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The Chibok Girls:
The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria
Copyright © 2016 by Helon Habila
All rights reserved
Published by Columbia Global Reports
91 Claremont Avenue, Suite 515
New York, NY 10027
facebook.com/columbiaglobalreports
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945881
ISBN: 978-0997126471
Book design by Charlotte Strick and Claire Williams
Map design by Jeffrey L. Ward
Author photograph by Windham-Campbell Prizes
This book is dedicated to the 218 Chibok Girls still missing,
and to all victims of the Boko Haram insurgency.
CONTENTS
PART 1—CHIBOK
Chapter One
Professor Americana
Chapter Two
The Day They Took the Girls
Chapter Three
A History of Violence
PART 2—INSIDE BOKO HARAM HEARTLAND
Chapter Four
Gombe
Chapter Five
Maiduguri
PART 3—RETURN TO CHIBOK
Chapter Six
Waiting for the Girls
Chapter Seven
America
Chapter Eight
The Day They Took Us
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Notes
The town lay about a mile ahead, hidden behind rocky hills and baobab trees. There was still one more checkpoint to pass before we entered Chibok. We had left Maiduguri early and spent the night in Yola. The regular route from Maiduguri to Chibok, which passed through Damboa and normally takes two hours, was still in the hands of Boko Haram, and so we had to divert through Damaturu in Yobe State, and then to Gombe in Gombe State, getting to Yola in Adamawa State by nightfall—a detour of almost 500 miles.
We left Yola at 10:00 in the morning. This was the coolest it ever gets in these parts, with temperatures falling to the low fifties Fahrenheit at night. It was January, the middle of the season of Harmattan, a wind that blows in from the Sahara, carrying with it dust from the great desert. The fine sand particles go right into your nostrils and eyes, dehydrate the skin, crack the lips, and induce coughing fits and general discomfort. Among the villagers, who mostly go about in slippers or barefoot, the Harmattan cuts deep grooves in their heels. Despite rolling up the windows, the dust still managed to get into the car. All the way from Yola it had clouded the windshield and piled up on the seats and on our clothes and hair.
The closer we got to Chibok, the more checkpoints we encountered. At each stop we had to get out of the car and open the trunk; sometimes the soldiers went through our bags, sometimes they just waved us through. As we passed through Askira-Uba, the last local government area before Chibok, signs of the ongoing battle between Boko Haram and the military became more evident. Burned tanks and military trucks stood at the roadsides, rusting away. There were houses with caved-in roofs and walls pockmarked by bullet holes. There was a destroyed bridge around which we had to detour.
Abbas, my guide, was driving. With us was Michael, a member of the civilian Joint Task Force—local hunters and youths working as volunteers alongside the military. He was from Abbas’s hometown and somehow related to him. We had picked him up on the way, at Lassa junction, where he had waited for us, seated on his bike with only his Dane rifle for company. He had left the bike there and entered the car. When I asked him if the bike was safe there in the bush by itself, he said yes.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. He appeared to be a man of few words. I was conscious of him seated right behind me, his rifle pointing in the general direction of my head.
The JTF was a coalition of the different branches of the armed forces formed on an ad-hoc basis to fight the insurgency. Civilian vigilantes knew the terrain better than the soldiers, who were mostly from distant parts of the country and didn’t even speak the local languages. Nevertheless the civilian JTF’s prowess in fighting Boko Haram had been much exaggerated and mythologized—for instance, they were believed to possess charms and medicines that made them invulnerable to bullets, and even invisible to the enemy during battle.
Michael was supposed to ease our passage through the checkpoints. And sure enough, after bringing on this new passenger we had passed two checkpoints unharassed; the soldiers only nodded at Michael and waved us through—his tan uniform and the gun seemed to be doing the trick. Until we reached one where we seemed to have passed a flag without stopping. As we passed a second flag we noticed a soldier under a tree by the roadside shouting and waving at us to stop, his gun pointed at our car.
“We thought we were clear to pass . . .”
Another soldier, a superior, came out of a house behind the tree. He was putting on a shirt and his skinny chest was exposed momentarily. “You think? You think?” he shouted as he joined the others. “You people think we are here to play? I dey here for this bush fighting Boko Haram for two years now. Two years I no see my family, and you tell me you think?”
Thinking was clearly not allowed.
