A Gift from Darkness Read online

  But above all there were many women in the camp. I saw some in black niqabs, but also others who wore normal clothes and just had a scarf tied around their heads. Most of them were probably prisoners like us. But they were also working. On the very edge of the camp I saw some of them fetching wood. They probably wanted to start a fire. Others were chopping up leaves and tomatoes, probably ingredients for the fighters” dinner. Where on earth had I ended up? Was this place under the open sky one of the notorious camps in which Boko Haram kept the kidnapped women? Were we going to live with them here? Or serve them as slaves?

  Our escorts led us quite far inside the camp. Tarpaulins were stretched all over the place to catch the rain. Even so, everything was soft and drenched. The grass was very high and now, toward evening, mosquitoes buzzed around. Insects crawled around on the floor as well. If we stayed here for any length of time we were bound to fall ill.

  Some of our fellow prisoners sat on tarpaulins, some on the bare ground. Jara and I were surprised to notice that we knew some of them: they were women and girls from our hometown. Jara discovered some friends from Gwoza who had been abducted at the same time as us. They said that Boko Haram had attacked the town from different sides. And clearly the group had taken many more female prisoners than we had seen in our own neighborhood.

  I also met a girl from Ngoshe whom I knew from fetching water in the morning. Hannah had gone to the same well as me and Rifkatu, and we had often exchanged a few words with her there. But since my second marriage I hadn’t seen her again. I was shocked by the sight of her: her cheeks were sunken, her eyes dull, her arms and legs scattered with mosquito bites. I barely recognized her.

  “Patience!” she greeted me weakly. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Gwoza.”

  “Yes, I was,” I said. “They attacked us there yesterday.”

  “They’re like wild animals,” Hannah said. She told me she had been taken prisoner in Ngoshe on the day of the massacre. The day when so many villagers, including my mother, had been murdered. “I wanted to escape. I ran from the house with my brothers. But they caught us.” Her eyes glazed over. “They shot my brothers straightaway.”

  “What happens here?” I asked her.

  “It’s hell on earth. They want to turn us into Muslims.”

  “And if we refuse?”

  “There’s no point. A human life has no value for them. My advice to you is, don’t try to resist them.”

  There were more things I wanted to ask Hannah. But at that moment one of the men came over. “What do you have to talk about that’s so urgent?” he hissed, and held a machete under our noses. Hannah immediately turned away from me. I understood that she was terribly afraid, like all prisoners: Muslims and non-Muslims alike were afraid of the unpredictability of the men with the weapons and their love of violence.

  The group that had brought us informed one of the commanders of the camp. He was a tall, slender man from the north. When he saw us, he grinned lewdly, as his guards had done before. But he clearly had more important things on his plate right now than dealing with the new arrivals. “Take them to the others,” he said.

  So we sat where we were with the girls from our district. They had spread out a few big leaves from the millet stalks on the ground. They didn’t have a plastic sheet. But one of the trees sheltered us a little from the frequent showers of rain.

  Now, at dusk, they were cooking in the camp. There were several fires. I greedily inhaled the smell that wafted over to us from the cooking pots. It reminded me of one of our Sunday meals. What was it, I tried to remember. Meat? And would we be getting any? As I hadn’t eaten for over twenty-four hours I was terribly hungry.

  Suddenly I heard the voice of a man raised in a curious kind of singsong. It took me a moment to work out that he was the prayer leader, and that the camp was echoing with Arabic suras. Everyone took the call to prayer very seriously: the fighters immediately dropped everything and assumed the required posture. Only a few of them went on keeping guard. Two fighters hurried over to us and gave everyone who wasn’t properly covered up a cloth to wrap around their heads. Then we were supposed to pray—or at least pretend to pray: they forced us to stand straight, raise our hands, place them one over the other on our chests, bend down and put our hands on our knees, and finally throw ourselves down on the ground. And so on.

  I joined in as best I could, but it wasn’t as simple as that. I had watched Muslims praying quite often. But of course I didn’t know the precise sequence. So I just fidgeted around a bit. The other women who hadn’t been in the camp for very long did the same: we made a few mistakes that the two fighters who had handed out the headscarves drew attention to by shouting at us or hitting us with the butts of their guns. They also had a whip with them. It hurt terribly when they hit you on the back with it.

  I was struck several times during prayer. The girls who had been there for longer were more familiar with the sequence of movements. But I was still unclear what the men were trying to achieve with this action. Did they really think it would turn us into Muslims? Or were they more concerned with the act of subjection? They couldn’t seriously assume that we were praying to their god just because they forced us to go through these motions.

  I don’t need to add that I didn’t say the Arabic words, and couldn’t even pronounce them. Quite honestly I don’t think the men knew them either, even though they considered themselves to be the most pious Muslims of all. They just mumbled some things that sounded a bit Arabic, and we women did that as well. Was their god so superficial that he was contented with this charade? Was that supposed to be a prayer? Silently, secretly, I spoke to my own Lord: “Father, have mercy on us! Don’t abandon us!”

  Then the prayer was over, and everyone went back to what they had been doing before. The fighters” veiled wives hurried to finish dinner. As I learned, that was their task, since it was important to the men to have their meals prepared by Muslim women. Or perhaps they were concerned that we “infidels” would poison them. I watched as they were served their overflowing plates of food. There was millet porridge and also a rich soup. My mouth watered. The Boko Haram people savored every mouthful. Some of them demanded several extra helpings. Again I wondered if there was going to be any left for us. They couldn’t let us starve here!

  “You’ll taste this dish soon enough,” said Jara, who had been watching me. “And once you’ve eaten it you’ll wish it had never happened.”

  “The smell is making me ill,” another woman said.

  I didn’t understand. Weren’t they hungry or thirsty? They gave each other meaningful looks.

  When the men had finished dinner, their wives actually called us over to the pots. At last they gave us water to drink. Then they handed each of us a plate and filled it with leftover soup. They were careful not to have too much contact with us, either physically or verbally. Obviously they thought they were superior, now that they were Muslims. In the camp’s pecking order they were a cut above the rest of us.

  The woman standing next to me took her portion with an expression of disgust. She was the same one who had wrinkled her nose when we had talked about the food: a very thin, but strong- and energetic-looking person who exuded a sense of dignity in spite of our situation. She had probably occupied a superior social situation in a former life.

  “I know all these women,” she said. “They came to our church every Sunday.”

  “Where was that?” I asked, as I sat down next to her a little way from the others. I have to admit: I was quietly excited, because at last I was about to have something to eat and the liquid that my body needed so urgently.

  “In Kauri,” she said. “My husband was the vicar there.”

  “Kauri,” I repeated, and in my mind’s eye I saw the ghost village we had wandered through when we arrived. I barely dared to ask, but terrible things must have happened there.

  “They killed him in front of my eyes,” the woman told me. “They murdered all our men.
And these women here,” she looked at the fighters’ wives with disgust, “want to forget that. They have become accomplices of the people who murdered our husbands, brothers, fathers and sons. They have become involved with the butchers.”

  “Jesus forgive them.”

  “No, for them there is no forgiveness,” she said. “The burden of sin will crush their souls.”

  I was horrified to hear the vicar’s wife talking like that. Did preachers not always talk about forgiveness and brotherly love, even about loving your enemies? How did that sit with her words? But if I listened to the voice inside me, I could understand her feelings. I too wished the terrorists and everyone close to them nothing but eternal damnation.

  “They will roast in hell,” the woman said firmly. She had rested her plate on her knees. But she showed no sign of eating any of her food. Even though I was very hungry, that gave me pause.

  “Why are you not eating anything?” I asked her.

  She looked at me furiously. “Don’t you know what’s in that soup?”

  I looked at my plate and thought, quite honestly, that the mixture of vegetables, millet and meat—yes, really, meat!—looked very enticing. By my lights it was a proper Sunday dinner. “No,” I had to admit. “What?”

  “That’s human flesh,” she whispered.

  “What??”

  “Psst, not so loud,” she warned me. “Or do you want to eat me for dinner tomorrow?”

  I thought she had gone completely crazy. In camps like this it was easy to lose your mind. But even if her claim was the product of a disturbed mind, I had to admit that it disturbed me too.

  I looked round secretly and saw that many of the other women were fiddling rather listlessly with their plates. Particularly the ones who had been longest in the camp—even though they must have been really hungry. When they thought no one was looking, they secretly poured the broth away or picked out the bits of meat to throw them in the grass. They all seemed to agree.

  “They don’t want to commit a sin,” the vicar’s wife said. “They know it would part them from their God.”

  I still wasn’t sure whether she was fantasizing or not. Quite honestly I hoped she was. Still, I couldn’t choke down a mouthful. When the fighters’ wives went round later checking if we had emptied our plates, mine was still half full. “Come on, eat up!” they ordered.

  Then I began to retch.

  I couldn’t sleep all night. I lay among the other girls uneasily, with an extremely queasy feeling in my stomach. Jara slept on my left, Hannah on my right. I could feel their breath. Luckily it had stopped raining. Still, we had to cuddle up together so that the general dampness and the cold of the night didn’t get too much for us.

  I listened tensely to the noises around the camp, the sounds of animals and people. I was more afraid of the people: every footstep in our direction, every rustle made me start. Because people who ate other people were capable of anything; they had lost their own humanity long ago. In this place I had to be prepared for the worst at all times, I knew that in my belly.

  But nothing happened that night. Eventually tiredness took over and I fell into a half-sleep with disturbing dreams: first my dead mother appeared to me, then my father, who had also been murdered in my imagination. Last of all I saw Ishaku with blood all over his face. Those images left me seriously shaken, because I couldn’t tell whether my mind was just coming up with evil fantasies, or whether what I saw corresponded to something out there in the real world.

  The next morning I felt exhausted when the prayer leader woke us with his singsong chant. First of all we had to join in prayer again. Like everyone else I had slept in my clothes. Of course there was no opportunity to wash in the camp. And no toilet: if you wanted to relieve yourself you had to go behind a tree or do it in front of everybody’s curious gaze. Particularly for us women that was a source of shame, as the men didn’t look away and made lewd remarks as they watched.

  “Come on, show me that fine arse of yours,” a man whispered when I actually thought I was unobserved and crouched down behind a bush. “If I like it I might take you.” He laughed.

  Horrified and confused, I stopped right there and fled back to the group. I soon learned not to get too far away from the others. Otherwise the guards came after us—and you really didn’t want to run into them on your own. So I chose to stay near the other women. If you have no other option, you lose your pride.

  Sometimes events in this place even made us forget our humanity. We felt like animals.

  I discovered that life in the camp was based on a few simple, fundamental rules. They relied on terror, intimidation and constant surveillance on all sides. The different groups held one another in check. The “infidels”—the ones who had originally been Christians and were now supposed to have converted to Islam—occupied the lowest rung in the pecking order. We women and girls were effectively the slaves of the camp and had to do all the lowly jobs: fetching water, collecting wood, keeping the camp clean. We had no rights, and anyone could treat us exactly as they wished.

  There were no infidel men among the prisoners: I assumed that most of them had been killed. Only men who immediately joined the group had any chance of survival.

  The “Muslims”—those who had been Muslims in their earlier life, or who were considered to be converts and now had to prove themselves as new members of the group—were a rung above us. The women in this category had each been assigned to a different Boko Haram fighter as “wife.” They were seldom seen, since according to the strict program of the sect they were entirely devoted to the physical wellbeing of their husbands. In their part of the camp there were a few walls made of plastic sheets to protect them against the eyes of the others when they had to perform their duties.

  The Muslim men who already had some fighting experience were our guards; some of them were very young, perhaps even younger than me. They could earn special laurels for themselves if they treated us very severely. Their cruelties were sometimes breathtaking. When they behaved like that they were probably trying to impress the long-serving members of the sect. On the other hand, if they earned a reputation for treating us too carefully, they themselves risked falling into disfavor.

  The Boko Haram fighters closely observed the behavior of the newcomers in the group and even kept a record of it. Their regime of terror extended into their own ranks: there was no room for fighters with scruples or any kind of inner inhibitions. Only those who took real pleasure in murdering and torturing “infidels” were considered “true” Muslims, and could go on living among them in the long term. All others ended up on a blacklist. A list that could only mean a death sentence.

  So everyone in the camp—from those at the top to those at the very bottom—was acting out of fear, constantly trying to protect their own lives.

  As the lowest group in the hierarchy, it was particularly hard for us girls. That began with the distribution of the equipment available in the camp: everyone apart from us had plastic sheets and blankets to protect themselves against the weather. But at night we slept on the bare ground. And if we fell ill there was no medicine for us. And we only had one meal a day: soup.

  Of course we lived in constant fear of attack from the men. According to their own rules they didn’t have the right to rape us, but in unobserved moments it was bound to happen. No one was repelled if a fighter whose rank was high enough dragged a woman into the field to abuse her. Such behavior went unpunished.

  And if they liked us they could force us to become their “wives.” Because according to their terms that was our actual purpose. And as they all had several wives, there was a constant need for new candidates. Young and beautiful women, of whom I was unfortunately one, were much in demand. It seemed as if they couldn’t get enough of us. Sometimes I even suspected that it was the uncomplicated access to women that drew men to the movement in the first place.

  With the so-called marriage—which according to Boko Haram rules could only take place if the woma
n was considered to be a pious Muslim—one was no longer fair game for everyone, but exposed to the sexual desires of only one man. I saw it as a kind of rapist’s charter. Still, some women saw it as a better choice than unprotected status. I found myself wondering desperately how I could avoid becoming an adulteress just because someone had decided I was to be the wife of another man. I always stayed in the background and tried where possible not to attract any attention to myself. Ideally I would have made myself invisible.

  The nights were the most dangerous time for us. That was why we always slept in a row, pressed tight against one another. As soon as the sun had set no one dared to move so much as a step away from the others. But the ones on the outside still had visits at night. Unfortunately I know that from my own experience.

  The first time I slept in that position, a man suddenly appeared beside me in the middle of the night. I could feel his breath, and his rough hand on my face. He held my mouth closed so that I couldn’t scream. Then he dragged me away from the others.

  I don’t know who he was. I can only remember how he smelled, of male sweat. And that I was terribly afraid of him as he carried me through the darkness.

  He leaned me against a tree and rubbed his dirty body against me. His member was hard. Then he lifted my skirt. My whole body was filled with pain when he forced himself into me from behind. He came after a few short, violent thrusts.

  After that he simply walked away leaving me in the darkness. I ran back to the others and lay down with them again. No one asked me a single question.

  And I felt nothing. I just stared wide-eyed into the dark night.

  By day we were assigned to various tasks around the camp: the same things that were considered to be women’s work in our villages. With two differences: first of all, we weren’t allowed near the cooking pots; and second, we performed our duties under strict surveillance. When we set off to look for firewood, for example, we were always accompanied by one or two more or less low-ranking men. They carried machetes and were responsible for ensuring that we didn’t run away. “If one of you tries, she will be killed on the spot,” they warned us. And I was quite sure that they wouldn’t hesitate to put their threats into action. Anything else would put them in danger themselves.