A Gift from Darkness Read online

  I could have guessed how great the danger was when I listened to the vicar’s wife on that first night. But even though I was frightened by her words they didn’t conjure any precise images. I hadn’t yet seen the cruelties in the camp with my own eyes.

  That would change the first time a Boko Haram fighter became an outcast. It happened out of nowhere, within a matter of minutes.

  I don’t know exactly how high-ranking the man was—to me he looked like a very ordinary fighter, who hadn’t joined the group yesterday. But clearly he had been on the hit list for a long time. It only took a small sign from the commander, that man we had been taken to see on the first day, and a dozen Boko Haram fighters fell on him.

  They dragged him to the ground and took his weapons from him, both his gun and his machete. The man apparently knew what he was in for, but he still whined for mercy. “Take pity on me. I’m one of you,” he pleaded. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Shut up,” the commander said harshly. “You are a traitor!”

  The leader was barely recognizable: his facial expression was like that of a beast of prey. Even though his rage was not directed at me I was terrified of him. A man who looked as brutal as that was capable of anything. “We’ve been looking very closely at what you do,” he told him. “All the men here are witnesses: when we were killing Christians, you deliberately missed.”

  “No! I swear to almighty God that it isn’t so,” the man cried, lying on the ground. But the fighters brought their boots down on his back and pressed his face and torso into the ground.

  He was a pitiful sight. At first I was surprised that the men could be so brazen as to resolve their internal conflicts in front of their prisoners. But then I realized that the whole thing was entirely deliberate.

  “This is what happens to traitors,” the commander said in a loud voice, as if he wanted every single prisoner and every single fighter in his troop to watch. They came flowing in to observe the spectacle from every corner of the camp. “All of you, take a good look at how we deal with traitors!”

  I sensed that worse was to come. Along with some other girls I stood about ten or fifteen yards away from the man lying on the ground. I would have run away if I could. But I was so frightened of everything that was going on around me that I couldn’t bring myself to move from the spot.

  I watched as if spellbound as the commander drew his machete from its sheath and raised it into the air. Now it was just above the neck of the man lying on the ground. No! I cried inwardly. You can’t do it! Don’t do it!

  That terrible injustice. The worst thing about it was that you just had to put up with it. I, and all the other figures who had once been human beings, children of God, stood mutely around and watched as another human being was slaughtered. And there was nothing we could do but feel soiled and guilty. But the butchers robbed us of our souls as they made us their accomplices.

  The machete came down. It sliced through the muscles at the back of the man’s neck and severed his throat. The blood spurted. The head rolled to one side.

  “Allahu Akbar,” the men cried. They kicked the dead man’s head with their boots, and went generally berserk. Apparently with joy because their boss had removed a traitor from their ranks. But perhaps also because they themselves hadn’t been the victims. They were in a state of extreme excitement. And the more they feared that they might be the ones lying on the ground next time, the louder they cried: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

  As if through a veil I saw some fighters dragging the man’s body away. They brought it to the kitchens. Really. Then they stripped it and hacked it into pieces. Meanwhile the fighters’ wives in their black veils prepared a fire.

  I looked away in horror. Now I had no doubt that the vicar’s wife had told the truth.

  The women who now belonged to Boko Haram made no secret of what they were serving us that evening. “The blood of traitors makes us even stronger,” they said as they filled our plates with soup.

  But I couldn’t eat a thing. As soon as I even smelled the soup I began to retch, and threw up shortly afterward. Like the other girls, I tried to make most of our macabre meal disappear as furtively as possible. But I had to be careful that they didn’t catch me, because I knew what they did to renegades. So I had no false hopes where that was concerned.

  That was how things were, evening after evening. Because what I had observed had not been an exception. So-called renegades were slaughtered with horrific regularity in the camp at Kauri. Sometimes they were Boko Haram members who had fallen into disfavor, sometimes they were prisoners or men who had converted to Islam and were accused of betrayal. It always happened in the same way, and was almost like a ritual: the victims were laid in front of the assembled crowd, and then their heads were chopped off. During my time at the camp I witnessed eight such executions. And all the dead were chopped up and cooked, and at least parts of them were eaten in soup.

  I very quickly lost a lot of weight, even though I was pregnant. But I preferred to starve rather than eat another human being. I couldn’t carry that level of guilt. If I had eaten that meat, it would have poisoned the soul of my unborn child.

  On our trips to the river, or to collect firewood, I tried to make up for my lack of food by plucking wild plants and—usually as I passed by—putting them in my mouth. I ate the leaves of the moringa tree and the bright red blossoms of the yakuha tree, from which we usually made tea. Both contain many of the nutrients that my body was crying out for. Sometimes I also picked wild alehu leaves, which taste like spinach and should really be cooked. And if I was very lucky I even found a few okra, which I shared with other hungry girls.

  By day, when we wandered around the surrounding area, we were not so closely observed as we were in the camp, even though, of course, we were never unaccompanied. On many occasions I fantasized about running away on one of these outings. But when I told Jara and Hannah what I was considering, they looked at me with such horror that I too lost heart. My friends were right: if we tried to get away and they caught us, they would kill us. There was no doubt about it. Were there no other possibilities?

  If we waited until one of the fighters “married” us, our fate would be sealed anyway: my child would be born and grow up as the son or daughter of a murderer. And I would have no chance of a normal life. Even if I managed to escape I would have no future. My family, the people I loved, would inevitably reject me as a Boko Haram wife.

  It was an impossible choice. Day and night I racked my brains to think of the best possible course of action. I wasn’t afraid of my own death. I was a child of God and Jesus would open the doors to his kingdom to me if I died. I was sure of that. As long as I kept to the straight and narrow, at any rate. So the important thing was to keep sin far away. For that very reason I felt guilty when I considered the possibility of flight. I was also responsible for the child in my belly. Our lives were bound together. And if I destroyed my life, I would destroy my child’s life as well. I would become the murderer of the life I carried within me.

  The best days for us were the ones when the Boko Haram fighters weren’t in the camp. Sometimes during the day they drove around the area. They generally attacked other Christian villages, robbed them and killed all their male inhabitants. Then at night, intoxicated with the blood of their victims and their own violence, they would come back to the camp. Often they brought booty with them, fresh food, medicine, pots and pans, blankets, tarpaulins to protect them against the rain, kidnapped women.

  When the new women joined us in the camp I felt terribly sorry for them. I saw their big, fearful eyes. They were silently asking us, the ones who were already here, what to expect. I wished I could say something to comfort them. But with the best will in the world I couldn’t think of anything. Everything that I had had to see here in the past few days—or had it been longer?—showed me that the men who were keeping us prisoner here had lost all human sympathy and any normal human emotions. They behaved like monsters—and
they were monsters. No, there was no consolation: the women had ended up in a terrible place.

  Like us, the newcomers were subjected to careful questioning. The fighters wanted to hear them declare their conversion to Islam, as they had exhorted us to do in Ashigashiya. They pressed their machetes to the new arrivals” necks and forced them to utter the Arabic formulas. Trembling with fear, the women would gabble something incomprehensible that sounded a bit like what they had been told to repeat.

  I noticed that one of them had a slightly swollen belly. I secretly observed her. Was she pregnant too? Perhaps because of my own condition I was particularly alert to the possibility. So now I would have a fellow sufferer in the camp.

  But clearly I wasn’t the only sharp-eyed person there. “Hey, you,” I heard one of the fighters say to her. He was staring at her belly just as I had done. “Are you pregnant?”

  “No,” the woman said spontaneously, “I’m not pregnant.” She held her hands over her belly as if to protect herself. It was a helpless gesture, but also one that gave the game away.

  “Yes, you are! You’re pregnant!” the man insisted. He pulled her hand from her belly. And now everyone else stared at it too. It clearly was a baby-belly. Now that the words had been uttered there was no doubt about it.

  “Lie down!” ordered the most senior of the men. He was young, but very brutal looking. Even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty he was already missing a few teeth.

  The woman resisted. She knew instinctively that she mustn’t do it. “Down on the ground, get a move on,” he yelled. “We don’t bring any Christian babies into the world here.”

  His inferiors grabbed her by the arms and dragged her to the ground. My heart was pounding as I watched them. This was impossible, I thought, the woman was pregnant! She needed protection! All ethnic groups respected that. But these men ignored that unwritten rule. What were they trying to do to this poor defenseless woman?

  After the men had laid her down in the grass, the brutal young man walked over to her. He knelt down and lifted her blouse so that her belly and her breasts were visible. Then he stood up again and drew his machete from its sheath. I wanted to keep my eyes closed, but I couldn’t. I watched him running that great knife along her belly as if taking measurements. “All Christian children must die,” he said. “Allahu Akbar!”

  “Allahu Akbar!” cried his men.

  Then the man slit the woman’s belly open. He pulled the unborn child from her innards and threw it into the field behind him.

  “Allahu Akbar!” the crowd yelled.

  They left the woman who would never be a mother bleeding in the grass.

  The demons of memory

  Patience has reached an uncomfortable point in her story. I notice that she is losing concentration, and that her descriptions are becoming more and more confused. Often she gazes vaguely into the distance and seems as if she has drifted into another world.

  It is the world of horror, which she doesn’t really want to think about. She had buried away the terrible things that happened in the Boko Haram camp deep inside her. But now that she is telling me what happened, those events are assuming new life: the demons of the past are coming after her.

  “The rest is really unimportant,” she sometimes says.

  “No, it’s all important,” I say. “Nothing that they did to you and the other women should be forgotten.”

  Patience nods. Still, she becomes increasingly tense and laconic. Even the baby in her arms notices that; Gift begins to cough and wail much more often than she did at the start of our interview. She is protesting against the unease that she perceives in her mother.

  And her mother understands her protest: she would probably like to wail herself. But instead she regains her composure; she has been taught to keep her feelings to herself. Her crying child also gives her an excuse to interrupt the interview. She walks back and forth with Gift in the yard in front of the church. Patience needs these breaks. It gives her a chance to catch her breath and, for a moment, to escape the acts of cruelty that she is laying out before me.

  But her stories are leaving their mark on me as well. Particularly at night, when I lie on the mattress next to Renate, my thoughts are uneasy. Again and again I find myself imagining the scenes that Patience was telling me about only a few hours before. I can’t grasp the horror that is still being played out only a few miles away from me. I am especially troubled by her most recent report. Is it really possible that there was cannibalism in the Boko Haram camp? I wonder. Were the members of the sect truly capable of such monstrosity? Or is it Patience’s trauma that makes her claim these things? The description of the killings, and of the consumption of human flesh, are a central element of her story. She has mentioned them several times. It seems very important to her that I should know about it.

  Because the subject won’t leave me in peace, I try to find other eyewitnesses. Several women confirm to me that they saw Boko Haram members drinking the blood of their enemies. I hear several times that they also mutilated the corpses, removing their hearts, for example. But no one apart from Patience mentions body parts being turned into soup. Among my interviewees, however, she is also the only one who experienced conditions in the Kauri camp in person. And I manage to discover that the vicar’s wife she quotes as a witness actually exists: Rebecca finds her name in the parish register of the EYN church. No one knows if she’s still alive, or where. So I go on wondering. And once I manage to fall asleep at last, I dream of the horror that Patience has set out before me.

  The next day I feel completely exhausted. As always I sit down on the bench under the neem tree and wait for Patience. We have not agreed a precise time for our meetings, I’ve got used to her just turning up eventually. This morning I wait in vain.

  What’s up? I wonder. Is Patience ill? I ask Rebecca if she’s heard anything about her. She has the number of a deacon who works in the church where Patience is living. But no one answers. I don’t know what to do, and spend the day waiting.

  When Rebecca manages to get Patience on the phone that afternoon, she tells me that she’s been in the hospital with her child. “What’s happened?” I ask, shocked.

  “She says the coughing got worse during the night,” Rebecca translates. “She’s been given medicine for Gift.”

  “And is she getting better?”

  “A bit.”

  “Will she come again tomorrow?”

  Rebecca nods. “Yes, if the child is well.”

  “Get better!” I say.

  The next morning Patience again leaves me sitting alone under our tree. Eventually Asabe, our translator, arrives. Neither of us knows what to do. “She’s not going to give up, is she?” I ask Asabe.

  “Perhaps she’s gone to hospital with the child again.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” I say. But I suspect something else: I think that the interviews have simply got to be too much for Patience. I know that they’re hard for her. And that’s probably why she’s withdrawn.

  I’ve had this experience with several traumatized interviewees before. It was much the same with Farida Khalaf, the member of the Yazidi minority community that was persecuted in Iraq who told me about her time as a prisoner of ISIS: eventually, when the memories become too painful for them the victims of violence find themselves, consciously or unconsciously, unable to continue the conversation. They provoke interruptions, they look for excuses not to go on talking.

  Each time that plunges me into a moral dilemma. Of course I would like them to go on telling their stories. But can I force them to do so? “Should we ask Rebecca to phone the deacon again?” Asabe asks me.

  “No,” I say spontaneously. My experience has shown me that there’s no point in contacting Patience by telephone again and trying to persuade her. It would only intensify her resistance. I need to give her time. Then perhaps she’ll come round of her own accord.

  Only two things help in this situation: a lot of patience, and a lot of empathy on my p
art.

  So I let another day go by, to let Patience recover a little. When she still doesn’t show up on the third day, I make a decision: to violent protests from the guard, and without saying anything else to the others, I leave the church compound and trudge off to the place where Patience has always gone in the evening after our conversations. I just need to speak to her in person, to look into her eyes so that she will trust me again.

  Patience has told me that she has taken refuge in a little Catholic church nearby. It can’t be far away, I think—and ask the first passerby I come across if they know the way. I’m only vaguely aware that I am myself guilty of behavior Renate told me I mustn’t engage in. Trust in God seems to be infectious in Africa.

  For people in the street I am the attraction. A blond European, out and about on her own, isn’t something you see around here every day. I get a friendly greeting from everyone. “Sanu!—hello, how are you?” they call to me.

  “Lafia—all fine,” I reply, as Renate has taught me. Every traveler to Nigeria needs to know at least those two phrases, she insisted—and as always she was right. People are delighted when I can answer them in their own language.

  When I ask them, in English this time, the way to the church, they are overjoyed. I get a thousand different answers—and offers to come with me. It isn’t easy to explain to them that I’d rather go on my own. After all, I don’t want to be unfriendly.

  The church isn’t as close as I thought. It’s about a mile away from ours, but I have to take several turnings and change my direction slightly. I anxiously wonder how I’m going to find my way back: to my untutored eyes everything looks more or less the same. The roads are unpaved, dusty and scattered with rubbish, with a particularly large number of plastic bags lying around. On either side there are corrugated iron huts, one or two stories high, with their residents sitting outside. Many people have their workshops or little stalls in the street. There are no landmarks that would help you find your bearings.