The Chibok Girls. Helon Habila

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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

       globalreports.columbia.edu

       facebook.com/columbiaglobalreports

       @columbiaGR

      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

       Part One

       Chibok

       Professor Americana

      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. СКАЧАТЬ