Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

  The sun was just beginning to light the day when they all finally took off running down that hill. First, Esther dropped off Missy and Ibrahim at home. During the entire nightmare the youngsters had somehow stayed quiet. Happy and Marvellous were still gone with a neighbor, but she felt confident that they’d soon show up to care for their siblings. Next she stopped by her sister’s home, and soon the two of them were half running, half walking to Dorcas’s school. Almost everyone in the town was doing the same thing, rushing to the burning school to find out what had become of the girls.

  Chapter Five

  SIMILAR TO THE WAY PRISCILLA, MARY, SAA, AND DORCAS SAT AT the center of their parents’ worlds, I knew my siblings and I were the sun, the moon, and the stars combined to Mamud and Kadi Sesay. A few years after my parents moved to London, my older sister, Jane, was born with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder typically caused by a brain injury before or at birth, a condition that left her severely disabled. None of the doctors could provide a satisfactory explanation of what had happened to cause Jane’s condition. But one English doctor said simply, “That’s how evolution goes sometimes,” before adding flippantly: “Don’t have any more children.”

  As my mother enjoyed reminding me countless times over the years, she promptly tossed aside this advice, and I was born just over a year later in a north London hospital. Then came the surprise arrival of “the little prince,” my baby brother, Mamud, named after our father, five years after me. By the time I was seven, I had been transplanted against my will from England to my parents’ native country of Sierra Leone. The transition to Freetown, the capital city, wasn’t easy, but my parents wisely ignored my grumbling and in time I grew to love my sun-drenched life.

  I took great pleasure from my efforts to sway my father, Mamud Senior, into doing whatever I wanted, and he unashamedly spoiled me. He served as the in-house counsel for the Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Board (SLPMB), and I felt like Christmas and my birthday had teamed up and come early whenever my father took me with him to work. As an eight-year-old, in preparation for those visits, I would spend hours sorting through my books and toys, constructing a sort of emergency kit in the unlikely event that I got bored while I was with him. On the eve of each visit, my mother watched without interrupting as I carefully packed and unpacked several large bags. Looking back, I now know the strange look on her face was bemusement, that wry smile an acknowledgement of how much I was a daddy’s girl. The night before these adventures, I could hardly sleep, nerve-tingling excitement keeping me awake. The next morning we would set off for SLPMB in the car as I gleefully mouthed the letters under my breath. One of the things I most looked forward to was a bowl of creamy chicken soup in the staff restaurant. Each time I’d eagerly grab my knife and reach for a bright yellow pat of butter to slather on my soft bread roll. Then, with grease-covered fingers, I carefully cut up the bread and slowly dragged it through the steaming-hot soup, savoring every mouthful of creamy, salty goodness. Afterward when we were in the corridors, my father would stop every couple of minutes to proudly introduce me to this “aunty” and that “uncle.” I always stood perfectly still by his side, peering through my thick-rimmed glasses and channeling my best impression of meekness.

  My father may have been my enabler, but my mother was the heartbeat and enforcer in our family. She set the rules and rhythm of our family life and kept every single one of us in line, including Mamud Senior—without fail.

  Back in London when I was a toddler, she’d begun surrounding me with books. It wasn’t long before I was reading voraciously. I read children’s versions of most English-language literary classics—Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice—long before I reached primary school. By the time we were back in Sierra Leone, my mother was a senior lecturer, teaching English literature at the University of Sierra Leone. Unsurprisingly, reading widely, writing clearly, and speaking confidently were the cornerstone lessons of my childhood. For many years, in the run-up to major school exams, my mother would go through every one of my notebooks and create questions for each subject. She’d stay up late into the night, after her long days in the classroom, drawing up practice papers to ensure I aced my tests.

  When I was about eight or nine, one of my teachers started bullying me. This plump, wrinkled old woman taught math and took great delight in humiliating and beating me whenever I got an answer wrong or simply when it suited her. The stress and fear began to make me physically ill. After days of listening to me complain of strange aches and pains in the mornings before school and the whole way over there, on one particular morning my mother slowed down her silver Peugeot 504 and gradually brought it to a stop on the side of the sloping road.

  “What’s going on, Isha?”

  We were sitting a couple of yards away from my school, and I could hear the happy shrieks of the other pupils in the playground. I was miserable and afraid to tell her what was happening to me, so I just sat there, looking down at the green-and-white check of my school uniform.

  “Tell me, what’s wrong?” my mother pressed gently. “Please.”

  My resistance didn’t last long; soon the words were tumbling out. Once the tears slowed after she’d managed to calm me, my mother was out of the car, marching into the school compound and headed straight for the head mistress’ office. That old hairy math teacher left me alone after that.

  At the time, we lived on the leafy, hilly University of Sierra Leone campus alongside dozens of other lecturers and their families. Our home was a modest bungalow surrounded by hot-pink bougainvillea bushes, as well as mango, plum, and black velvet tamarind trees, the latter known as “black tumbler” trees in Sierra Leone. I waited impatiently each year for the seeded fruits inside the black brittle shells to ripen and go from green to orange. At the first sighting of branches of black tumbler being sold around town, I’d beg my teenage cousin Fenthi to climb one of the two trees in our front yard to check the fruits’ readiness. Hopping from one foot to the other, I’d yell up to him excitedly, “Are they ripe?” There was always a pause next, accompanied by the sound of cracking as Fenthi pulled a handful of black pods from nearby branches and broke them open. After what felt like a never-ending wait for his verdict, I inevitably shouted, “Fenthi!” in exasperation. All I wanted was to hear him say yes. And when he did, I squealed so loudly, half the neighborhood probably heard me. Over the next few hours I devoted myself to quickly cracking open as many of the small pods as possible to build a mountain of the round, spongy fruits. Once I was satisfied with the pile, I started stuffing large handfuls of the sweet-sour pulps into my mouth and rolling them around like marbles in my swollen cheeks.

  During these years living on the campus grounds, my parents were in their thirties and working hard, but we weren’t wealthy. Before we could afford a generator, I studied by lamplight on the frequent occasions we lost electricity thanks to the country’s crippled energy sector. On the evenings when we were suddenly plunged into darkness, my father would break into song and I would eagerly follow along:

  Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree

  Merry, merry king of the bush is he

  Laugh, kookaburra! Laugh, kookaburra!

  Gay your life must be

  I never did learn the rest of the song, but we sang this one verse over and over and over again. Whenever I pause to think about it, I can make out our voices singing softly, as if it were a lullaby. Memories of my father are in relatively short supply, though. He died unexpectedly at age forty, when I was twelve.

  I’d been fast asleep when an aunt ran into the bedroom, and as soon as I opened my eyes, she breathlessly shouted, “I think your dad has died!” My mother wasn’t home at the time, so in that moment it was just a heartbreaking rumor first delivered by a family friend. My father had been in London for many months receiving treatment for a kidney condition. Still, I’d told myself he’d be back home in time for Christmas and my birthday. I’d convinced myself that he’d
return to live with us in that modest bungalow surrounded by all those fruit trees. Instead, I found myself trembling and desperately patting the sheets in search of my glasses, which had disappeared.

  Within hours my mother was draped in the white linens of Islamic mourning and confined to the house. For those first forty days, she half sat, half lay on the bed and stared blankly at the procession of relatives, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who formed an orderly line at the door. They entered, one by one, to offer condolences and to mumble words of support. For several hours each day, I squeezed myself into a corner next to her and watched her struggle to acknowledge the conveyor belt of mourners. Too shocked to cry, I remained dry eyed, running through an endless list of questions in my head. My mother was the person I turned to for everything, but in this moment she was beyond my reach. She mostly remained silent, till one day it all became too much and her stoic silence turned to uncontrollable weeping, sending tears down her cheeks so fast I couldn’t catch them. All I could do was wrap my twelve-year-old arms around her and draw her close. I reached for one of her delicate hands.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I whispered. “I’ll look after you.”

  She smiled weakly.

  After the funeral, I watched in awe as my mother negotiated life as a thirty-nine-year-old widow responsible for three children (one of whom was severely disabled), living in an African society riven by chauvinism. With her meager salary as an academic, she did all she could to maintain the comfortable childhood we’d had when my father was alive, while paying school fees and living allowances for a never-ending troupe of relatives and the occasional stranger. My mother believed education was the most prized possession a person could have and did everything in her power to share it with anyone eager to learn. From her I learned that while much in life is negotiable, gaining an education should never be, and a girl’s right to be educated is always worth fighting for. My mother’s strength molded me into the woman I am today, and with each passing year we’ve grown inseparable.

  I was in the CNN newsroom in Atlanta on April 15, 2014, when I first heard that hundreds of girls had been taken from a boarding school in northern Nigeria. None of it made much sense. Details were muddled, numbers fluctuated, and the statements coming from various government officials only added to the confusion. I rang my mother quickly in Sierra Leone, in keeping with my habit of calling her to discuss everything of significance in my life and the wider world.

  “Did you hear about the kidnapped girls?” I asked once she finally picked up.

  “Yes! They’re saying Boko Haram took them.” She sounded incredulous.

  “Uh-huh, unbelievable that this could be allowed to happen.”

  The overseas phone line hummed quietly as we both held silent for a moment, absorbing the injustice at the heart of it all.

  The targeting of women and girls trapped in hot spots has long been an ugly characteristic of global conflicts. When men clash, the borders of their battlefields regularly extend to include the bodies of females. It barely raises eyebrows these days to hear that women caught up in hostilities have been abused, bought, swapped, or completely destroyed at will.

  During World War II, some 200,000 women from countries that Japan occupied were forced to provide “comfort” to the invading Japanese soldiers. Hostilities in Rwanda and Bosnia, and the unending conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have produced tens of thousands of stories about wholesale female suffering. In Syria, ISIS established slave auctions to buy and sell women and girls from Iraq’s minority Yazidi sect. Girls as young as nine were traded for rape and enslavement. In August 2017, world leaders watched Myanmar’s security forces lay siege to the Rohingya community in the country’s Rakhine State. Staggering brutality and destruction drove close to 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh. Almost immediately, stories of systematic rape and sexual assault began to emerge, and those soon numbered in the thousands, all of them brushed aside by Myanmar’s military, which continues to deny the widespread atrocities.

  The perpetrators of this kind of wholesale violence against women and girls know that their chances of being held accountable are low to nonexistent. They are all too aware of the fact that provisions afforded to women to keep them safe during periods of armed conflict are weak, and actual enforcement of the law has been the exception rather than the rule. As Kelly D. Askin points out in her article “Prosecuting Wartime Rape and Other Gender-Related Crimes under International Law,” published in the Berkeley Journal of International Law in 2003:

  Women and girls have habitually been sexually violated during wartime, yet even in the twenty-first century, the documents regulating armed conflict either minimally incorporate, inappropriately characterize, or wholly fail to mention the crimes. . . .

  The progress made globally in recognizing, prohibiting, and finally enforcing gender-related crimes has been painstakingly slow.

  The root of the problem, Askin argues, is the centrality of men to the process of recognizing and prosecuting crimes of gender-based violence against women. The answer is the inclusion of more women.

  Until the 1990s, men did the drafting and enforcing of humanitarian law provisions; thus, it was primarily men who neglected to enumerate, condemn, and prosecute these crimes. While males remain the principal actors in international (and domestic) fora, in recent years, women have broken through the glass ceiling and are changing the traditional landscape by securing high-level positions in international legal institutions and on international adjudicative bodies.

  Like Askin, I’ve always believed that more women must move from the sidelines to the center of efforts to bring about accountability for crimes against women and girls. In the meantime, the perpetrators of such violence know that striking at the females in a community creates a wound so deep within the heart of every family that it may never heal. The result is that communities and ultimately societies are changed forever, which is, of course, the intended outcome.

  This was the first of many conversations my mother and I would have about crimes perpetrated against women and girls, and about Boko Haram and its objections to girls’ being educated. By the time I hung up the phone, I was incensed. And I knew I would have to handle this story differently from all the others I’d covered. It was time to get to work.

  From right there in Atlanta, I decided to make the story of the missing Chibok schoolgirls the primary focus of my daily news show, CNN NewsCenter. Our correspondent in Nigeria, Vladimir Duthiers, worked diligently to pin down what had happened in that faraway town the night the girls disappeared, but verifiable facts were hard to come by. A flurry of statements released by local and federal officials contradicted each other from one day to the next. It took more than a day to confirm that the number of girls missing was 276. On April 16, the director of defense information, Major General Chris Olukolade, announced the rescue of all “129 girls, except eight.” He followed up with a retraction the very next day after enraged Chibok parents exposed his lie. Every day produced more questions about what happened before, during, and after the attack on the Chibok girls’ school. And the biggest question of them all remained unanswered: Where were the girls?

  After working for more than a decade in the broadcast news industry, I was aware of one of its most shameful secrets: Every day in Western newsrooms, news executives are making calculations, asking themselves consciously and subconsciously “Whose story matters?” and “How much screen time or how many column inches do they deserve?” In the United States, the travails and triumphs of white America tend to dominate the headlines, after which come stories of black and brown people. But they are still above black African women, who are arguably at the very bottom and consequently receive what most often amounts to “blink and you’ll miss it” coverage. Of course, in the face of a catastrophic occurrence like the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls, the story rundown is inverted, and those at the bottom rise to the top. But even here, there’s a caveat: any in
crease in time and resources devoted to reporting on Africa is still predicated on whether anything else of perceived importance is happening on American soil at that particular moment.

  The fact that not all lives are valued equally in the media was a painful lesson for me to learn on many levels, and it was a source of great disappointment to me as a journalist because I saw firsthand how these biases shape the way Western news organizations approach and cover stories about Africans and the continent itself.

  In the immediate aftermath of the horrific Chibok kidnapping, CNN’s coverage was limited. In this instance, it was hampered by a lack of information and by the swirl of misleading statements, which back then were simply dubbed “false narratives,” but in the era of the Trump presidency would be called out as “fake news.” But thanks to a handful of dedicated CNN journalists, the network remained committed to the Chibok story, which likely came as a surprise to the administration of then–Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan. The government’s strategy appeared to be one of withholding specifics of how things unfolded in Chibok and what was being done to reunite the girls with their families because, in the absence of details, this story would surely die. As they soon discovered, that was a grave miscalculation on their part.

  Chapter Six

  BOKO HARAM’S ABDUCTION OF PRISCILLA, SAA, MARY, DORCAS, and more than two hundred other girls from their Chibok school dorms in 2014 earned the terrorist group global attention and scrutiny. Yet in actual fact, by the time that Boko Haram swarmed Chibok on that sweltering April night, they’d already kidnapped scores of other women and girls from across Nigeria’s northeast. Reports date back to 2009 of women and girls being snatched from the streets of the group’s stronghold, Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, and likewise in Damaturu, the capital of neighboring Yobe State. Over the years, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented multiple accounts of forced marriage, rape, torture, domestic servitude, and indoctrination from those who made it to freedom. Fast-forward to February 2014, just a few short weeks before the raid on the Chibok school, when Boko Haram launched a deadly attack on the predominantly Christian community of Konduga and disappeared with dozens of women.