by Isha Sesay
Then, out of the darkness came the echo of automatic weapons. Esther and Yakubu froze in terror. Less than two dozen Nigerian soldiers were stationed in Chibok to keep everyone safe. Could they be source of the raucous gunfire? They were both praying for this to be the case till the ominous chant of “Allahu Akbar” rose up amid the thunderous crackle of gunfire. Esther’s faltering hope left her and they knew then that they were out of time. If they were going to do anything, it needed to happen—now.
They had no idea where their eldest daughter was, but they had to get her three sisters and brother, Happy, Marvellous, Missy, and Ibrahim, out of the house. From the sound of things, the fighters were closing in. Yakubu refused to hear Esther’s pleas for him to take the children while she stayed home in case Dorcas appeared. Soon twelve-year-old Happy and nine-year-old Marvellous were off with the neighbor. While Yakubu scooped into his arms their sleeping five-year-old son Ibrahim, Esther quickly tied three-year-old Missy, who was also fast asleep, to her back. Minutes later, they were running alongside thousands of people in the moonlight to a stone hill overlooking the school to hide.
Back at the school, the big, bright moon illuminated the faces of the hundreds of girls gathered on the hostel grounds. By now almost everyone was outside. Some sat, others stood in groups, and almost all of them were absorbed in prayer. The girls’ fast-moving lips gave voice to ardent petitions for deliverance from the evil lurking nearby. For some it was too much to bear silently, and ever so often gasps of “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” were heard. Meanwhile, there were those who took comfort in telling themselves that even if Boko Haram turned up, they wouldn’t be harmed, because the group was mainly known for targeting boys.
The sounds of chaos in town, though, were getting louder. Priscilla and some of her housemates sought out Kaka. She was relieved to find him sitting in his usual corner, looking the same as he always did. The girls could hardly wait for someone in authority to finally tell them what to do.
“Kaka, do you hear what is happening in town? Should we run?”
Kaka stared at them wearily, blinking slowly before he spoke. “Me, myself, I don’t know what to do. You have gathered together in prayer. Let us just continue praying.” That was all he had for them.
Disappointed, Priscilla and the group turned away to head back to the rest of their housemates. They’d taken only a few steps when she looked over her shoulder for one last glance at Kaka. He was gone! Priscilla gasped and the rest of the girls turned. Their beloved Kaka had fled without saying a word. Now they were more afraid than ever. Mr. Jida, also, was nowhere to be found.
Girls with cell phones dialed family members, their hearts racing. Saa found a spot to sit down, just in front of the hostel buildings, and dug out her phone. She dialed her father’s number. No answer. She tried her brother next. The same. Saa tried her dad a second time and listened impatiently as the number rang, unanswered. A few minutes went by and then her screen lit up. It was her father.
“What is happening?” he asked. He’d been fast asleep and now his voice sounded tense. She’d never called him this late before.
“Boko Haram is shooting guns in Chibok town. We are at school and we don’t know what to do.”
There was a long pause. Then he advised his daughter to stay in school with the others and wait for their teachers. He also instructed her to pray for God’s protection. Then the conversation was over.
Priscilla, meanwhile, was also trying desperately to reach her parents on her phone. She repeatedly dialed the number, but each time the call went nowhere. Frustration gave way to fresh panic, then a troubling new possibility. Maybe she wasn’t getting them because they had run away once they heard all the gunshots. Could they really have left her?
The sound of a rumbling, sputtering motorcycle engine suddenly caught everyone’s attention. Priscilla turned toward the gate and watched as a man in a Nigerian military uniform came through and drove toward the crowd of schoolgirls. He moved slowly and steadily. Soon he was close enough for her to see the lack of emotion in his eyes. Nobody said a word or dared make a move. Without warning he suddenly turned on his bike and sped off. Priscilla and all the other girls suspected they’d just received a visit from Boko Haram. She stared at the figure retreating in the moonlight. No one but Boko Haram would be bold enough to barge into their school without any kind of permission.
Within minutes she heard the clear sound of unfamiliar male voices just beyond the school’s wall.
“Look, the school is empty. Come, let’s go.”
“No, we must at least go in to see what is inside.”
“I have told you, there is nobody inside.”
“We need to see the hostels for ourselves.”
Startled, Priscilla looked around. What should they do? When the first handful of men entered the school grounds on foot, the girls were all still paralyzed by fear. As the men stepped out of the shadows into the light, they saw they were all dressed in the standard camouflage uniforms of Nigerian soldiers. Many were young, in their twenties and thirties. More and more walked through the gate, and at the sight of this endless stream of men, Bernice and several girls burst into tears. No one could believe what was happening. At least a hundred armed men marched toward them. The hostel grounds were completely overrun, and Priscilla, like all her schoolmates, was trapped.
“Don’t be afraid. Come closer,” the men instructed as they surrounded the trembling girls. “We are soldiers out on patrol. We’re here to protect you and nothing bad will happen to you.”
After so many hours alone and afraid, the relief among many of the girls was palpable. Soldiers had come to protect them! When the men gave instructions, the girls listened carefully, and without saying a word, quickly gathered together in front of their hostels as directed.
Priscilla did as she was told, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong. Once she’d been able to study the appearance of their intruders, she became convinced these weren’t Nigerian soldiers at all. Yes, they were dressed in the same uniforms, but only a handful of the men wore shoes; most of them were in flip-flops, and a couple had nothing on their feet. Their water bottles also struck her as odd, filthy looking and haphazardly slung over their shoulders with lengths of rope. To Priscilla, these men were far more likely to be cattle herders than soldiers.
When Mary looked closely at the men, she wondered why Nigerian soldiers would be wearing black headdresses that covered their faces. By now the same feeling of alarm was spreading through the group. But any thought of trying to escape was pointless. The girls were hemmed in, and strange-looking men spread out across the compound. As more girls fought back tears, the group collectively prayed their worst nightmare wasn’t about to come true. Then they heard it.
“Allahu Akbar . . .”
“Allahu Akbar . . .”
Boko Haram had arrived.
A wail rose up from the hundreds of girls, who now began to sob uncontrollably.
The men were unmoved.
“We are with you today!” one of them shouted. “If you don’t do what we tell you, we will kill you! We can kill all of you here! We are Boko Haram!”
Were they all about to die? Priscilla wondered. The girls’ wailing grew louder as they clung to each other with growing desperation.
Amid this burst of activity, a girl from Mary’s house managed to peel away and make it to the hostel wall. Rahila quietly clambered up the wall and quickly dropped from view. Unbeknownst to her and the rest of her schoolmates, Boko Haram was not only inside the hostel compound, it was also outside. The entire school was completely surrounded. So within minutes of Rahila swinging herself over that wall, filled with thoughts of running to freedom, she was tossed right back into the compound, where she landed in a thud and a flood of tears. No one dared move. Her schoolmates could only watch as the sobbing girl writhed on the ground before she gingerly picked herself up, seemingly unhurt, and limped over to the rest of the group.
The men merely snickered among themselves without saying a word to her. They had other things on their mind.
“Is this all of you?” the men asked roughly.
“Yes!” said the girls in unison.
The men remained unconvinced. “We don’t believe you! There should be more of you than this! Where are the boys?”
“No, this is all of us. The boys are day students . . . they go home every day,” the girls stuttered.
“You are lying!” the men growled.
One of the militants cleared his throat and spoke in a loud, clear voice. “If there is anyone hiding in any of the rooms, you’d better come out, right now! Or we are going to set these buildings on fire!”
Convinced the dorm rooms were completely empty, Priscilla was surprised when a group of agitated-looking girls suddenly came scurrying out of the various houses.
They were greeted with sneers and insults from Boko Haram. “You fools, did we not tell you to come outside immediately?” Unsatisfied, some of the men dispersed to search the hostels, only to return empty handed.
The men holding the group of girls continued their questions.
“Where’s the cement block–making machine?”
“Where’s the gasoline?”
Their queries produced confused looks and muttered responses of “We don’t know,” which only enraged the intruders.
“We will shoot you if you don’t tell us where this machine is!” they threatened. But the girls didn’t know. Some just wept where they stood.
“What about the store where the food is kept?” asked one of the men, as he pointed directly at a randomly chosen girl and motioned with his gun for her to show him the way. She remained rooted in place, tears streaming down her face, unable to move. The other schoolgirls looked on, nervous about what might happen next.
“I will show you,” offered one of the girl’s friends, breaking the silence. The rest of them looked on while the two girls began a slow walk with the armed militant following close behind. The storage room was locked when the three arrived, but after several blows with his gun it was soon wide open and ready to be emptied. The men worked in two groups, the first carrying out the bags of rice, spaghetti, macaroni, milk, rice, yams, and onions, and leaving the others to load everything into the massive heavy-duty truck that pulled into the compound. The Mercedes-Benz LA 911, nicknamed “nine-eleven” by the locals, is a hulk of a vehicle with four tires at the back to accompany the two in front. The lumbering motorized wagon had a steel cage over the rear open cargo area and could carry well over a ton.
While the storage room was being looted, a separate group of men kept watch over the hundreds of girls who were now sitting quietly, too afraid to say or do anything that might anger their captors. As soon as the two friends returned it was time to get going.
“Move out!” shouted their captors. “Go over to the classroom area.”
As Priscilla stood alongside the hundreds of girls, bands of fighters converged tightly around them, forcing them to proceed. She’d barely taken five steps when their hostels went up in raging flames. Priscilla looked back, transfixed by the inferno. Saa watched in horror as all her possessions and everything her classmates owned burned to ash, the flames leaping and twisting the whole time against the inky night sky. Up to this point, Priscilla had kept her emotions in check, even as most of the others fell apart all around her. Now she was distraught, and her mind was reeling: Is this how my life will end? . . . Will they really burn me? Or will it just be my hostel? If I’m going to die, I think I’d rather be shot than burned. Hot tears ran down her cheeks.
The men were propelling her forward out of the hostel compound toward the block of sandy-colored buildings that housed their classrooms. It was less than a five-minute walk, and she’d made this journey hundreds if not thousands of times during her six years at the secondary school. What Priscilla saw when she stepped beyond the walls of their hostel compound caused some of the girls to lose their footing. Others screamed, and loud gasps leapt from the throats of some. Close to three hundred more men stood there, sneering, with eyes flashing in the shadows. Upon seeing the girls, the waiting mob erupted in waves of “Allahu Akbar.” Before Priscilla could even fully take in the spectacle of this flood of armed men, she heard the hiss and crackle of flames. Their classrooms were all now ablaze. So too were the hostels and the staff quarters.
“We will burn everything here.”
“Nothing will remain!”
The declarations were met with more cries of Allahu Akbar, a riotous endorsement of the terror brought to bear on this small school.
Meanwhile, a spirited conversation suddenly broke out among several dozen of the men who were standing a short way off from Priscilla and the others.
“Let us carry them all with us,” one suggested.
“No, no. Let us divide them into groups and burn them in the different rooms.”
Burn us?
On the other side of Chibok, Esther squatted with the other members of her community on the stony mound on which they’d sought shelter, but her heart and soul were with her daughter, Dorcas. From the hill, she and everyone with her could see the outline of the school, the last building on the outskirts of town. God, the girls are so quiet. Maybe they managed an escape of some type. Esther lacked the presence of mind to worry about herself or the rest of her family, adrift in a town overrun by men with a hankering for chaos and death. All her mind was able to register were thoughts of Dorcas and the threat to her child’s well-being.
She had good reason to be afraid. Two months earlier in neighboring Yobe State, Boko Haram had attacked the Federal Government College in Buni Yadi. Unlike the boarding school in Chibok, the college had housed both male and female students in their respective hostels. When the attackers appeared in the overnight hours, they swept through the chipped and faded arch at the school’s entrance, moving among the school’s twenty-four buildings and unleashing a hail of gunfire. Bullets whizzed through the air, cutting down terrified young men who died alone in pools of blood. When the sun rose the next day on this impoverished corner of Nigeria, every single school building on the site was in ruins and fifty-eight boys were dead, some burned beyond recognition.
There were girls in the school that night too, but they’d been handled differently. Before the murderous rampage began, the insurgents marched them out of their hostels and into the school’s mosque, where, in a place of worship, the innocent stood face-to-face with terrorists and the girls feared the worst. No death sentence was handed down, though. Instead they received a stern lecture about the perils of Western education, along with the direct instruction to abandon their schooling at once and get married. Next they were ordered out of the school. With wrathful words of warning still ringing in their ears, the girls of the Federal Government College had bolted. Once the they were gone, Boko Haram gleefully shot and burned the male students till dawn.
Now the fact that no one could hear the Chibok girls troubled Esther deeply. In recent months, the school had become known for the hordes of teenage girls squealing and running around late into the night. Why were they so quiet now that Boko Haram was in their midst? Nobody on that rocky outcrop slept or spoke. They kept vigil and stared at the school in the distance. Esther’s lips moved ceaselessly in prayer. Father, please protect my baby. Let it be silent because the girls have found a place to hide. Father, protect Dorcas.
In the quiet of the predawn hours, vaulting flames suddenly appeared, reaching high for the night’s sky. No telltale sound of men yelling or panic-stricken schoolgirls screaming reached the Chibok residents gathered on their hill. Esther looked down at a growing inferno with mounting horror and frustration. Every single bone and sinew of her body was screaming—Get up and run down the hill! The last thing she wanted was to be so far away from Dorcas, but even in her altered state she knew that such a move meant almost-certain death.
When the boys from Boko Haram laid siege to Chibok on April 14, 2014,
from eleven thirty on that Monday night till just before dawn the next day, hundreds of them terrorized this small tucked-away town. To the soundtrack of rapid gunfire and crescendoing cries of “Allahu Akbar,” the militants unleashed a shower of bullets, burned down the town’s outdoor shopping complex, along with the homes of several prominent residents, and destroyed the girls’ school.
Disturbing details from the raid on the girls’ secondary school would later emerge. As those first shots rang out, every single one of the school’s teachers had abandoned their students and crept out of the compound to save themselves. Meanwhile, the principal’s home, which was on school grounds, also stood empty. Mrs. Asabe Kwambura was nowhere near Chibok; she was eighty miles away in her personal house in Maiduguri, the state capital, as had become her routine. As for old Mr. Jida, and even older Kaka, who’d urged the girls to stay in place and pray, they also melted away into the night.
For those hours that Boko Haram ransacked the town of Chibok, its residents remained out of sight, hiding up on hills above town or in nearby villages, praying for the night of terror to end. Up on the stone hill where she was keeping watch, Esther heard the rumbling of multiple engines on the move just after four thirty a.m. She gave her husband a questioning glance, but Yakubu simply stared back at her quizzically. He had no idea what was happening either. They concentrated on the sounds. One vehicle after another trundled along Chibok’s sole dirt road and headed out of town. Eventually, the sounds of engines faded away and there was nothing else. Quietness settled around Esther and the assembled residents of Chibok town. Wherever they were, everyone hoped and prayed that the ordeal had finally come to an end.