turn, had taught Saa’s mother. The experience reshaped their appreciation of education, and when it came to their own six children they wholeheartedly encouraged them to work hard in school and aim to attend university. Surprisingly, there was little to no distinction in the level of expectation and encouragement doled out to Saa versus her five brothers. Saa was encouraged to be whatever she wanted in life—with one exception, becoming a teacher like her father. Baba was adamant that teaching would be a poor life choice because in his view there was no way to make a decent living within the profession. But he needn’t have worried, because Saa had a very different idea of where her life was headed. She was going to be a doctor. Her decision wasn’t predicated on how much money she stood to make, but rather the impact she could have. Before Saa left for boarding school, her mother had suddenly taken ill late one night in 2010. The nearby local government hospital was closed due to its striking workforce, and there was nowhere else in the vicinity to take her. With fear and despair rising, Saa watched as Rebecca’s condition worsened rapidly and her mother slipped perilously close to death. Her survival was due to the lifesaving treatment she received from a family friend who’d been through medical school. It was in that moment Saa decided she would become a doctor, a profession that would allow her to make a difference in her community and to be on hand to save those she loved most.
She actually joined the Chibok school in its final year, senior secondary three (SS3), leaving behind her initial secondary school in Askira because her parents believed that in out-of-the-way Chibok, their daughter would be safe from Boko Haram’s Islamic militancy. They told themselves that there Saa was beyond the group’s widening tide of attacks on schools in major population centers—offensives intended to dismantle secular education across the three neighboring northern states of Borno, Yola, and Adamawa. Unlike Mary, who cried and complained without end, Saa bore her new school’s cracked walls with broken windows, the crowded dormitories where most juniors slept on the floor, and the cramped classrooms of close to a hundred students, where she sat in groups of twos and threes to share benches attached to metal desks, without complaint. Her focus lay elsewhere—her life plan: secondary school, followed by university, then medical school, and returning home to help one and all. To Saa that was what really mattered.
When it came to their firstborn, Dorcas’s parents believed their daughter could do no wrong. She was always well mannered and perfectly behaved, an all-around easy child. To her mother, Esther, this girl was the “messiah” of the family, the one with almond-shaped eyes and delicate features, the one who would help lift them all out of poverty. They made no secret of their belief that Dorcas was totally different from her four younger siblings: Happy, Marvellous, Ibrahim, and Missy.
The unusual story of how she got her name was a long-standing family favorite, told repeatedly and often. Long before their courtship and marriage, Esther’s husband, Yakubu, would drive his Hilux pickup truck around town with a poster of a white baby girl plastered on the driver’s side door. He’d grown up as an orphan and thought often about the parents he never knew. He’d bought the image in the market, and the cute, smiling infant somehow captured all his deep-seated yearning for a family. It also masked his secretly held fears that he would never find someone to love him or have a child of his own. So this unknown little one, to whom he had absolutely no real connection, became his “baby.” Yakubu named her Dorcas, after the Hebrew woman found in the fifth book of the New Testament, Acts 9:36, “Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity” (ESV). According to the Bible, upon Dorcas’s sudden death, as the entire community stood weeping and mourning her loss, she was brought back to life by Saint Peter. To Yakubu, the biblical Dorcas was a model Christian, with the perfect name for his model baby.
He also decided to have some fun with the situation and set about trying to convince his passengers that the white child plastered on his vehicle was actually his kid. This became a well-known joke in Chibok, producing a warm chuckle whenever it was shared. In due course, he met and marri
ed Esther, who soon gave birth to their first child, a girl. In keeping with their Chibok traditions, the day came when all their friends and relatives gathered in the local church for the naming ceremony. The pastor readied himself for the big reveal: “And the baby’s name is—” he started. But before he could even get the words out, the entire church yelled in one voice, “Dorcas!” Though the baby was officially named Maida in honor of Esther’s aunt, the name Dorcas had belonged to her long before she was conceived, and that would be the name that stuck.
Dorcas was a genteel child. Even as a toddler, while other young kids were busy rolling around in the dirt, she preferred to sit in her own special chair and play cook with a large empty tomato can that doubled as her cooking pot, using sand and water as her ingredients. She amused herself for hours and never got her clothes dirty. Simple things made her happy, including looking after her parents and siblings. As soon as she was old enough, Dorcas began shaving her father’s head with a razor, and from that point onward, Yakubu left all his grooming needs squarely in the hands of his daughter. Meanwhile, with Esther on the road buying and selling brilliantly hued fabrics for clothing, cushion covers, and bedsheets, Dorcas was caring for her siblings and running the household by her early teens. Before long, she was leading morning and evening devotion with her entire family, reading the Bible verses, singing the praises, and praying for them all.
She displayed a maturity far beyond her years, which may have been the result of living with her grandmother when she was seven or eight. It was during this time that Esther had returned to college to earn her Higher National Diploma. In the absence of her mother, Dorcas followed her grandmother everywhere: to the local government building where she worked as a cook, and to the family farm, where they planted groundnuts, maize, guinea corn, beans, and sesame. Just like the other girls, Dorcas was also given her own strip of land. But it was her grandmother who stepped up to do the majority of the work, gladly taking care of her groundnuts and beans while her granddaughter was away at school.
Esther proudly proclaimed her high expectations for Dorcas. Over the years she told anyone who would listen that her firstborn would be the one to head to university and come away with a bachelor’s degree. She talked regularly with Dorcas about her future, asking about her dreams and ambitions. “Do you want to be a foolish housewife or a trader?” In time Dorcas decided she wanted to teach at a university and put all her energies into making that career choice a reality. Esther thought the plan was a good one and readily gave her blessing. As far as Dorcas was concerned, the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok was neither the best of schools nor the worst in the region. Like Saa, Dorcas was a relative newcomer, having joined in SS3 after leaving a school in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital. Maiduguri, which was also the birthplace of Boko Haram, found itself in the terror group’s crosshairs and the target of one attack after another, all of which led to Dorcas pleading with her parents to transfer her somewhere else where she’d feel safe. Once she was enrolled in Chibok, Dorcas did what she always did, working hard and keeping out of trouble.
Despite the ever-expanding trail of death and destruction caused by the insurgents in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa, Boko Haram still remained a peripheral concern to the girls in Chibok, and they certainly didn’t feel particularly vulnerable or believe they were facing a specific threat. The girls were just excited to be on the brink of finishing secondary school and had already cast their minds forward to new academic pursuits: different schools and exciting new adventures on the horizon. Likewise, their parents believed that their beloved daughters were safe in the Chibok boarding school. No significant conversations about fears for the girls’ safety took place in the homes of Priscilla, Mary, Saa, and Dorcas. The Chibok school authorities and local government leaders never sent letters of warning to the parents or called a parent-teacher meeting, so the belief among these four families was that the situation in the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok and the town itself was under control.
Plus, they had faith. Both the parents and the girls told themselves God would always watch over them and ensure no one came to any harm.
Chapter Four
EACH DAY AS THE SUN SET ON CHIBOK AND THE PACE OF LIFE SLOWED to a crawl, Priscilla, now eighteen, prepared for the approaching night across town in the girls’ secondary school. The school had no electricity. So when the sun finally disappeared from the northern skies, all parts of the compound—the cramped classroom blocks, the sparse library, the bathrooms without running water, and the sprawling hostels—sat in near-complete, inky blackness. By that hour, only the beams of flashlights cut the impenetrable darkness, as Priscilla and the others wandered back and forth between each other’s rooms, chuckling and exchanging bits of gossip, or finishing off their homework in a tucked-away corner.
The absence of basic amenities like electricity and indoor plumbing didn’t bother this soft-spoken young girl—after all, these were the very same conditions Priscilla grappled with when she was back at home. In school, studying by flashlight every evening and then grabbing her bucket to collect water from the school’s well the next morning was inconvenient, certainly, but her entire life had been fashioned by inconvenience. So when it came to expectations of comfort, Priscilla didn’t have any. All she knew was that she was fortunate beyond measure to be receiving an education.
There were hundreds of girls, every one of them assigned to one of four dorm rooms in the four hostels. The hostels, in turn, were dubbed “Houses,” each with its own unique name—Ganna, Mwoda, Jetau, and Likama. On some evenings, Priscilla spotted a couple of the female teachers moving among the girls, checking on how they were doing. Many of the school’s teachers lived in the cluster of staff quarters within view of the hostels. So on the occasions when they suddenly appeared, neither Priscilla nor her friends gave it much thought; the girls simply carried on with whatever they were doing. Knowing there were adults nearby gave them a sense of comfort and safety.
The only people Priscilla expected to see on a nightly basis were the school’s duo of nocturnal caretakers. First there was the graying Mr. Jida, somewhere in his seventies. He’d been there watching over the girls for as long as anyone could remember. Strikingly dark with tribal markings of a short vertical line on each cheek, he’d appear each evening on his bicycle. By then the day’s classes were long done and the girls were back in their hostels. His concrete lookout post was a small shelter beside the hostel compound’s gate that was so far away this wiry old man couldn’t actually see the buildings or the girls he was supposed to keep safe through the night. Not that he was keeping a close watch. In fact, depending on whom you asked, some girls said you were more likely to find him curled up and fast asleep in that very spot with his trusty bicycle propped up against a nearby wall.
Meanwhile, closer to the hostels was an even older man. Priscilla and the others called him Kaka, which means “grandfather” in Hausa. Bony, with a head of white hair, he was tasked with constantly patrolling the area around the dorm rooms, but his energy had left him long ago. So when he arrived each evening, he plopped down on a stool by the hostels and remained in that corner for most of the night. Yet whatever he lacked in stamina, he replaced with geniality. He regularly soothed angry tempers and mediated arguments between the girls, which made Priscilla adore him.
When Monday, April 14, 2014, rolled around, all the Chibok schoolgirls were focused on one thing: exams. Their Senior School Certificate Examinations (SSCE) had been under way since the beginning of the month and would last till the end of June. Every single girl understood the necessity of a good showing in these critical end-of-secondary-school tests, which were meant to pave the way to university. If a girl didn’t perform well, her career prospects would be hamstrung. And after years of sacrifice on the part of their families, the girls were all too aware of the weight of expectations resting on their shoulders. Still, with only 4 percent of girls in northern Nigeria completing secondary school, the mere fa
ct that these girls had reached this point already made them success stories.
There are between 8.5 million and 10 million children out of school in Nigeria—the largest out-of-school numbers in the world for more than a decade. The country has faced a “multi-dimensional crisis” in education, according to a report by the UK’s Department for International Development released in 2009. Sixty percent of the unenrolled live in the country’s north—with girls accounting for more than half of those numbers. The report elaborated on the scale of the problem:
Access is limited and quality is poor; Department for International Development (DFID) research found that learning outcomes in Nigerian schools were worse than in many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. There are insufficient qualified teachers, especially in rural areas. Quality of teaching is often low. Many children leave primary school and junior secondary school without adequate literacy, numeracy and life skills. Teachers are often poorly supervised and are described as having low motivation and inadequate incentives.
The truth is, the situation in the northern states stands out as particularly bleak. A 2012 review by the UK government highlighted that two-thirds of fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old girls in the north couldn’t read a sentence, a dramatic difference with the southern part of the country, where that rate of illiteracy drops to below 10 percent. In the eight northern states, more than 80 percent of women were unable to read, compared with 54 percent for men. Between 2010 and 2015 only seventy-five females for every one hundred males finished senior secondary school in the country’s northeast. In 2014, with a state of emergency in place and Boko Haram’s accelerated efforts to disrupt education across the northern states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa, even fewer children had the opportunity to take their seats in a classroom. This educational crisis had forced local authorities to open up the girls’ classrooms in Chibok to boys a few years earlier. They were allowed to enroll for the final three years of school—known as “senior secondary school”—as day students. Thus, once classes were over, the several dozen Chibok schoolboys who attended with the girls, wearing uniforms of blue check shirts and matching pants, all headed home.