‘We all sang Amazing Grace ... then they shot our friend’
HELD HOSTAGE IN A NIGERIAN SWAMP, MISSIONARIES DAVID AND SHIRLEY DONOVAN WITNESSED THEIR COLLEAGUE’S KILLING
Stuck in a kidnap gang’s hideout in Nigeria’s lawless Delta area, missionaries David and Shirley Donovan and their two companions were trying their best to keep up morale. The night before, they had been dragged from their beds by men armed with AK-47s, who had burst into their lodgings near the Donovans’ bush clinic. Ignoring their pleas that they were missionary medics, not wealthy oil workers, the gang whisked them by speedboat to a shack on stilts in a remote swamp.
Then, as the kidnappers unexpectedly handed back a few of their looted belongings, the captives saw a chance to raise their spirits.
Among the items returned to them was an acoustic guitar belonging to fellow missionary Ian Squire, the clinic’s resident optician. Sitting himself on the shack’s broken TV set, he duly launched into Amazing Grace.
It was, as it happened, the only song Squire, 57, could play without recourse to his music sheets. But it chimed with the occasion. Written by John Newton, an 18thcentury slave trader-turnedpreacher, it tells how a brush with death caused him to find faith in God and forsake his old profession selling human cargo.
For the Donovans, it was a reminder of how their own religious awakening had brought them to Nigeria in the first place. And with the gang after a $3 million ransom, it also underscored how in this part of West Africa, men and women have long been traded for money.
“It was the perfect song, and at that point things began to look not quite as bad,” said David Donovan, 57, in an interview with his wife last week at their Cambridgeshire home.
“But then, after Ian finished playing, he stood up, and a salvo of gunshots killed him instantly. We didn’t see who did it, but it was obvious that someone in the gang had shot him. It was terrifying to see.
“We jumped out of the shack and into the water as we thought they were coming for us next, but a member of the gang came and put us back in there with Ian for the rest of the day.”
Just why their companion had been killed, the gang refused to say. David speculates that one gunman had panicked, fearing the sound of the music drifting across the water would give away the foreigners’ presence.
Given that the gang spent much of their time drunk and high on marijuana and cocaine, a degree of paranoid trigger-happiness would not be surprising, although whether the gunman intended to kill or simply fire warning shots may never be known.
Whatever the answer, it was a horrifying start to the missionaries’ three-week ordeal, during which they lived as much in fear of dying from malaria or dysentery as of death at the hands of their kidnappers.
Yet before relating the story of how they survived, the Donovans are keen to answer the question they know many will ask. Namely, what on earth were white British missionaries doing in one of Nigeria’s most dangerous corners in the first place? After all, practising Christians are a rare enough sight. But practising Christian missionaries? In 21st century, post-colonial Africa?
Certainly, talking over their kitchen table, the Donovans come across not like patrician Victorian throwbacks, but as an ordinary, well-educated middle-class couple. Which, indeed, was what they used to be. David worked as a GP in Cambridge. Shirley, his Scottish wife, 58, taught local children excluded from school.
But from their early 40s onward, what had previously been just a “nominal” faith began to play a more central role in their lives.
“We had good jobs, our two sons in private schools, and a big house in Cambridge, and pretty much everything we wanted,” said David Donovan. “But we realized it didn’t satisfy us, and that to be true to the Gospel, we had to realign our lives.”
In 2003, they sold their house for a smaller one, moved their children to a state school, and used the proceeds to start a medical charity, New Foundations. “The children were fine as they wanted to move schools anyway, but our friends did think we were completely crazy,” Shirley admits.
That, though, was the easy part. In response to a talk they heard by a Nigerian pastor about infant mortality in the Delta region, they eventually set up a clinic in Enekorogha, a Delta community poor even by local standards. There was no electricity, clean water or roads. Access was only possible via a three-hour motorboat ride through labyrinthine, mosquito-infested creeks.
It was also on a Foreign Office no-go-list, as it was plagued by robbers, pirates and militants. Early on, two of the motorboats the Donovans had bought were stolen, the thieves stabbing their watchman on one occasion. Shirley suffered a potentially fatal bout of cerebral malaria, and in 2009, David was nearly kidnapped for a first time. Locals rallied to his protection, concealing him and a colleague in a priest hole-style hiding place underneath a sofa in a neighbour’s house.
They admit that had it not been for their faith, they would have given up early on. Their reward came one day when the gravedigger at Enekorogha children’s cemetery told them that thanks to their clinic, he was almost out of a job.
Even the locals, though, lived in fear of the “Egbesu Boys”, a cultlike gang named after an ancient war god in local Ijaw tribal culture. Driven underground in Victorian times — when British missionaries first helped colonize southern Nigeria — the Egbesu cult has been revived by militants and criminal gangs, who believe its ritual scarring practices make them bulletproof. It was an Egbesu faction that abducted the Donovans and their friends on Oct. 13, led by a ferocious, bearded commander known as the “General”.
“At times you could see ... their body markings,” said Shirley. “We’d never heard of Egbesu before, but it added a sinister element to proceedings.”
After Squire’s death, the group were moved to another stilted shack. The gang, who dined off roasted monitor lizard, brought noodles and clean water for the missionaries.
Ablutions, though, had to be performed by leaning out of the shack and into the surrounding water. They shared their accommodation with up to 14 gang members, who spent much of their time playing violent videos and loud, sexually suggestive rap music on their mobiles.
Both Shirley and her fellow female missionary, Alanna Carson from Fife, feared sexual assault, “but thankfully the gang leader told his men that if they so much as touched the women, he would kill them personally”, said David. At one point, the “General” lashed an underling 50 times across his bare buttocks for falling asleep on guard duty.
The captives kept their spirits up by reading a Bible that the kidnappers had stolen in a robbery — including the First Epistle of St Paul to Timothy, which refers to the evils of “menstealers” (kidnappers and slave traders). As time went on, they also used the Bible to build a rapport with their guards.
“They justified their actions by saying that they’d grown up with nothing, and that we were privileged, but we pointed out that some of our own clinic workers had also come from troubled backgrounds,” said David, who also offered his captors medical help.
A main concern was how they would ever pay a ransom. David braced himself for having to call his brother and ask him to liquidize what was left of the family’s assets in Britain, only to realize that the “General” had no idea how to organize international ransom transactions anyway.
The captives saw military gunboats looking for them, although they were mindful of how a previous attempt to free a British hostage in Nigeria had ended in tragedy. Chris McManus, who was abducted by an Islamist group, was shot dead by his captors during a raid to free him by British special forces and Nigerian troops in 2012.
Instead, the hostages were eventually freed after the kidnappers told them a ransom from the Nigerian government had been paid. The gang blindfolded them and dropped them at a rendezvous where two SUVs were waiting with a Nigerian army escort. “We got inside and smelt the leather and the AC,” said David. “It was like stepping from one world to another.”
Today, the Donovans’ phone still rings regularly with well-wishers from Enekorogha, who turned out in their hundreds earlier this month for a mourning parade in Ian’s memory.