by Isha Sesay
When they were all loaded in the vehicles, Priscilla noticed that the group was smaller—they were leaving close to fifty of their schoolmates who were all wives now and part of Boko Haram’s dangerous world.
The girls departed Gwoza first thing that morning and were on the move without stopping throughout the day, plunging deep into the forest. When the vehicles finally arrived at their new location, the landscape was by now all too familiar to Priscilla. Shacks of woven grass dotted the camp, along with the terror group’s standard paraphernalia: broken-down vehicles, discarded motorbikes, and women who flitted about like dark-robed ghosts. In this camp, the girls would be spread out across five small shacks and within days consumed by efforts to find water, firewood, and enough to eat. Now that they were back in the forest, the men were content once more to leave Jida in charge, while they pulled back to their cluster of homes. Their overseer found himself a spot nearby and quietly monitored his charges, unconcerned that they’d be able to slip away. As a result, Priscilla discovered she was allowed to move about the place.
The captors’ one remaining concern involved the Chibok school uniforms. The girls had held on to their brightly hued blouses and wrappers, keeping them hidden during their long eleven months in captivity. In this new open-air setting, the men noticed that groups of the teenagers were slipping off their hijabs and sitting together in their school uniforms in the middle of the day as planes patrolled overhead.
Priscilla and the other girls were, of course, doing this intentionally. They’d spotted the stepped-up aerial traffic and decided that exposing their school uniforms to the eyes in the sky could well be their best chance of being rescued. The men, catching on, rounded them up days later and handed them reams of fabric.
“Hand us your school uniforms!” the men snapped.
Priscilla’s heart sank.
The men waited impatiently for the girls to return with their variously colored wrappers and blouses. With great satisfaction the men laid all the garments on the ground in a pile and set fire to them while the girls did their best to stifle their cries. Now that the uniforms were gone, the men felt confident they’d eliminated the risk of the girls’ being spotted by aerial surveillance or by soldiers on the ground; they’d lost their only distinguishable feature.
While the bonfire raged, the girls’ captors gave them new instructions. “Take these wrappers now and make your own clothing.”
Priscilla stared incredulously at the bundles of fabric being handed out. For someone like her, who’d never sewn anything in her life, being told to make something to wear was one of the most ridiculous statements she’d ever heard, and ordinarily she would have chuckled at the very suggestion. But all that was ordinary or normal had long ago disappeared from Priscilla’s life, now lost in the forest, where she and Bernice sat side by side and slowly figured out to how to make their own smocks.
After eleven months in this fourth location, the men appeared one night with determined looks on their faces and a new announcement.
“There are always planes in the skies here. So let’s move to a place where this will no longer be a problem. Pack your things, so we can go.” The girls had very little to gather: most of them had only one hijab each and a pair of slippers that were already on their feet. Only a handful of them even had underwear at this stage. In fact, each girl’s most prized possession was the yellow plastic container she used for drinking. So the girls were packed and ready to go within minutes.
The journey to their new home took two whole days, and along the way Priscilla and Bernice grew increasingly fearful of what would be waiting for them when the vehicles finally stopped.
This latest camp looked much like all the other places they’d been held captive, only now the girls were spread among three one-room shacks. And there was no Jida! At the time Priscilla and the others were awoken in the middle of the night and told to quickly gather their belongings, they had been focused on moving as quickly as possible. It wasn’t until they arrived at the new camp that Priscilla had realized Jida wasn’t with them. None of the men acknowledged his absence or ever mentioned him again. Once their captors retreated the girls were truly on their own. The men very rarely came by to check on them after that first night, and food deliveries became increasingly rare too. The only constant in this new, isolated existence was the appearance of an imam, which still happened in the early afternoon each day. But once he was gone, there were no more visitors.
Life here was the most difficult it had been for the girls up till that point. They had little clean water to drink and so little to eat that in moments of desperation they wandered into the forest in search of food. Unable to find any kuka, the girls plucked the leaves from wild-looking tamarind trees that were bereft of their fruit, because they weren’t in season. They excitedly boiled them down and then relished the sour-tasting water. Priscilla felt like she was starving to death, there among the three shacks. At one stage the girls were without food for six whole weeks. Then the green fruits of the tamarind tree were their sole source of comfort.
The men may have thought they were bringing their captives to a place with less overhead traffic, but in that sense, the new camp actually ended up being far worse than anywhere else they’d been kept. Sleep became a rare occurrence for Priscilla as bombs fell nearby throughout the night. Every day, for hours at a time, planes and helicopters dropped missiles and the earth beneath their feet shook as the girls trembled and prayed for God’s protection.
Priscilla was stunned to hear they were being moved once more. It was October 2016, and they were approaching nearly two and a half years in captivity. She listened impassively as the men told them to leave everything behind and promised they’d be safer in the next place.
“The planes know where we are. So we’re now going to a place the planes don’t know about.” The men sounded optimistic as they spoke.
Unmoved by anything she’d heard, Priscilla just sat on the ground and stared into space.
Around seven o’clock that evening, the men and girls were gathered and poised to set off. Where are all the cars? Priscilla wondered. She quickly learned the vehicles would not be part of this journey. They would be walking. There was a little light when they began, but soon they moved silently in the dark through Sambisa. They walked all night without food or water, and when the sun rose the next day the girls were so parched they drank from puddles they found along the way. They walked for two more days in the heat and through clouds of dust, yet when they finally arrived at their destination around seven a.m., there was nothing. No woven shacks, no camp off in the distance, no sounds of radio or the low rumble of generators. There was no one there. Nothing, apart from a tall and lean tamarind tree.
Priscilla and Bernice whispered to each other, trying to figure out why they had been taken to such a place. What is about to happen to us?
“Go and sit under the tree!” the men shouted.
Unlike the colossal tamarind tree that had marked the beginning of their life in Boko Haram captivity, the tree they now scrambled to sit beneath was unremarkable in every way. With great relief and gratitude Priscilla and Bernice received the food and water the men suddenly appeared with. The militants quickly backed away and the girls stayed under the tree.
When the sun had gone and the day edged to a close, a new group of men appeared to address the girls. There were about fifty of them, and most wore military-style clothing and were armed, except for the one man who appeared to be in charge. He wore white from head to toe and had no weapon. Their demeanor made the girls uneasy. To Priscilla, they looked like they were there to make arrests.
The man in white started to speak.
“Everybody gather together. We have an announcement. We have made a plan with the Nigerian government, and we are going to free twenty girls—that is the number that we agreed to. But we have decided to add one extra, as a gift to Nigeria.”
At the time the announcement was taking place, Priscilla and Bernic
e were fast asleep on the forest floor and they missed the man’s speech. The girls seated all around them were giddy with joy, but also a little apprehensive. Who would be chosen? The girls struggled to remain calm while they waited for the selections to be made. With hopes of being picked, one of the girls tried to quickly move from the back to the front of the group. As she rushed passed, she brushed Priscilla and woke her. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes and stretching her long limbs, Priscilla noticed the group of men standing together addressing the girls and the anxious look on her schoolmates’ faces.
“What is happening?” she asked the girl sitting next to her. The girl explained to Priscilla that they were on the brink of choosing twenty-one girls to return to their families. Priscilla wanted to leap up and jump for joy. “Thank you, God! Thank you, God! Please make this happen!” she exclaimed. She was still giving thanks when the man in white spoke again.
“Who has paper and pen?” he asked, his eyes scanning the group.
Priscilla was torn. She had ignored the men’s instructions to leave everything behind when they’d left the last camp. Priscilla had not only packed her notebook, she’d brought along a pen for good measure. The last thing she wanted was to get into trouble. Should I say have a pen and paper or just keep my mouth shut?
“I have some,” Priscilla’s voice rang out.
“Who?”
“Me, I have pen and paper.” Priscilla’s mouth was suddenly dry. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears.
“Come up here!”
All she could think was What have I gotten myself into now?
There were fifty pairs of male eyes staring at Priscilla as she walked toward the front of the group. She nervously clutched her frayed notebook and pen and kept praying to be spared punishment for not doing as she was told.
When she was standing directly in front of the man in white, Priscilla tore a few limp pages from her book. She handed the paper and her pen over to man, who continued to stare at her as he slowly took the items from her outstretched hand.
“What is your name?” he asked gently.
“Priscilla.”
Seconds later, her name was written on one of her sheets of paper.
“Go and sit over there,” one of the men told her.
But now that she’d been chosen, Priscilla was too nervous to sit. Fearful of losing her spot, she moved to the side but remained standing.
Priscilla looked at the rest of her sisters seated under the tamarind tree. Every one of them had a pleading look in her eyes. Many of them were muttering under the breath, praying for this to be their moment.
The men used their flashlight to make their selections, swinging the beam from one face to another. The chosen ones tended to be the girls who sat quietly. Priscilla noticed that those who tried to push to the front or to go out of their way to be noticed were ignored. Bernice had also been asleep. By the time she woke up, Priscilla was already standing at the front of the group with her name top of the list. Bernice too asked a girl seated close by to explain what she was looking at. She watched calmly and told herself if that if it was God’s will, she would be picked. Moments later Bernice felt the glare of the flashlight on her face.
“What is your name?”
“Bernice.”
“Get up and stand over here, with these other girls.”
When the list of girls was complete, each name was read aloud. Priscilla’s name had been deliberately left off because the men intended to reveal her as number twenty-one, a surprise at their meeting with the Nigerian authorities. With the roll call over, the man in white looked at the dozens of heartbroken girls who hadn’t been chosen.
“Be patient,” he coaxed. “If we go with these girls and the agreement we have made with the government goes through, then you will be joining your friends very soon.”
The girls wanted to believe him, but it was difficult given all they’d been through. Some were sobbing wildly when the man in white shouted, “Let’s go!”
Priscilla and Bernice needed to say goodbye. They longed to hug the girls they’d sat and wept in the darkness with and cared for in times of sickness, but they weren’t allowed.
“No! Let’s go now!”
All of the girls were crying hysterically.
“Don’t worry,” those left behind said. “We will follow you if it is our time.”
Priscilla cried for the sisters she was leaving behind and also because of the deep fear she felt within. Are we really being taken home? She’d been praying for this day for such a long time, and now she was soaked in grief and thoroughly confused about how things would actually play out.
The men and the twenty-one chosen girls walked for a few minutes, until they could no longer hear the rest of the girls weeping.
“Wait here,” the men instructed.
Within the hour, they heard the sound of vehicles approaching. A line of ten Hilux pickup trucks moved toward them, and the chosen ones were divided into small groups and spread out among the cars. They drove through Sambisa for the next four days before stopping.
“We are stopping here to wait for somebody. This person will be our escort. So come down.” After days of being cooped up in cramped vehicles, the girls welcomed a break in the journey.
This Boko Haram camp was not like the scores of others populating Sambisa. Over the next three days, the twenty-one huddled together, watching camp life unfold in the distance and waiting for their next set of instructions.
Finally, the “escort” arrived in the middle of the night while most of the girls slept. Priscilla and Bernice had stayed up, lost in conversation, and suddenly they heard angry voices.
“Let’s go!” a man was shouting. His rough tone made the two girls uneasy. They quickly shook the others in the group awake.
The girls were hastily loaded into the waiting vehicles and within seconds were bolting through the dark forest. From the safety of the truck, Priscilla watched the branches sway wildly as the vehicles pushed past them. But the forest’s dense, suffocating vegetation began to thin out as they moved beyond Sambisa’s boundaries. They’d been driving for a few hours when the militants decided to tell Priscilla what they planned to do with her.
“We are going drop the twenty girls along the way. But you will continue on with us. You will be the one to do the talking when we meet the government people.”
Priscilla was startled by the plan and the weight of expectation on her young shoulders. She didn’t understand why she’d been chosen. What will happen to me once I arrive? she asked herself. By now the teenager was trembling, but none of the men shared what they did or didn’t know about what lay in store for her when she reached their destination. There was only one certainty in this situation of unknowns: she was being used as a human shield. Priscilla was their fail-safe in the event the Nigerian military was luring the militants into a trap rather than the preagreed handover. But she knew that in this matter, as with so many others she’d encountered during her years in captivity, she had very little choice.
Several hours later the convey came to a stop on the side of the road. This was where the twenty girls and all the vehicles were to remain. The rest of Priscilla’s journey would be completed with the militants on foot. When they set off, it was before dawn. She walked through the darkness at the heart of a crowd made up of fifty armed men. Hours later, when the heat of the day had drenched her in sweat, Priscilla turned to look back at the scene, and her breath caught in her throat. She’d known that, as they walked, they were going past myriad Boko Haram camps deep in the forest. What she failed to realize was that each time they’d gone past a settlement, dozens of men had dropped everything they were doing and joined the procession, amassing what was clearly meant to be a show of force. In due course, Priscilla’s tall, bony frame was surrounded by hundreds of militants, some following along on foot, while the tinny whine of motorbikes carrying others also filled the air.
Their destination was a wide-open clearing on the outski
rts of Banki, a town bordering Cameroon in southeastern Borno State. Back in 2014, Banki had made national headlines after Boko Haram burst into the town, kicked out the Nigerian armed forces, and seized control of the strategically important location. However, by 2015, control had reverted once more to the Nigerian military. In that way, Banki had become a symbol of the ebb and flow of the battle between the Nigerian armed forces and Boko Haram, as well as further evidence of the long-lasting damage caused by the terror group. What had once been a town abuzz with life and possibility had been transformed into endless miles of squalid camp, housing tens of thousands of Nigerians, all of them displaced by Boko Haram’s never-ending campaign of violent disruption.
The clearing for the meet-up was empty when Priscilla and her entourage stepped out of the forest. As Priscilla looked up, she saw a ball of smoking fire coming toward her, sending the men around her scattering in all directions.
A terrified-looking man curled into a ball at her feet and urged, “Lie down! Lie down! Make sure you pray because this might be your final prayer.”
But rather than press her body flat to the ground, Priscilla chose to kneel. With her hands held aloft, she bowed her head and prayed. She begged God to save her life as the smoking projectile spun toward her, but it passed overhead, exploding in the bushes behind her.
A strange quiet descended on the clearing. Soon the men who’d scattered were back, casting furtive glances about the place in search of the officials they’d been negotiating with. They waited. When no one showed up after an hour, the men decided to make a phone call on a cell phone someone had stashed away in his pocket.