Two schools. And two hundred and eighty seven pupils and teachers. We’ve been afflicted once more. Chibok was where it first happened on this magnitude. Now, it is the turn of Kaduna. Others had their turns in between. When the Kaduna victims will return from the terrorists’ enclave is a question no one can answer because not even all the ones taken from Chibok have returned. Many taken from elsewhere are yet to return to their homes.
The Chibok abduction will be a decade on April 14. Yet, the pains remain. A perfect sense of these remain can be gleaned on the pages of a one-in-a-kind book, ‘The Stolen Daughters of Chibok’ by Aisha Muhammed-Oyebode with photographic illustrations by ace photojournalist Akintunde Akinleye.
The book features interviews with 152 of the over 200 Chibok families affected.
Yana Galang, the mother of Rifkatu, one of the schoolgirls, still cries each time she hears her daughter’s favorite song. Another thing that makes her cry is seeing the man Rifkatu was to marry.
“Whenever he sees me, he bursts into tears and we cry together. He had to move on,” Yana recounts.
Unlike Riftaku’s husband-to-be who has moved on, Yana is unable to move on. Every single day, she remembers her daughter and either fights back tears or allows it.
The students, Muhammed-Oyebode notes, were girls from communities such as Garu, Likama, Shirkarkir, Mbalala, Korongilim, Kuburmbula, Gatamarwa Kautikari, Askira, and Damboa.
Many of their parents, she said, had watched helplessly from their villages as the flames engulfed the school.
“The parents were afraid, as they knew who the intruders were. Some had heard of another incident at the Federal Government College in Buni Yadi just south of their location in the neighbouring Yobe State, exactly forty-seven days earlier they had heard of schoolboys marched in line by gunmen to the assembly ground. They had heard of slit throats, burned bodies, and other barbarities. They, too, hurried to Chibok to rescue their daughters, but by the time they arrived, the school was smouldering on the soil. When I think of that night, I still imagine the first smell of smoke the walkers experienced and the torturous remaining miles to its source.
“For days, the rumours about their daughters were vague and inconsistent. Perhaps not knowing what else to do, a host of fathers and brothers carried primitive weapons into the Sambisa Forest, men clutching cutlasses and hunting rifles, to fight an enemy they could not identify,” Muhammed-Oyebode writes.
The book shows that 57 girls escaped days after the abduction and for two years, 219 girls remained missing. But in May 2016, the first of the missing students, Aisha Nkeki Ali, was found by the Nigerian military. 107 more are back home. Four were freed by Nigerian military/ para-military intervention, twenty-one through negotiated release in October 2016, and eighty-two more in May 2017. Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to the book, brokered the deals. Increasingly complicated negotiations between the Nigerian Government and Boko Haram continue for the 112 girls who remain captive.
Yana is not alone in her grief. Hauwa Mallum, the mother of Kuma Solomon, is on the same ship. She took her daughter to school because she didn’t want her to be an illiterate like her.
“That decision eventually led to the loss of my daughter. She has been kidnapped by evil men who believe that Western education is a sin,” she says.
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There is an interesting ring to the case of Awa Sasa, who is still in the grip of the terrorists. Her mother, Pogu Sasa, didn’t want her to go to Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok, where she had dropped out after two years. Her objection to her daughter’s admission to the school wasn’t about Boko Haram threat.
Her reason: “During my time there, there was hardly any teaching. The teachers were not teaching well. I felt that my daughter would be wasting her time by attending a school where I didn’t think she would learn much. I myself can’t speak English.”
Asmathic Zara Ishaku is also still with the abductors and her mother worries who is taking care of her.
Panda Lalai, whose daughter, Kau’na, was also abducted, is one of the lucky parents whose daughters have regained freedom. She was released from Boko Haram captivity in May 2017. While she was in captivity, Lalai did two things: Prayed for her release and cried for her loss.
“Sometimes it starts with a prayer and ends in crying and sometimes we cry and round that out with prayer,” she recalls in the book.
The parents of Rahila Bitrus also got lucky when in May 2017 she was released. She was sixteen when she was abducted and didn’t return home until she was nineteen. She loved education so much that whenever she went to the farm with her parents she went along with notebooks and a novel.
Deborah Peter, who sold some of her goats to fund her education, is another of the set freed in May 2017, two years and eleven months after the abduction.
Also in this set is Mary Ali, the only one of twenty children to attend a formal school. “I do not believe that Boko Haram are Muslims. They are not human beings. We are Muslims,” her mother, Ngwakuma, says.
Ex-President Obasanjo, in his foreword, captures the permanent nature of the pain of the abduction. He said he had suggested that Nigerians and the world needed to come to terms with the reality that these lives had been irretrievably cut short. “That we would never see these young women, these girls, in the way we remembered them. That in the years following this tragedy, they would trickle out of the forest with the scars, both metaphorical and physical, of their time in captivity. I was vilified for my bluntness,” the ex-president writes.
Mohammadu Sanusi II, one-time Emir of Kano, in his contribution to the book, argues that the anger towards Boko Haram over the Chibok abduction should also apply to the condition of the Northern Nigerian Muslim girls.
Nearly all 107 freed girls, according to the author, are enrolled in a special programme at the American University in Yola. Four of the earlier fifty-seven escapees, who she now serves as their guardian, are attending a special programme in America. One returnee, Deborah Jafaru, Muhammed-Oyebode notes, declined a university education offer and is back in Chibok to be with the husband she married two weeks before she went to the school to resit her West African School Certificate exams and got kidnapped.
My final take: Are we going to see the end of mass abductions in Nigeria? Or, has it become our reality and we have to see it as normal? And will the terrorists ever be defeated or we just have to co-exist with them?
