‘Bring back our girls’: The kidnapping of Nigeria’s Chibok schoolgirls
In April 2014, 276 Nigerian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram. Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw tell the story of how their kidnap gained world attention and how 82 of the captives were eventually relea
It was May 7, 2014, an overcast Wednesday in Washington DC, and all the major breakfast shows were leading with the same harrowing tale. Thousands of miles away, in a remote Nigerian town called Chibok, 276 schoolgirls had been kidnapped from their dormitory on the night before their final exams. They’d been dozing on bunk beds, studying notes, or reading the Bible by flashlight.
They were high-school seniors, a few hours of test questions from graduating as some of the only edu
cated young women in an impoverished region where most girls never learned to read.
Then a group of militants barged in, bundled them onto trucks, and sped into the forest. The students had become captives of a little-known terrorist group called Boko Haram, which filled its ranks by abducting children. The girls’ parents chased after them on motorbikes and on foot until the trail went cold. For weeks, few people seemed to notice. The schoolgirls looked set to be forgotten, new entries on a long list of stolen youth. But this time, something mysterious aligned inside the algorithms that power the attention economy.
A small band of Nigerian activists on Twitter coined a hashtag calling for the hostages’ immediate release. Through the unpredictable pinball mechanics of social media, it shot out from West Africa and into the celebrity-sphere, boosted by Hollywood and hip-hop royalty, then captured the global imagination. People all over the world began tweeting the same clarion call: #BringBackOurGirls. The network news channels found the story irresistible. Anchors choked up retelling a tragic sequence of events that seemed to connect the world’s richest and poorest people through the universal pain of parental loss. Here was a chance to take part in the crowdsourced liberation of more than two hundred innocent victims terrorized for their determination to learn.
Watching the news reports upstairs in the White House, Michelle Obama felt the same wrench of empathy that millions of others would express online: Those could be my daughters. She dialed her chief of staff. “I think I want to do this,” she said. “I want to do this.”
Her media team scrambled to choreograph the tweet. Staff hurried office supplies into the White House Diplomatic Room, trial-and-error testing Twitter photos in the same circular reception hall where Franklin Roosevelt once recorded his Fireside Chats. Michelle’s aides fumbled with different-size placards, and tested out sharpies to see how thick the marker should be for legibility on a small screen.
Michelle descended the staircase, rushing to a personal appointment. The motorcade was waiting, but she could do this fast. Standing opposite a portrait of George Washington, she stared intently into the photographer’s lens, gripping a pearly white placard: “#BringBackOurGirls.”
She dashed into her car, while an aide typed up her caption and clicked Tweet: “Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families. It’s time to #BringBackOurGirls.—mo”
That modest gesture was liked or retweeted by some 179,000 people and seen by hundreds of millions across the world, becoming the most shared post of a frenzied campaign that tested the power of social media to reshape events thousands of miles away. In the space of a few weeks, two million Twitter users, with a tap of the screen, repeated the same demand.