Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

  In return for saying yes and agreeing to convert, each one of the willing girls was handed a hijab from a pile lying on the forest floor and was allowed to leave the towering tree for a new open-air spot, under a different tree a few feet away—in clear view of the enclosure holding Priscilla and the others. Once the handful of girls had been moved, the men left.

  For the converts, their days now revolved around deepening their newly acquired faith by attending Qur’anic classes. As it turned out, Old Man Jida was determined to make Islam the focal point of life for the holdouts as well, filling the hours with lectures about the righteousness of the religion. But his efforts to coax Priscilla’s lot were quickly rebuffed with forceful nos. For these girls, overcoming the acute inconveniences and discomfort of being hidden away was what mattered.

  Each morning after dawn prayers, the group was split up, and the converts were instructed to move to their dayside perch. Though physically separated for parts of the day, the holdouts and converts remained bound to each other. They were together again at mealtimes, when the converts came over to collect platefuls of whatever the chosen quartet had cooked, before retreating to eat under their own tree. And in the fading light of evening they returned once more to huddle with all the other girls through the night. From day to day, there was little discernible difference in the way the girls were treated by their captors. Things stayed that way until Priscilla and the rest of the holdouts received a second visit from the man who had earlier tried to convert them. This time, his easygoing manner was gone, replaced by a new aggressively impatient one. Within minutes he delivered a stark message to the girls.

  “Those of you who convert will be allowed to go home. And those who do not convert, you will remain here.” The tone was menacing. Once more he told the willing to make themselves known by standing apart from the group. But now the girls had questions of their own. “Didn’t you tell us when we arrived that we’d only spend three days in this place and then you’d return us?” they asked defiantly.

  The question caught the men off guard, and when they finally spoke, they sounded nervous. “No, no, we were not the ones who told you that. We will return you to your families in two weeks. But first, all of you must take the hijab,” they said.

  Unimpressed, the girls remained silent.

  The pressure to convert felt greater to Priscilla. The girls’ longing to be reunited with loved ones was overpowering, and it proved strong enough to pry large numbers of girls away from their religion. And with that, dozens and dozens of them chose the promise of reunion with their families over their faith. These decisions also stemmed from the increasingly desperate need to end their nightmare after dark days and nights spent behind a veil of leaves and branches.

  Trapped deep in Sambisa Forest, Priscilla wanted nothing more than to go home. But forgoing her faith was simply too high a price to pay. So she stayed sitting on the forest floor and didn’t make a move.

  For those who had sacrificed their belief for freedom, there would be no return after all. All the new converts got was a hijab and a seat alongside the earlier converts in the shade of a different tree.

  The holdouts were asked once more about changing their minds. Their response was instant: “We will never give up our faith.” Then came the warning—“We shall see.” The words signaled a shift.

  After that second visit, the girls who wore hijabs were given preferential treatment over the holdouts. From laundry detergent to food and clothing—no matter the item, the militants made sure the converts received their share before the others. If there wasn’t enough to go around, Priscilla’s group did without. Their captors couldn’t have cared less about the misery that caused.

  By the third visit, the men had given up on the idea that Priscilla and the nearly two-dozen staunch holdouts could be convinced to renounce their Christianity. They now understood the depth of their devotion. These girls would never willingly choose Islam. Knowing that, the militant group recalibrated its demands. It emerged that on Boko Haram’s list of priorities, obscuring the female form in loose, flowing hijabs ranked higher than the specific God to whom the girls prayed. So though the holdouts were ultimately allowed to reject Islam, there was no debate about shielding their bodies from the eyes of men in the camp. That was mandatory. Priscilla was appalled by the order to put on the hijab.

  “Even if you refuse to accept our religion, you must wear the hijab,” the men told the girls. The militants applied extra pressure to ensure they submitted: “Once you have all put on the hijab, we will take you home, in two weeks.” Priscilla knew the girls had been cornered. In the absence of free will, the small group of rebel girls put on the shabby garments.

  Days later, Priscila was awoken by loud male voices pacing and shouting around the tree. “Wake up! It is time for all of you to get up and pray!” Without warning a new routine had come into being. From that day forward, each morning, both bleary-eyed Muslims and devout Christians got up from the cold, unyielding earth. The Christian girls emerged from beneath the tamarind tree cloaked in their hijabs to take part in the prayer rituals of a religion they continued to reject—though in reality, they mostly just stood there silently, with lips unmoving because they didn’t really know what to do while the others alternated between kneeling and standing all around them as they prayed.

  Later in the day when they were sitting in their hour-long Islamic lessons, they remained hidden in the flowing gowns. This forced immersion in Islamic doctrine left Priscilla and the other Christians feeling under siege, and they wept bitterly while the imam taught the group. Though Jida was the one dedicated to hovering over the girls, bands of militants also monitored them from a distance. They were armed and ready at all times. Whenever Priscilla turned her head, the men would be staring at them, on the lookout for even the smallest action that hinted at the contemplation of escape. The girls were permanently on edge, unsure of what was about to happen. For hours, Priscilla was tormented by a single thought: Is it my time to die?

  While they did their best to keep track of time, at some point during the suffocating heat of the day and the crushing despair that took hold at night, the girls lost count of the exact number of days they’d been in captivity. Occasionally one of the schoolgirls wondered out loud, “What day is it? Do you think it is Monday or Tuesday?” At that point the entire group paused to think long and hard before eventually giving up and admitting they had no idea. The pall of sorrow that hung over the girls rarely waned. Sometimes they wept till they ran out of breath. During these moments they willed each other to be strong. “Trust in God,” they murmured. Then at others, the grief they wrestled with was so great, it drew to them a number of compassionate militants who felt compelled to coax the girls to stop crying. “Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. We will take you back,” they promised softly.

  Long after the pledged two-week deadline for their release had passed, the girls confronted their captors. Jida had summoned the men to face the increasingly restless girls, having grown weary of ducking questions he couldn’t answer.

  “You promised us that if everyone takes hijab then after two weeks you will release us, and you haven’t. Why?”

  The men had no real answer for the girls. “Our oga, the boss man, is not here. You must be patient,” they pleaded.

  “We want to go home to our parents!”

  The girls were in no mood to be patient or to believe they were still being held because the “boss” wasn’t present. The men tried to reassure the increasingly frenzied group with vague statements: They would be released “soon,” they promised. Without skipping a beat, the girls pounced on the possibility.

  “Swear to God!” they demanded. They wanted a sacred oath to bind these zealots to their words. The girls relished the discomfort it caused in their kidnappers, men who considered themselves to be pious. Now that they’d been backed into a corner, the militants shuffled and stuttered as they vowed to release the girls in the coming days. With these
promises extracted, the teenagers were filled with hope.

  Ironically, the same men holding the distressed girls captive were also blaming them—the victims—for their own abduction and current plight.

  “We told all of you that no girl should be in school. As we found you there in school, that is why we took you,” the men repeated to the girls often and with no apology.

  Girls should not be in school? Priscilla repeatedly turned those words over in her mind. She was confused. Prior to her abduction she’d been unaware of the Boko Haram edict. Her parents, she knew, had been similarly oblivious.

  “That is a lie. That is not the reason you took us!” Priscilla spat back at her captors one day, after they’d trotted out this explanation for the umpteenth time.

  “Sit down!” the militants shouted at her. By now, the men had grown accustomed to Priscilla’s outbursts and bold challenges to their authority. With a wry smile they stared at her, as they often did in these moments, and then burst into laughter.

  She refused to accept her abductors’ logic, that she was in captivity because of her own choices. And yet Priscilla remained remarkably clearheaded. If her seeking an education was in fact the real reason they’d taken away her freedom, she would still never regret being in the classroom or abandon her future dreams and ambitions.

  The girls’ hopes of quickly returning home floundered as the weeks piled up. Nothing changed; they remained prisoners in the forest. Until that point the men had brought them water in plastic containers, plus bars of soap and told them they were free to bathe. In reality, there was never enough water for a full dousing. But at night, groups of girls crept out from under the tree and in the bright moonlight used small quantities of water to ensure their bodies didn’t start to smell. They’d also turned to the tree that imprisoned them and broken off twigs to use as toothbrushes. But now that promises of reuniting the girls with their loved ones had been made and broken, the captives concluded that a change in behavior was necessary. They felt that if they continued to follow their captors’ instructions and remain agreeable, it would erode their chances of being released quickly. So rebellion became the order of the day. The girls decided to transform the realm of personal hygiene into a battleground. Uncleanliness was now an act of resistance and the girls abandoned cleaning themselves altogether.

  As they grew increasingly unkempt, some of the militants gently suggested certain moments as opportunities to bathe. Every offer was unanimously spurned. “Why should we bathe when you came and took us away from our parents?” they asked.

  Not knowing what to say, the men backed away in embarrassment. Priscilla was fully committed to the group’s collective action and embraced the revolt with glee.

  While the girls drew their own battle lines in Sambisa, unbeknownst to them, their disappearance had escalated the war between Boko Haram and the Nigerian government. It had also triggered an increasingly rare show of true global diplomacy and an international search operation. It was this kind of large-scale global attention that Boko Haram’s deranged-looking leader, Abubakar Shekau, craved. Within a few weeks of their abduction, he made his first public statement about their disappearance, in a nearly hour-long video released on May 5, 2014. Speaking in a rambling mix of Hausa and English, he gleefully claimed responsibility for the girls’ abduction and warned of further heartbreak.

  “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market by Allah. There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.”

  The video sparked even greater global outrage and accelerated the spread of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag. Countries like the United States, France, Canada, Israel, and China quickly stepped up with offers of support to find and rescue the girls. Shekau’s on-camera bluster also heightened criticism of the Nigerian government’s slow response to the kidnapping.

  Almost a month after the girls’ abduction, on May 12, 2014, Boko Haram released a twenty-seven-minute video. This was the world’s first opportunity to lay eyes on the missing girls since they’d vanished. At the same time, it showcased the results of the militants’ pressure campaign to convert the girls to Islam, presenting 136 converts. Priscilla and her gang of holdouts did not make an appearance. The militants told those girls who appeared on camera that the video would be sent to their parents as proof they were still alive. The majority of them huddled together on the forest floor, while some stood at the rear, two of them diligently holding up the black flag of Boko Haram. They were clothed in Boko Haram’s standard-issue drab head-to-toe hijabs of black or gray, which hid the school clothing they were all still wearing. The filming was done a short distance from the tamarind tree, out in the open in a clearing surrounded by trees and semiarid earth, with no distinctive natural features to give away their exact location. All the girls stared forlornly into space as they loudly and solemnly recited Muslim prayers, their captors’ proof of their conversion to Islam. An interviewer who remained off-camera queried three girls. One explained her new faith by declaring, “Jesus is not the son of God.”

  Shekau, the terror outfit’s leader, also made an appearance in this second video, albeit from a location separate from the girls. Seated in front of a green background with an AK-47 nestling in his arms, Shekau mocked the global outrage his group’s actions had sparked. “Just because we kidnapped these young girls, you are making noise? You are making so much noise about Chibok, Chibok, Chibok.” He reaffirmed his group’s objection to Western education and, as in previous videos, pointedly warned, “Girls, you should go and get married.” Then he delivered more distressing news to the Chibok girls’ loved ones. “These girls will not leave our hands until you release our brothers in your prisons.”

  Back in Chibok, the lack of electricity meant the girls’ parents couldn’t immediately watch the video that was being aired repeatedly by local and international news networks. But they’d heard about it and were desperate to pore over the images. Frantic and clinging to their faith, a handful chose to make the eighty-mile journey to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. At long last, they viewed the footage there with the help of local government officials. But since the majority of the families stayed put in Chibok, the State’s Governor, Kashim Shettima, gave instructions for the video to be transferred into “mobile memory devices” (memory sticks) so every parent could see it. Whether in Maiduguri or Chibok, heartbroken parents gathered around screens big and small, desperately scanning the young faces on camera, praying for a sighting of their beloved missing children.

  A few days after that second video emerged, François Hollande, then the French president, convened a Paris security summit. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, and his regional counterparts, the leaders of Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Benin, gathered “to discuss fresh strategies for dealing with the security threat posed by Boko Haram.” In a rare show of unity among Nigeria and its neighbors, the bloc declared war on Boko Haram and discussed the possibility of a joint rescue operation of the missing girls. President Jonathan forcefully declared, “We are totally committed to finding the girls, wherever they are.” He added, “We’ve been scanning these areas with surveillance aircraft.”

  Nigeria had long been fighting Boko Haram on the ground and from the air; the campaign at times involved dropping bombs on Sambisa Forest, so the militants had a pretty good idea of what a state response to this mass abduction might look like, long before it even began.

  The militants warned the girls early and often about the threat from the sky. “Once you hear planes coming, you must try to hide yourself wherever you are.” The girls were told to remain hidden under the tree at all times, for their own safety. “If they see you, they will drop a bomb.” Priscilla approached the threats and warnings with a degree of skepticism. Like all the other girls, she refused to believe the Nigerian government would do such a thing.

  “You are lying! They will not bomb us. You, maybe. But they will never bomb us,” the girls
said with unmistakable indignation.

  Meanwhile, the thought of being held outdoors in the forest for the rest of her life was too much for Priscilla to bear. Within the first month of captivity, she began plotting to escape with a group of girls. All three of them knew what would happen if they were caught, but they’d made up their minds it was worth the risk. When the chosen day came, they waited till Jida was out of sight and the other men were lost in afternoon prayers, at which point the girls slowly and quietly pushed aside the branches that kept them hidden from view and stealthily slipped into the surrounding bushes. Disoriented and afraid within minutes, Priscilla didn’t make it far before they were spotted by one of their captors—“Just get back or otherwise I will shoot you!” he threatened. Yelling and gunshots started up almost immediately, and the girls were promptly marched back to camp. With their blooming prison in view, the men dug a series of pits and called the rest of the schoolgirls to gather around, to watch as Priscilla and the other attempted escapees were forced to climb down into what would be their graves. Priscilla’s heart thundered as she slid into the hole, while her mind had emptied out all but one thought: I am going to die. She looked up at the rest of her schoolmates, the faces of every one of them contorted in pain, smeared with tears. All of them pleading.

  “Please, mercy! We beg!”

  “Please!”

  “Spare them!”

  The sound of their pleas for her life were deafening, and the emotional onslaught clearly took the men aback. They now looked down at Priscilla and the others who stood praying and trembling in the pits and faltered. All of a sudden they declared a newfound need to consult with their boss man before taking any further action. Did this mean she might not be killed? Priscilla wondered. In fact, there were no lives taken that day. Instead, Priscilla and her coconspirators were whipped again and again with lean canes. While they sobbed and screamed, she promised to never leave the camp again. With each merciless blow that fell, they were reminded, “We will kill you if you ever attempt this again.”