Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

  As far as she was concerned, nothing more needed to be said.

  “Maybe when you reach where we are going, you will agree,” the men retorted.

  The focus turned back to the dozen girls who had stepped away from the group. Priscilla stared at them, standing there dry eyed, with heads bent, silent. Those eyes suddenly filled with terror when it emerged that the converted girls would no longer be allowed to travel alongside their schoolmates. Instead, for the rest of the journey, they’d be transported in a separate vehicle. The twelve girls shuddered, and Priscilla felt a rush of pity for them.

  Just then one of the men shouted abruptly, “Everyone into the cars! Hurry! Let’s go! Let’s go!” Priscilla and the others were dragged and pushed in the direction of the parked convoy. Men sprinted and hurled themselves into the assortment of vehicles, whose engines started up immediately, and they were on the move. The men never let on what had sent them scurrying, and none of the girls had seen anything unusual. In the absence of details, Priscilla was simply left to wonder as they trundled deeper into the forest. Could the men have spotted their parents approaching?

  Armed with only a long stick, Dorcas’s father, Yakubu, had trekked for hours alongside hundreds of other men, many of them also parents wrestling with the same heartache and fears for their own lost daughters. There were others present whose families remained intact, untouched by this tragedy, and yet they felt compelled to help, part of a community-led effort to find and rescue their missing girls. The rest were from the Civilian Joint Task Force (JTF), a collective of local vigilantes formed in 2013 with a clear mission—to protect their local communities and to support the Nigerian security forces in their fight against Boko Haram. The massive search party wielded sticks, makeshift bows, arrows, and rusty machetes. When they finally entered the fabled Sambisa Forest, Yakubu found the wild undergrowth and imposing trees completely overwhelming, unlike anything he’d ever seen before. But he continued to move forward, fueled by his personal tragedy. He brushed aside all that nature had put in his way and listened carefully for any sound of the stolen girls, all the while scanning the surroundings for visual clues.

  At one point, the rescue group noticed movement in the near distance. Yakubu saw a long line of moving vehicles pulling away. He didn’t know what to think. Was Dorcas among them? Had he found his beautiful child? Spurred on, the search party moved faster, determined to follow the procession deeper into Sambisa. They’d taken only a few steps when a handful of men emerged from the bushes and blocked their path.

  “These boys have weapons,” the strangers told the Chibok townspeople. While they spoke, Yakubu stood quietly and simply stared at them. He noticed they were of various ages, a few looked to be teenagers—all of them spoke in Fulani, with the certainty of those who knew the forest intimately. He suspected they were in fact Fulani, part of the sprawling horde of herdsmen who have long called the forest home.

  The unknown men added, “They can kill you.”

  From the very moment they’d left Chibok at the crack of dawn armed with only rudimentary weapons and determination, every one of them had known what they were up against. But these words of warning from the Sambisa men were a new reality check. Yakubu and the others paused to fully assess the challenge ahead. The weaponry they carried consisted of sticks, machetes, and bows and arrows, while their opponents were armed with AK-47s and who knew what else. The townspeople were simply no match for the heavily armed militants.

  “If you reach them, both you and your girls will be no more,” the men from the bushes pressed home.

  The search party’s confidence took flight, leaving the Chibok men with only heavy hearts. Minutes later, with heads hung low and eyes stinging, they slowly retraced their steps out of the forest.

  Back in Priscilla’s truck, the captives were sobbing. They’d become increasingly convinced that their parents had been close by and might have been able to rescue them. Now the girls were more desperate than ever to know where they were headed. “Where are we going?” they asked their five minders. Though met with only silence and blank stares, the group remained undeterred, repeating the same question loudly and often.

  When the men finally spoke, it was sharp and brief. “There is no need to ask that,” they snapped, before returning to their surly silence.

  Priscilla saw the sun rise and set two more times before the convoy came to a standstill. When it did, the girls cowered in the back of the cramped truck and stared at each other in confusion.

  Moments later the men yelled, “Come down!”

  Priscilla had no idea what was about to happen to them. But they all knew it couldn’t be stopped, so one by one they warily climbed out of the vehicles.

  She was in shock. Now outside the truck in the blinding sunlight, the young girl could see only small structures dotted across a landscape of brownish yellow, reedlike grass. The dwellings sat off in the distance, but they were close enough for her to notice that the ramshackle houses were also made of the same reeds, and the vast area was surrounded by a parade of trees. Strewn about the place were piles of discarded motorbikes and battered-looking vehicles. Priscilla could also make out women and children moving about. The women all wore hijabs of black, brown, and gray that fluttered gently as they walked. Their faces were veiled.

  They’d arrived at a Boko Haram camp.

  “Go under that tree!” demanded the militants.

  Startled by their words, Priscilla noticed for the first time the colossal tamarind tree standing a few feet away. Her eyes widened in disbelief, taking in its mammoth trunk and its most striking feature, a sprawling mass of bowed limbs. Every branch was weighed down so heavily by leaves and fruit that its end almost touched the forest floor. Mother Nature had created a hooped skirt around the tree, and inadvertently a hiding place from the world.

  The hundreds of girls moved en masse for protection and stood weeping at the foot of the tree. Priscilla wanted to scream at what was happening to them. Instead, like all the others, she parted the branches and disappeared out of the sunlight. Initially she struggled to see. For those first few minutes, they all simply stood in the shadows of the tree and wept. Priscilla’s eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness of the leafy labyrinth, which was punctuated by a few stubborn streams of light. What kind of place is this? She gasped as she looked around. The space was larger than a soccer field and easily held the hundreds of girls, with room still left over. Overwhelmed, she sank down into the mossy grass next to dozens of other girls. Lost in her grief, she didn’t immediately feel the multitude of tiny movements beneath her body until the stinging sensations jolted Priscilla back to her senses. “Ayyyyyyyyyeee!” She was being bitten on her feet, legs, and thighs all at once. Priscilla leapt up and saw that the soil was alive. In the dim light she made out the source of her pain, a swarm of moths delicately fluttering at her feet. Everywhere she looked their translucent wings glimmered. Other girls were shrieking now as they too realized they were not alone in this secret place. Eventually all the girls sat down once more. They had no choice. They willed themselves to ignore the nipping earth. They were prisoners.

  The overburdened branches of the tamarind tree didn’t uniformly touch the ground. In some spots they hovered just above and created an opening that allowed the girls a narrow, ground-level view of whoever was close to the tree. Priscilla strained her eyes but saw no trace of their captors. More and more of her schoolmates were struggling to remain calm in the oppressive heat of their enclosure. A mantra started up, whispered from one girl to the next, transforming the dank enclosure into an echo chamber.

  “Stay calm and pray,” they urged one another.

  Before long, Priscilla heard the sounds of people approaching. The girls slowly crept forward in the murky light and peered out to see several pairs of dirty feet. Priscilla and the others fell quiet and listened.

  “We have brought this old man to live with you.”

  The girls exchanged puzzled looks: Live with us? />
  The disembodied voice continued, “You must do everything he tells you to do.”

  An old man with a turban suddenly appeared in their midst.

  That was it. No more information. No name, or details of where he was from or why he’d been chosen. Unlike the militants who had seized the girls, this small figure wasn’t in a Nigerian military uniform. He wore a pair of shabby pants, a threadbare T-shirt, and on his shriveled feet, a pair of tattered slippers. He eyed the girls silently with an inscrutable look. Meanwhile, as Priscilla continued to assess him, she noticed the tribal marks on his face, one solitary line on each cheek. They were the same as the ones borne by Mr. Jida, the Chibok school watchman. As both men were elderly and similarly marked, the girls gave their new guardian an old, familiar name: Jida.

  The same ghostly voice delivered another announcement: “We have also brought you food to cook, firewood, and water.”

  But rather than providing a feeling of relief, the statement triggered an outburst among the girls. “Ah! Are we going to live here?” they shouted in dismay.

  “No. You will only stay in this place for three days and then we will take you back home.”

  Priscilla heard the words “take you back home” and felt such a deep sense of longing, tears instantly filled her eyes. A ripple of excitement ran through the group. Home in three days.

  She was still in a state of reverie when Jida was told by the men to choose four of the girls to cook the food waiting outside. Without delay he quickly made his picks, pointing and saying “You, you, you, you,” in a low voice. He motioned to the four to follow him, and once more the tree branches parted, shafts of sunlight pouring in as the old man and the quartet shuffled out.

  The four girls carried bags of rice and beans, along with oil, seasonings, onions, cooking utensils, pots, and platters over to another tree a few feet away from the giant one housing the schoolgirls. Once again, everything they had been given was cooked together in one pot. The girls improvised and made a type of “jollof rice,” a spicy tomato-based dish enjoyed throughout Africa. When the cooking girls finally carried the trays of steaming-hot food to their waiting schoolmates, the hungry girls had already divided themselves into groups of ten for each platter.

  As daylight ebbed away and the sun set over Sambisa, Priscilla sat in almost pitch blackness under the tamarind tree. By this point the ravenous group cared little about how much they could see. All that mattered was that everyone could gather and eat. At first Priscilla tried to hold out, but her nagging hunger won, and soon she too sat among her friends from home and gratefully filled her stomach.

  When the food and the light were all gone, they sat in the darkness. No lamps or torches, just hundreds of stolen girls tormented by fearful thoughts deep in the forest. Unbeknownst to them, Jida had managed to sidle up to the tree. Now his voice floated through the gaps between the webbed leaves and branches. “If you are feeling sleepy, then you should sleep.”

  Sleep? Priscilla snorted with derision. Do these people really want us to sleep here?

  A sudden succession of loud pops rang out nearby. Gunshots? Priscilla’s breath caught in her throat. She listened to the sounds going off like a cascade of firecrackers. The already frightened girls pulled even closer together. “What is happening?”

  In the days that followed, Priscilla learned that shots fired by Boko Haram in the dark were a regular affair. The shots were supposed to frighten off the animals that made strange sounds in the bushes all around. On that first night in the camp, the girls fretted constantly about what was lurking in those bushes and, more important, wondered if it came out in the dark. Sleep was the farthest thing from everybody’s mind. Even without the fear of unseen animals, no comfort was to be found in this place. There were no blankets or ground coverings of any kind, only a roof of leaves overhead. As a bone-chilling cold settled in their bodies, they could no longer feel the sting of the writhing soil. The girls were exposed to the elements from above, below, and all around.

  Priscilla’s eyes searched the darkness, but all she could see were her loved ones back home. They were fraught and inconsolable because she was lost to them; nothing could stop their weeping. Hot tears sprang from her eyes in the darkness of the tamarind tree. She felt as lost and alone as ever.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ALLAHU AKBAR, ALLAHU AKBAR,

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,

  Ashhadu alla Ilaha Illallah.

  The strains of the Muslim call to dawn prayers signaled to Priscilla that day two in the Boko Haram camp was beginning. Late into the night she’d listened to the sound of the girls’ sobbing in the darkness. As the morning arrived, she could begin to make out her schoolmates’ distressed faces. It was clear hardly any of them had slept.

  Someone was walking toward the tree.

  “If you are a Muslim, get up. Take your hijab and pray where you are.” The shuffling footsteps belonged to Jida. His feeble voice wormed its way through the leafy curtain that shielded him from his charges. Priscilla watched as the twenty Muslim-born girls in their midst dutifully obeyed and slowly rose to begin their supplication in the shadows of the tamarind tree.

  As the day wore on it grew punishingly hot. The girls shared what was left of the water in a yellow five-gallon plastic container. Priscilla tipped it into her palms, grateful for the feel of the cool liquid as it ran down her parched throat. As with the day before, men eventually delivered bags of food, and the same four girls disappeared to do the cooking. Those they left behind remained on edge. They were deeply fearful of what the second day would bring, and it left many of them weeping uncontrollably for hours at a time. In fact, nothing happened that day. The militants all but ignored their captives, leaving it up to old Jida to watch over them.

  Come nightfall, turbulent thoughts about the forest wildlife took over and paralyzed the girls wherever they were beneath the tree. For a second night in a row, Priscilla’s body remained upright in the dark. Her mind was racing once more, outpacing the pull of sleep. From the deepening silence around her she could tell more school friends were succumbing to exhaustion on this evening. Eventually, all the girls fell silent and sleep triumphed over Priscilla’s mental resolve. She slowly lowered herself onto the cold, hard earth and told herself to ignore the stones digging into her weary body. Groups of girls clumped close to one another as the temperature dropped, hoping physical proximity would bring warmth. In time Priscilla closed her eyes, but sleep was short lived. She’d barely begun to dream when panic stirred and sprung her upward once more.

  On the fateful night Boko Haram had spirited away the girls in Chibok, the men had warned of serious consequences if their captives left the school with any personal belongings. In a panic, Priscilla had quickly tossed aside the cell phone she’d been hiding. But there were others who’d steeled their minds and cradled Bibles, notebooks, and pens in the folds of their clothing. In the dim light of the tamarind tree these items were revealed. The Bibles were now totems of their former lives and connections to faraway loved ones. They provided comfort in a harsh and cruel place. Yet they also had the potential to be a source of pain and suffering. If the Muslim fanatics discovered the holy books, the girls were guaranteed a whipping, if not much worse. Meanwhile, lined notebooks that were once used to scribble down facts and worldly knowledge acquired in their Chibok classrooms now became diaries in which girls recorded the date they were stolen—April 14, 2014—and thereafter, details of life in their now closed-off world deep within the forest. Weeks later Priscilla would seek out this same comfort, as she tore scraps of paper from the boxes that delivered their food supplies and borrowed pens to capture her tumultuous emotions.

  Before sunrise on the third day, when the Muslim girls stood to perform their prayers, the Christians answered a personal call of their own. Wherever they sat or lay, they too prayed quietly. In due course, the quartet of girls who handled the food disappeared, and the day appeared to be unfolding exactly like the previous two. Prisc
illa sat listlessly under the tree for much of the afternoon till the men arrived.

  “All of you come out,” said an unknown voice.

  Eager to escape the stifling conditions of their dwelling, the girls rushed out. In the open Priscilla joyfully sucked the fresh air into her lungs and relished the unfiltered sunlight.

  Standing in front of them were several men she’d never seen before.

  “Do you know why we’re here?” asked one of them.

  “No,” the group of girls said together.

  “We’ve come to tell you that there is no need to waste your time sitting around like this. Those of you who want to convert, stand up and come over on this side,” the man said pointing. “And if you know you will not, then come over here,” he added, now stern faced, motioning to the other side.

  Priscilla scanned her schoolmates’ faces, anxious to see where they would stand on this second attempt to convert them to Islam. A few minutes later, fewer than twenty girls had taken the momentous step and agreed to conversion. More than 150 others took the opposite position.

  The man who’d done all the talking looked confounded. Turning to those in the “no” camp, he demanded an explanation. “What is your reason for refusing to convert?” he asked.

  The answer Priscilla and the other objectors gave was short and to the point. “We don’t feel like converting.”

  The man pressed his case for Islam with passion and the requisite reverence. “It is in your interests to choose our religion,” he stressed. Still he failed to win over any more girls. Defeated but undaunted, he signaled that Boko Haram’s efforts to turn them away from Christianity were far from over. “Okay, I may be back again,” he warned.