Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

“We are waiting—where are you?” the militant asked gruffly. The conversation was brief and then everyone went back to waiting.

  Eventually five vehicles drove toward the clearing, all bearing the iconic logo of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Half a dozen men, some Nigerian, others European, climbed out of the cars. Among them was Zannah Mustapha, a tall, thin northern Nigerian man with thick-rimmed glasses. This influential former lawyer in his late fifties had played a critical role, alongside three secret Swiss negotiators, in negotiations with Boko Haram for the release of these twenty-one girls. The talks had been painstaking, but Mustapha had remained hopeful the entire time. Much of that confidence was due to the relationship he had established with Boko Haram back in 2007, after he first came across a preradicalized Mohammed Yusuf, in a mosque in Maiduguri where they were both living at the time. Boko Haram’s trust of Mustapha deepened when he launched the Future Prowess Islamic Foundation School that same year, to educate the children and support victims of all sides of the insurgency. To date he provides free education, uniforms, meals, and health care for all who are enrolled. Over the years Mustapha has become a lifeline for growing numbers of Boko Haram widows and orphans displaced by the conflict. His efforts to negotiate the release of the twenty-one girls was triggered by President Buhari’s 2016 statement at the United Nations, in which he expressed a willingness to negotiate with Boko Haram and welcomed “intermediaries such as UN outfits to step in.” This created the opening for Mustapha’s outreach to the group. “Nobody contacted me to do this in the first place,” he said. “I felt it was necessary to do what I did as a humanitarian. I was not influenced by anybody from either side.” The process led by Mustapha and a number of Swiss negotiators took only a few weeks, though it required a series of confidence-building measures to arrive at an agreement. But this lawyer turned humanitarian, who has won a host of awards for his work, has always been quick to stress that the real mediation that resulted in the release of Priscilla and the others was initiated and coordinated by the Nigerian government. And whenever he’s been asked to shed some light on what Boko Haram received in exchange for giving up the twenty-one girls, Zannah Mustapha has always politely demurred.

  On October 13, 2016, Mustapha and one of his Swiss colleagues walked to the middle of the clearing, where ten armed militants joined them. The men from the forest were strikingly upbeat as they exchanged pleasantries with the newcomers. Next they moved right on to the matter at hand. “We have already brought your girls. And we brought one to show you that they are around,” the man said and pointed at Priscilla. He went on, “So here is the girl. Let’s greet her.”

  Priscilla swallowed hard, and her eyes widened as the men came toward her. She nodded her head respectfully and bent her knees when they were finally in front of her.

  “Who are you?” one of the men asked her.

  Priscilla was so nervous she could barely raise her voice above a whisper. “I am one of the Chibok girls.”

  “Don’t be afraid. We are here to rescue you. But where are the others?”

  “The rest are with the boys, far off from here.”

  “Be patient,” urged Zannah as he gave a tender smile to the frightened girl.

  Priscilla’s captors piped up once more. “This girl we have brought here today, but her name is not on the list. We only promised to release twenty people, but we brought her as a gift to Nigeria. So even if this ends up in a battle, she will be freed. We made that promise and we will keep it. We are gifting her to you, Zannah Mustapha—she is yours and a gift to Nigeria.”

  Priscilla wasn’t bothered by the militant’s talk of her being a “gift.” Priscilla cared about only one thing—getting home to her loved ones. At this stage, whatever came out of the mouths of these armed men were just words. Now Zannah Mustapha took her hand and Priscilla began to cry, moved to tears by the prospect of being so close to freedom and the kindness of this stranger. Priscilla was still crying gently when one of the militants said to a fellow fighter, “Go and bring those girls.”

  About an hour later, dozens of Boko Haram fighters materialized from the bushes. By their sides were twenty frightened-looking girls from Chibok. They approached slowly. A handful of words were exchanged between the militants and negotiators to confirm the agreement. All twenty-one girls were too afraid to even breathe at this point. They all just stood silently, waiting, wanting all of it to be over.

  “OK ladies, the moment you hear your name—it is the end,” said their kidnappers.

  Zannah Mustapha now turned to Priscilla and instructed her to read the names on the list he handed to her. As she read their names, each girl acknowledged herself before stepping out of the clutches of Boko Haram and into a new future. Every one of them was immediately whisked toward a waiting vehicle.

  After Priscilla had finished reading the list, she stood alone in the clearing, seemingly forgotten. Zannah Mustapha and his Swiss colleague were deep in conversation, and the militants were poised to head back into the forest. The Boko boys noticed she’d been overlooked and quickly yelled out to the departing negotiators, “Ah, you have forgotten Priscilla for us!”

  Embarrassed, Zannah Mustapha spun on his heels and rushed toward her. “Ah, how will we forget her? She is our bonus!”

  Priscilla couldn’t believe she was actually free as she walked toward the parked vehicles. All the girls were in the cars except Bernice. She had been standing anxiously, refusing to get in the car without her friend. Priscilla smiled warmly and giggled when she caught sight of Bernice. They were finally by each other’s side, and nothing more needed to be said.

  When the convoy of Red Cross vehicles pulled away from the clearing, none of the twenty-one girls could quite grasp the fact that their ordeal was over—one day short of two and a half years in captivity. In Priscilla’s car the girls chatted excitedly. But dark thoughts also lingered. Is this really happening? Will I find my parents alive? When they had been held in the house in Gwoza, the men had told them repeatedly that their parents were all dead, as a tactic to pressure the girls into marriage. Now Priscilla and Bernice couldn’t shake the fear of not having a family to come back to.

  They drove the short distance from the handover location into Banki town itself and then onto a military airstrip, where a helicopter sat waiting. None of the girls had ever been in a helicopter, or any kind of aircraft, before that day. Yet they were so full of adrenaline and relief, they weren’t even capable of being afraid when they clambered aboard. They couldn’t help but chuckle darkly to each other as they strapped themselves in. They had spent years watching aircraft drop bombs on their heads while they were in captivity. And now they were inside a helicopter going home! As the helicopter packed with the twenty-one girls and baby Amos rose into the skies, Priscilla started to truly believe that she might really be free. In the blink of an eye, she’d gone from living as a captured Chibok schoolgirl to reclaiming her freedom in a bush clearing on the outskirts of Banki. For the first time in more than nine hundred days, Rebecca could begin to think about her future with something other than dread in her heart.

  The helicopter made the short trip to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, pausing briefly on the tarmac before heading to Kaduna, the capital city of Kaduna State in northwestern Nigeria. The government’s original plan of leaving the girls there for medical checkups was firmly rejected by President Buhari—who demanded the girls be taken to the capital, Abuja, immediately.

  The moment the doors of the aircraft opened in Abuja, the girls were transported to the Department of State Security (DSS), Nigeria’s equivalent of the FBI. The teenagers confronted a mash-up of smiling faces belonging to strangers, stern security officials, medical personnel, and endless questions. At the DSS they were out of harm’s way. Access in and out of the organization’s complex was closely monitored twenty-four hours a day. There was a hospital on the grounds, usually reserved for members of the Nigerian military, but on that day the doctors and nurses we
re standing by to welcome the Chibok girls.

  Upon settling, the very first thing the girls asked for was a Bible. For two and a half years they’d been unable to worship freely. Now that they’d regained their freedom, giving thanks to God for answered prayers was their most pressing priority. They also had brand-new, beautifully bright outfits waiting for them.

  The girls were in no way prepared for the crush of people waiting to welcome them at DSS headquarters. The twenty-one were led into a white-walled, brightly lit room where they sat quietly as people poured in. A host of VIPs—the vice-president of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, and his wife, Oludolapo; alongside Aisha al-Hassan, the minister of women’s affairs; and Lai Mohammed, the minister of information and culture—were all on hand. Each girl was tenderly embraced and met with kind, reassuring words.

  Warmth and gentleness had been absent from their lives for such a long time. Now faced with this kindness from strangers, all the painful emotions they’d kept under control spilled out into the open. Officials did their best to comfort the girls, seeing their hurt and distress. Meanwhile, a horde of journalists invited to capture the long-awaited return of these Chibok girls were crammed into the back of the room. This was a victory for the government of Muhammadu Buhari. The administration understood all too well the value of these images to Nigerians as well as to foreign governments and the broader international community.

  But the girls’ parents were conspicuously absent from the crowd. The girls had been freed on Thursday, October 13, 2016, and even though news had reached the Chibok community that same day, most of their parents didn’t have the money readily available to cover the cost for a five-hundred-mile journey to the nation’s capital—not to mention they’d have to travel along a road that remained a target for their daughters’ abductors. The government ultimately stepped in and paid the families’ travel costs, but it would take days for them to arrive. Meanwhile, all the girls and baby Amos were subjected to a battery of physical tests and reams of questions to assess their state of mind. The sight of their emaciated bodies and ashen complexions left no room for doubt. These girls had suffered extreme starvation and deprivation, but many more tests were conducted to gain a full picture of their health and well-being. Throughout the poking, pulling, and inspecting, Priscilla’s mind remained preoccupied with just one thought: seeing her parents.

  Like the other girls, Priscilla would have to wait until Sunday—two full days—before she could embrace her mother and father. When the moment finally came, it was at a specially arranged Thanksgiving service. At last, all the parents and daughters gazed on faces they’d long feared were lost to them forever. Under the cream-colored canopies erected to protect the families and specially invited VIPs from the unfriendly skies, mothers and fathers clung to their painfully thin daughters for the first time in years. They cradled their children like they were fragile newborns, as if the opening up of any space between them might allow something terrible to happen once more.

  One father rocked his child protectively while she sat in his lap. Another held his fragile-boned daughter high above his head in joyful thanks. Priscilla’s mother could hardly stand the force of her own sobbing, leaving her doubled over yet refusing to let go of her beloved daughter. Her father stared at his Priscilla through bloodshot eyes; his chest rose and fell heavily while he cried. When they moved beyond the tents, into the open courtyard, no one seemed to care about the intermittent rain, maybe because their faces were already soaked with tears. The merging of unbridled joy and the agony of lost years produced a heartrending wailing that reverberated throughout the courtyard.

  At the heart of this reunion ceremony, these wounded, damaged people raised prayers of thanks and songs of praise. For Chibok’s devoutly Christian community, there could be no better way to formally mark their children’s return from the clutches of evil than through prayer. The girls themselves led some of those prayers and spoke of how faith had kept them alive in the dead of night in that forest. It was this same faith that provided comfort to the girls’ parents when much of the world had turned away from their suffering.

  And then, once the prayers were completed, the euphoria in the room and the celebratory drumming pulled everyone to their feet. As palms beat the drums harder, the music grew louder and everyone moved rhythmically, singing songs of old from Chibok, a home the twenty-one had visited only in their minds over the past two and a half years. They were still a distance from that long-awaited homecoming.

  At first, the girls in their beautiful new outfits stood in rows, dancing in unison to the accelerating drumbeat. Faster and faster they moved, with arms swaying side to side, their feet leaping deftly across the brick-lined courtyard and their throats outstretched to the heavens, letting their voices rise high in the Abuja skies. As the emotion and percussion took over, the lines separating the dancers and giving the group order quickly melted away, leaving parents, daughters, and VIPs dancing freely and joyfully intermingled. Soon the scene was a swirl of undulating bodies, ecstatic faces, and a collage of bright and vibrant color. They moved together instinctively, celebrating the return of their stolen daughters, as one reunited Chibok family.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I WOKE UP ON OCTOBER 13, 2016, IN NEW YORK, FAR AWAY FROM MY home in Los Angeles. I’d been on the East Coast for a multiday publicity blitz to promote We Will Rise: Michelle Obama’s Mission to Educate Girls Around the World, a CNN-produced documentary I was featured in alongside the former first lady and the actresses Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto. When I opened my eyes just before nine, I was bone tired and looking forward to enjoying the dregs of summer on a rare day off in the big city.

  What I wasn’t expecting that day was the news of twenty-one Chibok schoolgirls being released. I actually stumbled on it while absentmindedly scrolling through social media. Still bleary eyed and barely awake, I wasn’t wearing my glasses or contacts lenses, so a part of me thought it had to be a mistake. In my confusion, it seemed impossible that the Nigerian government could have secured the mass release without the news leaking out beforehand. Once I confirmed that the girls had actually been freed, I felt a rush of emotions: heart-thumping joy, shock, relief, and an undeniable sadness that came from knowing they were but a small fraction of the 219 schoolgirls Boko Haram had taken that April night nearly two and a half years earlier.

  Long after most people had stopped paying attention, I’d remained consumed by what had happened to the girls. Six months earlier, as the second anniversary of the mass abduction had approached, I had been forced to confront the fact that the world hadn’t seen or heard anything substantive about them in months. Their loved ones, like everyone else, were completely in the dark. At that point, no one knew whether the girls were even alive, and if they were still being held in Nigeria or if they’d been smuggled across that country’s borders, as was long rumored. It was said that the Buhari government was negotiating with Boko Haram to bring the teenagers home. Was that actually true? Just as with the previous administration of Goodluck Jonathan, no one could get meaningful information from the current government.

  A flurry of developments had recently revived global public interest in the tragedy, albeit only briefly. CNN’s public release of a proof-of-life video on April 14, 2016, the second anniversary of the Chibok abductions, was followed by the discovery on May 18 of the first of the missing Chibok schoolgirls—Amina Ali Nkeki, who was found that night on the edges of Sambisa Forest by members of the Civilian Joint Task Force, the vigilante group set up to help fight Boko Haram. She carried in her arms a baby girl, and by her side was a young man who claimed to be her husband. It all generated a stream of headlines, as did the emergence of another hostage video later in August. But my list of questions about the girls’ fate remained endless and basically unanswered.

  Now I found myself in a New York hotel room processing the extraordinary news that a group of twenty-one had been released. Within minutes I knew I had to get to Nigeria; nothing else
mattered to me. Several frantic emails and begging phone calls later, I had the green light from my bosses in Atlanta and I was booked on a flight from JFK to Abuja for that evening. As I looked around my messy room, I focused on the two large suitcases, lying open on the floor, both piled high with spiky heels and colorful dresses, clothes suitable for a media blitz but useless for a journalist on assignment in Nigeria.

  I was in a race against the clock and off to a poor start, but before I could do anything else, I needed to speak to my mother. I dialed her number hurriedly. She picked up after a few rings and I breathed a sigh of relief as her warm, deep voice flooded my senses. We could barely contain our excitement during the brief conversation. We’d talked about what this moment might be like, when the girls might be freed, but now we had to acknowledge that it was tinged with significant sadness because only a small fraction of them had been released. My mother wholeheartedly approved of my snap decision to drop everything and head to Nigeria to meet my “sisters,” as she often called the Chibok girls. She also believed my presence would help put the story back on people’s radar, though when I cast an eye on CNN USA’s coverage that morning there was no mention of the story to support that optimism. That October, the network was in the throes of election fever and Trump mania. With the US presidential vote a few short weeks away, the shows that morning were covering the same news as they had been all year long, dominated by an endless procession of political pundits. I tried to keep my growing disappointment in check. I told myself that the story would become a priority for my bosses once CNN’s reporting teams were back on the ground again in Nigeria. I was convinced the network would be just as invested as it had been back in 2014.

  By the time I boarded my flight that night, I was drenched in sweat and wondering whether my heart would ever slow down. I’d been rushing around at breakneck speed the entire day and getting to the airport had been an ordeal. Nonetheless, I’d made it. Once I was settled into my seat, I allowed feelings of triumph to take over. I thought about the twenty-one girls savoring their freedom for the first time in two and a half years, and I felt a rush of excitement. I couldn’t wait to meet them.