All that was familiar (II)
The drive across Maiduguri was laced with silence, that kind of brooding, contemplative silence in which one takes stock of things such as the essence of life and hunger and death. Classic country music rolled out of the car speakers, filling the void. Every time the car slowed down in traffic, hordes of children, and sometimes adults too, clawed at the windows, begging for charity.
‘Please help an orphan,’ they each chanted, shuffling against each other, trying to position themselves better for whatever might come out of the car. There are many of them now in Maiduguri. So many it bothers you. They are the orphans of the Boko Haram carnage, and those who pose as such victims to make some money. There will always be people who take advantage.
Beyond the forest of outstretched arms and clawing fingers, Maiduguri seemed normal, almost - a city learning to breathe again after the ravages of Boko Haram. Traders and artisans have goods on display in shops and walkways. Fancy street lamps line the roads, some imported from France to give the city the exotic ambience of Paris. I am surprised by how boisterous the city seems, bulging with life and hordes of displaced people. And the dreams that people have, even in the most troubling times.
It was here that what has become known today as Boko Haram was born, here in this city of the proud Kanuri tribe and their ancient history, the seat of the Kanem Empire. It was here that one Muhammed Yusuf started preaching a radical form of Islam in 2002, exponentially growing his militant fan base with frustrated youths. And when in 2009 the group confronted the authorities, it was here, in Maiduguri, that they were brutally crushed. Yusuf was killed along with hundreds of his followers. Other members of his sect fled and went underground, only to resurface in 2011 as the deadly terror group that would, at the peak of its powers (around January 2015), hold some twenty thousand square miles of territory - an area roughly the size of Croatia.
Our car is stopped now at a checkpoint. Young vigilantes armed with bamboo clubs, machetes and Dane guns peer into the car, looking at me, my photographer and the driver. Their bleary eyes and dope-stained lips tell of drug use. They are called the Civilian Joint Task Force. Tired of Boko Haram attacks, youths of the city took up arms to hunt down the terrorists that had risen from among them. And it is in large part thanks to them that Maiduguri is relatively free of the insurgents. The model has been replicated in other towns in the north-east, helping the military to identify and tackle members of the sect. The story of this insurgency cannot be told without their contribution, but when Boko Haram is fully subjugated, the government will have to find some use for these youths, or they too will become a problem.
For now, they are everywhere, patrolling the streets and guarding buildings. They were there at the gate of the Dalori IDP camp on the outskirts of the city, where they and the soldiers keep watch.
Dalori is one of the biggest camps in the country. Walking through the gate, one is confronted by hordes of people and endless rows of tarpaulin shelters that stretch as far as the eyes can see.
Zahra Mohammed, a twentyfive-year-old Cameroonian, lives here. Her shack is just a single room, about six feet by ten feet. Her personal effects - plates, mats and a flimsy mattress - are scattered around the little space. You can hear voices through the tarpaulin walls separating her from her neighbours.
In the year Zahra lived here, her life consisted of waking up, washing her dishes, cleaning her room and, at about noon, joining the queues for the first meal of the day.
‘Sometimes we don’t get food, so we try to cook whatever we have scavenged or some of the relief materials we have,’ she says. She is soft-spoken, but there is sharpness in her eyes, eyes that belie the difficult times she has gone through, both here and in the forest she was rescued from.
Herwa Community Development Initiative, the NGO that offers her counselling and trains her and others in skill acquisition, euphemistically calls her a survivor. Others who are less tactful would call her a ‘Boko Haram Wife’.
In July 2014, Zahra was recently divorced, nursing her seven-month old baby Jamila and tending to her sick mother at a hospital in Kolofata, northern Cameroon, when she heard gunshots and explosions.
Armed men burst in, pointed their guns at her, then dragged Zahra and her child away from her mother’s bedside. She was blindfolded and thrown into a truck along with other women. One of them was the wife of the Cameroonian Deputy Prime Minister Amadou Ali, and it was primarily because of her that the Boko Haram attack on Kolofata made the local and international news. Not one of these reports mentioned Zahra Mohammed by name. She was one of the ‘other women’.
Zahra’s heart beat wildly as they drove, and she heard the sounds of the life she used to know recede into the distance. They bumped their way through rough bush paths, on and on until all that was familiar was only a memory, save her daughter clinging to her.
They were driven into the forest of Buni Yadi, where the younger women were separated from the older ones. That was the last time Zahra would see the wife of the Deputy Prime Minister, even though they were held together for three months. Every day, armed men would escort the younger women to attend classes run by Boko Haram scholars. And when new victims were captured in raids, the militants asked Zahra and the other captives to cook for them. There was a routine to that life in Buni Yadi, but that routine was soon disrupted.
One day, bombs fell out of the heavens and exploded around the militants’ camp. Screaming, the terrified women crouched on the floors, fearing a bomb would explode over their heads and that
Our car is stopped now at a checkpoint. Young vigilantes armed with bamboo clubs, machetes and Dane guns peer into the car, looking at me, my photographer and the driver
would be the end of it. But they survived.
The air raid forced Boko Haram to move camp, relocating with their hostages to another forest. At the new camp, Zahra worried about the well-being of her daughter, her son, who had been with his father when she was taken, and the fate of her ill mother left in the hospital. Her captors were contemplating other matters.
‘They said they wanted to marry me,’ Zahra said. ‘I told them I wanted to return to my parents, and they said my parents were infidels and I would never see them again.’ It was a curious proposal. If Zahra had said yes, the interested militant would have reported to the amir, or the head of the cell, that he had found a willing wife. For Boko Haram, hierarchy is important. A witness - a survivor - had told me she had seen about twenty militants executed by their commander for taking ‘wives’ without his consent. They were branded fornicators and shot. Against the wishes of the executioner, the women were spared because they were forced into the ‘marriage’. The enraged executioner had to be physically restrained from shooting the women.
Zahra did not know this, of course, but she still rejected the proposal. Spurned, the militants decided to force her hand.
‘They put me in a hole in the ground and covered it with some crude construct. They kept me there for fifteen days. And when they brought me out, I still refused,’ she said. She was fiddling with her fingers now.
She sat staring out of the door to where the other women were sitting in the shade, braiding their hair and speaking in Kanuri. I imagined how she must have felt in those seven months of her captivity, losing all contact with home and everyone she had loved. I wondered if she heard when the government of Cameroon negotiated with Boko Haram for the release of the wife of the Deputy Prime Minister. If she had wished she was with those freed alongside the wife of the politician after the ransom was paid. I wondered how it felt to be one of the forgotten ones, and to remain one of the forgotten ones years later.
With no news of home, all she had was her daughter, Jamila. She held her for comfort at night and the innocent child, then fourteen months old, was the only source of joy she had.
But then the fighter jets came again. Another day, another raid. With bombs dropping, chaos broke out in the camp. The women saw an opening and fled into the forest, but were pursued by their unrelenting captors.
With little Jamila strapped to her back, Zahra ran into uncharted terrain. The wrapper she used to bind her daughter to her back came undone and Jamila tumbled off, falling to the ground and snapping her neck.
I could visualise Zahra falling to her knees, shaking her baby, asking her to wake up, calling her name and wailing to the heavens. But Jamila was dead. And when the Boko Haram militants caught up with the distraught woman, they dragged her away.
‘Your crying will not bring her back,’ they told her.
There was something almost mechanical about the way Zahra narrated her story, as if wanting to detach herself from it. Perhaps it was because she had already told it several times before, to her fellow refugees and displaced persons, to news hounds, NGOs and the international aid groups who had promised to help her find her family, all without success.
The only moment emotion crept into her voice was when she said, ‘I still think about my daughter.’ She looked down at her fingers, now dovetailed into each other. ‘I think about her all the time.’
When another military raid on their new camp at Kera Laji presented another opportunity to escape, Zahra took it. Survival was paramount in her mind. She ran. For her dead daughter. For her living son. For her sick mother, who may or may not be dead. For the love of life, she ran and did not stop, until she, along with five other women, reached Bama, which had just been retaken by the Nigerian Army.
There they were housed in the local prison for five days, until Boko Haram made a spirited attempt to retake the city. The attack was repelled and the army decided it was best to move the women to the safety of Maiduguri, to the massive camp of Dalori, where Zahra has been ever since.
It was Tuesday. In the bright sun of Maiduguri, close to the gate of the Dalori camp, there was a football match going on, two teams of IDPs slugging it out against each other. But for Zahra, it was just another day.
She had woken up to the humdrum life of the camp. And by noon, it was clear there wouldn’t be any food that day. The cooks were idling in the kitchen, cleaning utensils and finding ways of appearing busy, but anyone could tell nothing was happening there. Zahra would have to cook some of her rice or noodles. She had some spice she could sprinkle on them to give them a little taste. Conditions at Dalori are far better than at the Bakassi camp; at least here, food is more regular and the prospect of starving does not loom so large.
When she was told that some officials from Herwa, the NGO that has been counselling her, had come and were waiting for her at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) tent, she probably didn’t think much of it. She shelved her plans to cook for the moment. Who knew, perhaps the kitchen would come alive by the time she was done.
The UNFPA tent was located near the makeshift school in the camp. It stood out from the field of white tarpaulins because it was yellow and the sunlight streaming through the tarp gave the inside of the tent an ethereal amber glow.
There was only one Herwa official on the ground, but he had come with representatives of the Federation of Muslim Women’s Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN).
The women huddled on the mats in the middle of the tent, talking to the officials. Soon, there was a buzz of excitement. Other women who had been in separate corners joined the group in the centre. Zahra sat, her hands on her lap, looking down at the mat. She seemed dazed.
One of the FOMWAN officials was also Cameroonian, and she happened to know Zahra’s parents. She told Zahra that her mother had recovered from her illness; her family had relocated to Marwa, but they were alive and well.
It was the first news from home Zahra had received in two years. Looking at her sitting there in the midst of the women, holding back the tears in her eyes, I could see how much this bit of news meant to her. She seemed completely floored by this happy coincidence.
‘They think I am dead,’ Zahra told me later. ‘They told them I had been killed in one of the air raids in the forest. They’ve even said prayers for my soul.’
This information was hard for her to process and she didn’t seem to know how to handle the news. But beneath the confusion, there was relief. And the renewed stirring of hope, the thawing of dreams long put on ice. There would be bureaucracy and paperwork to get her out of the camp if someone came for her, but the priority now was to reach out to her parents and let them know she was alive and well.
‘I just want to see my family and my son again,’ she said. The trembling in her voice told of anxiety, of an eagerness to remove the cloak of death from over her head, to reveal herself to the world she knew and that knew her.
For Zahra, there is now a glimmer of light at the end of her long and winding tunnel. For Sa’adatu Musa and her children at Bakassi, the wait continues.
‘They think I am dead,’ Zahra told me later. ‘They told them I had been killed in one of the air raids in the forest. They’ve even said prayers for my soul.’