Girls brought back
Female students kidnapped by Boko Haram moving on ... but living under new kind of government-controlled life
YOLA, Nigeria — The list had more than 200 names. Martha James. Grace Paul. Rebecca Joseph. Mary Ali. Ruth Kolo. And so many others.
It took Nigerian officials agonizing weeks to publish the names of all the students Boko Haram kidnapped from a boarding school in the village of Chibok four years ago, on the night of April 14.
For years, the teenagers remained missing, changing from girls into women, lost to a band of extremists known for beating, raping and enslaving its captives.
And then, many of their names were joyfully crossed off the list.
“I’m ‘back,’ as they say,” said Hauwa Ntakai, one of the Chibok students.
Nearly four years after they were abducted and dragged off to a forest hideout, more than 100 of the students from Chibok now live on a pristine university campus four hours from their homes here in northeastern Nigeria, their days filled with math and English classes, karaoke and selfies, and movie nights with popcorn.
The government negotiated for the release of many of the Chibok students, who were set free in groups over the last year and a half. A few others were found roaming the countryside, having escaped their captors.
But more than 100 of their former classmates are still missing, held by Boko Haram. About a dozen are thought to be dead.
“I’m happy,” said Ntakai, who was No. 169 on the list. Now, she is a 20-year-old student who rises at dawn for Saturday yoga class and argues about the benefits and dangers of social media during debate night at the university.
Nigeria is in its ninth year of war with Boko Haram, a group that has killed and kidnapped thousands of civilians across northern Nigeria.
Teenage students from a village school suddenly became the unwitting representatives of all the dead and missing victims of a crisis that has upended a poor, remote corner of the globe.
“When the Chibok abduction happened, it was the articulation of this whole saga,” said Saudatu Mahdi, a co-founder of the Bring Back Our Girls movement. “They became a rallying point.”
But the freed students from Chibok also bear the heavy burden of the celebrity that led to their release.
They are fortunate enough to attend a private university that educates the children of Nigerian politicians, businesspeople and other members of the elite.
But security restrictions on the Chibok students are especially tight. They are not allowed to leave campus without an escort. They can’t have visitors without special permission. And though some of the women gave birth during their captivity, their children are not allowed to stay with them at the university. Administrators say that would distract from their studies.
In fact, the young women have rarely seen their families since they were freed from Boko Haram. The longest period they have spent with their parents, siblings and other relatives since their abduction in 2014 was over Christmas break last year, when they went home for a couple of weeks. Other than that, they have been under close supervision by officials and educators.
As soon as they were released from Boko Haram, the women were whisked to Abuja, the capital, where they spent weeks in the government’s custody, questioned for information that could help find their still-missing classmates — and to satisfy officials that they had not grown loyal to Boko Haram.
Security agents warned the young women not to talk about their time with militants, arguing that it might jeopardize the safety of the students still held captive. Forget about the past and move forward, they were told.
For months, their access to their parents was severely restricted. They weren’t allowed to leave the bland government building that was their dormitory. Even today, their only regular connection to their families is by phone.
Last summer, officials at the American University of Nigeria travelled to meet with the government. In 2014, the university, in the city of Yola, had taken in about 20 students from Chibok who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram but had managed to escape within hours. Administrators pitched the government on a plan to take the newly-freed women, too. The idea was to incorporate them into a program designed to help them catch up on their studies, reunite them with their former classmates who were already at the university and prepare them for college life. Now the Chibok students’ lives are highly structured. With militants still at large in the country, they are considered high-profile targets. And as public figures, officials fear, they are vulnerable to exploitation.
“They will not be the normal people they were before they were abducted,” said Mahdi, secretary-general of the Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative, an advocacy group for women and girls in Nigeria. “A lot of restrictions will come with their lifestyle.”
Last September, more than 100 of the students arrived at the tidy campus, with its trimmed hedges, three-storey library and solar-powered buildings. Not everyone was happy to welcome such a large group of women who had spent the past few years living with militants.
Some of the other students were scared Boko Haram would come for the Chibok women again, especially at a university representing the Western education that Boko Haram has long condemned.
Others worried that the women had grown attached to their captors and could be terrorists themselves. One student told officials that she feared waking up at night to discover one of the women holding a knife to her neck.
University officials have the women adhere to a busy schedule — including classes on Saturdays — to keep their minds off the past.
“They’ve seen hell together,” said Somiari Demm, a psychologist who counsels the women and also teaches them yoga and attends church services alongside them. “They share the extensive narrative that no one else does.”
Demm contended that some of the Chibok students who had initially escaped the kidnapping had travelled to the United States only to be exploited by people there. She said they were made to repeatedly recount the night Boko Haram came to their school, with their testimonies used to solicit donations for churches or other organizations.
Demm argued that she wanted to empower the students in her care to tell their own stories, in their own time.
For now, she said, the hardest adjustment for the women is “being free, but not really free.”
Dama wants to take university classes, return to Chibok and be a nurse to help her community. Another student, Rhoda Peter, wants to be a lawyer.
“I know I’m in a place where nobody will chase me and do something wrong to us,” said Peter, 22. “They are here to help us.”
In February, about 270 kilometres from Chibok, the unfathomable happened again. Boko Haram stormed a secondary school in a village called Dapchi and left with more than 100 female teenage captives. The nation began to mourn the kidnapping of yet another set of schoolgirls. Then, late last month, the militants suddenly brought most of the girls home safely, for reasons that are not entirely clear. The Nigerian government says it is negotiating for the release of the rest of the missing girls from Dapchi, as well as the dozens of students from Chibok who are still being held captive.