It has been three weeks since the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 234 young women from a school in Northeast Nigeria. The government of Nigeria has failed at rescuing them, and there are protests underway across the country.
The girls, it seems, have been married off for $12 each.
For two weeks, retired teacher Samson Dawah prayed for news of his niece Saratu, who was among more than 230 schoolgirls snatched by Boko Haram militants in the north-eastern Nigerian village of Chibok. Then on Monday the agonising silence was broken.
When Dawah called together his extended family members to give an update, he asked that the most elderly not attend, fearing they would not be able to cope with what he had to say. "We have heard from members of the forest community where they took the girls. They said there had been mass marriages and the girls are being shared out as wives among the Boko Haram militants," Dawah told his relatives.
Saratu's father fainted; he has since been in hospital. The women of the family have barely eaten. "My wife keeps asking me, why isn't the government deploying every means to find our children," Dawah said. The marriage reports have not been confirmed officially, and rely on eyewitnesses.
A truly horrifying story, made worse by allegations of corruption within President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. Not to mention his responses, and the responses of the Nigerian government, have been weak at best. They're just now demanding action.
Girls brave violence and inhuman conditions in Nigeria’s north to get educated.
Halimatu Usman, 14, spends her days doing house chores in her home of Marte, near Lake Chad in Borno state, Nigeria. Her school has been shut to pre-empt attacks from members of the Jama'atul Alhul Sunnah Lidda'wati wal Jihad or Boko Haram (meaning western education is forbidden) a group waging an insurgency to establish an Islamic government in Nigeria.
As she fills the earthenware pot, she counts herself lucky not to be in a refugee camp in neighbouring Niger Republic or among the 234 girls abducted by Boko Haram insurgents from a physics exam in GGSS Chibok and taken to the Sambisa Forest reserve, leaving their parents and an entire country distraught.
Halimatu belongs to a generation of girls suffering from a fractured educational system in Borno state, primarily caused by the insurgency. According to an Amnesty International report in October last year, about 70 teachers and more than 100 school children have lost their lives. In neighbouring Yobe state, which has been in a state of emergency for nearly a year, 209 schools have been destroyed. In Borno state more than 800 classrooms have been burned down.
It shouldn’t be this way, in Nigeria or anywhere. It's not just girls too. Boko Haram massacred 59 boys in their beds at another school in the north. And shot their teachers. All for the crime of education.
And I've avoided the metacommentary over how 234 girls can be snatched from a school, marched off into the woods, and then forcibly married to other terrorists with only the slightest of peeps from the global press. Oh, there's coverage now. But in the US (where there is a substantial Nigerian community), until last week, not much, if any, at all. I still have to wonder if these girls were Ukrainian, or were perhaps passengers on a vanished Boeing 777, would there be more interest from international media and government (and please note here, I am not advocating, at all, for any type of US intervention of any type unless it's specifically asked for.)
But the story is getting out. This is a searing account from one of the young women who managed to escape.
Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns around Chibok, in the state of Borno, had been shuttered. Boko Haram attacks at other schools—like a recent massacre of fifty-nine schoolboys in neighboring Yobe state—had prompted the mass closure. But local education officials decided to briefly reopen the Chibok school for exams. On the night of the abduction, militants showed up at the boarding school dressed in Nigerian military uniforms. They told the girls that they were there to take them to safety. “They said, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you,’ ” Sanya told me. The men took food and other supplies from the school and then set the building on fire. They herded the girls into trucks and onto motorcycles. At first, the girls, while alarmed and nervous, believed that they were in safe hands. When the men started shooting their guns into the air and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Sanya told me, she realized that the men were not who they said they were. She started begging God for help; she watched several girls jump out of the truck that they were in.
It was noon when her group reached the terrorists’ camp. She had been taken not far from Chibok, a couple of remote villages away in the bush. The militants forced her classmates to cook; Sanya couldn’t eat. Two hours later, she pulled two friends close and told them that they should run. One of them hesitated, and said that they should wait to escape at night. Sanya insisted, and they fled behind some trees. The guards spotted them and called out for them to return, but the girls kept running. They reached a village late at night, slept at a friendly stranger’s home, and, the next day, called their families.
Sanya could not tell me more after that. She is not well. Her cousins and her close friends are still missing, and she is trying to understand how she is alive and back home. All she can do now, she said, is pray and fast, then pray and fast again.
Please keep these people in your thoughts. Please don't forget them.