Let us not spin the story of Maga the way we did the others. What others? Chibok and Dapchi. But why not? The names of the towns or villages may not sound exactly the same, but each leaves the tongue with two syllables. And they were all about girls. They were about night raids, guns and bandits.
It was defiance, if not skullduggery. It was outlawry, if boys of slaughter. It was failure of security, if not the matter of AWOL. It had all the stains and iniquities of rape, even when they returned whole. Only in Maga did they return whole.
What is whole? A nubile is no more pure when a man or boy, in the language of holy books, knows her. To know, in this context, is to hurt, bruise and sigh without her permission. That also means “to defile.”
Now, some may think the girls came whole, and undefiled, because we heard no tales of rape. We did not hear that about Maga in Kebbi State when the bandits stormed the Government Girls Secondary School. We saw the girls return, speaking, sometimes with glee, and say “amin” to a male prayer. They seemed intact, swathed in hijab and even donning smiles, each taking her number in the count.
Not so with Chibok, after the night raid. Years later, they returned in trickles. Those who were girls became women in their youths, became wives and mothers. Single mothers. Abandoned wives. Comfort to the barbaric passions of distorted souls.
They became echoes of their past elegancies. They were, in one word, raped into maturity. Families rejected some of them, having regarded them as dead and buried. They were ghost from the past.
From Dapchi, it was the same story with 110 young bloods. The poster image is that of Leah Sharibu, who reportedly would not renounce her faith. The politicians ululated, soldiers’ boots pounded forests, media cried, poets sang, yours truly devoted a volume of poems to her. She was alive, she was dead, she was alive again. She became no more Sharibu.
She inhabited everyone’s imagination. She was everyone’s daughter, sister, student, neighbour, each with their vision of the demoiselle. She also became a convenient foil to forget the other 109, as though a tear from Sharibu was a tear for a hundred. It soothed the conscience.
But to rape is not always to take a girl’s pride by direct sex. Western law has expanded the meaning in the definition of sexual harassment, including the portent of a smile. Geofrey Chaucer wrote tales of the vulnerability of the girl child, especially the Knight’s Tale with the themes of honour and fidelity with the maiden Dorigen. So, what happened to the maidens of Maga?
We may say they returned maidens. That may be true up to a point. The girls were in their hostels at night. They were asleep. Intelligence had it that the goons were going to strike. The governor, Nasir Idris, knew, and he notified the army and asked for protection. In earnest, soldiers were deployed in the school.
The students may have seen the uniform and guns and jackboots on campus. Hard enough to lull them to sleep.
In hostels, students sleep early. By midnight, the hostel air might have succumbed to a choir of snores. By 1 am, the soldiers had a new song. They were asked to vacate the place. Why? No one is telling us.
Reports say it was a soldier, a sergeant, who led them there and he was the fellow who asked them to leave. Forty-five minutes later, the demons blazed into the school. It was a thoroughfare. If a snore party, a new party had arrived, a party of ruffians, daredevil mission as their identity. They had barks for melody and guns for percussions.
All 25 of them were whisked away, but one escaped. Imagine fear in their hearts. The rough handling. The bullying words, the shoving, the sight of guns. For the few days, it was the foreboding. Did they eat? Could they eat? They had diets they did not ask for. They had bath? Who supervised it if they had? If they didn’t, was it because they did not want to strip in the ambience of their abductors? Did any one see them the way God made them? Did any suffer menstrual miscue? How did they survive it? What kind of water, if at all. If they drank, what kind of water, what taste, what colour, what smell? Where did they sleep? Or could they? Compare that to the familiar beds in daddy’s home or the hostel where they were possibly dreaming. If this was not rape, then the word does not mean violation. It was a rupture of their familiar sense of peace, or even routine. What Alexander Pope ribbed in his mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock.
Had they ever been to a forest? Had they ever seen a gun up close? Had they been around boys of rapine who spoke without courtesies and who acted without finesse?
The foreboding was worse. Imagine what they were imagining. Would they be taken to wife? What is the life of wifehood with hooded men? Where is daddy, where is mummy? Where is my home? Where is governor? Why did the soldiers leave us? We saw them before we slept. In novelist George Lamming’s words, “something startles where I thought I was safest.” What will they think of the male species? May they not follow Alexander Pope’s line: “Beware of all/but most beware of man.”Our Maga girls in hijab may need rehab.
In their young souls, their bodies were their cathedral, and so their yearnings. What they experienced was murder in their cathedrals, apologies to T.S. Eliot. In that play, very part of the building was sacrosanct except what happened inside. An ethereal collapse.
That is why we must ask, why did the soldiers leave? Why did they abandon young girls half an hour or 45 minutes to the coming of their jackals? They left them in the lion’s den. If the reason is that they were not well-armed as some speculations say, why did they not call for reinforcement? They cannot say they are not aware of the sort of weaponry these boys wield in the forests, the Ak 47, Ak 49 et al.
So, they should have armed the soldiers enough to eliminate them. If they could deploy the armoury needed before the time, why did they not take them along and empty the school ahead of the invasion. Retreat is part of military activity. Even during conventional wars, soldiers have been known to evacuate territories ahead of enemy onslaughts. We saw that in Europe during the Second World War. It is no cowardice. Retreat is not surrender. So, were the deployment and military evacuation a charade? Was it just a show? They appeared to disappear, like Black Dog in Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of buccaneers.
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It was therefore callous for them to be left to the justice of bandits. Who was that soldier who gave the order for them to leave? If it was a sergeant, we are not hearing the full story. A sergeant does not have an authority for such an order unless in defiance of higher authority. If it is a higher authority, then we must put in context the cry of Governor Idris that some people are working against the government.
The word is sabotage. We learn that the sergeant was summoned to Abuja, and it is supposed to give us hope that the truth will come to light. But what is even more potent is the suspicion that some people high up in politics and military are in on it, and they tolerate it. They even bask in the miseries of the north.
The tragedy is that they are northerners, whether in the army or in the establishment. Who are the parasites? Who are the failed men who should preserve our schools, our girls. Rather they have spawned an economy of blood, where the weak, including maidens, are the wares of transaction.
The head of the Arewa Consultative Forum, Bashir Dalhatu, wants to compare the bandits to the Niger Delta militants. So, he wants us to show them a hand of friendship. Dalhatu did not speak from a heart of peace. He may want to be friends with the goons, but he does not want to be friends with Nigerians. The Niger Delta militants did not abduct girls or raid villages to evacuate citizens, burn homes, rape girls, behead men. If we want to change them, they must bow. We cannot allow men like Dalhatu to lead a respected body like ACF. He is a politician. ACF should rid itself of partisan mongrels.
We cannot solve the violence by coddling forest tyrants. I believe, with political will and cooperation of northern elite, we can flush out these vermin in our blood in six months. It is a choice and not a difficult one. Bello Turji and Dogo Gide are human beings. The bandits are not spirits. We only need to be spirited.
