A Gift from Darkness Read online

  The closer we got to the valley, the more people joined our group; by now I had lost sight of Ishaku and the rest of the family. All the new people had slept somewhere on the mountain and were now, as we were, trying to find a way of escaping. Some of them were able to tell us that Boko Haram had set up checkpoints at this point or that on the road below the mountain, so that we were able to change our route to avoid them. It was a game of chance. According to my calculations we would reach the valley more or less level with Gavva, or a little way south of Ngoshe. There was a lovely farm there with orange trees and a villa where the missionaries had once lived. I only knew it from hearsay. Maybe we would be able to slip through a gap in Boko Haram’s defensive wall somewhere around there.

  When the red roof of the missionary building appeared among the trees and bushes I suddenly stumbled. It was as if I was being held by an invisible hand. At first I thought I had tripped over a branch or got caught in a vine. I tried to free myself with a few frantic movements.

  But I couldn’t do it. And then I saw that lots of people around me were having the same problem. I was very frightened. What was it? It was practically invisible. It was only when I looked very carefully that I could see the fine, transparent meshes.

  “A net!” a man exclaimed next to me. “Look out! They’ve put down a net!”

  But by then it was too late. With my clumsy attempts to get free I had got myself hopelessly entangled.

  I could already hear the wild cheering of the Boko Haram fighters who had been hiding in the bushes and were now running toward us from all directions. Behind me people tried to flee. Ahead of me I saw our men taking out their knives and cutting through the mesh. Some of them managed to escape like that. Others were caught by the fighters.

  I was seized with horror once more as I watched them behead their prisoners on the spot with their machetes. They did it in exactly the same way as the men in Kauri, by making their victims kneel on the ground and then slicing through their necks from behind.

  After a while several male bodies lay on the ground with their heads beside them. But the fighters were seized with a genuine frenzy of violence. They were even licking the blood off their machetes. And some of them tried to catch it and drink it from the bleeding bodies.

  “It’s not us killing you: it’s God,” they cried again and again. They threw the severed heads into the air. “Allah, this is our sacrifice,” they bawled, “please accept it from us!”

  I couldn’t believe what was happening in front of my eyes. These creatures were not human. They had emerged from hell!

  No one came to help me. I couldn’t see Ishaku or the rest of the family anymore. I assumed that they had reached the valley in a spot where no nets had been stretched on the ground—and it would have been suicide to turn round. Perhaps they hadn’t even noticed that I wasn’t with them anymore. At any rate, no one came to free me.

  Gavva 1959–2004

  The curfew from six makes the evenings very long for Renate and me. Once we’ve had a picnic snack there isn’t much to do in our room in the vicarage.

  We spend our time telling each other stories. Having heard so much from Patience, I’m curious about the place where Renate worked as a missionary with her husband around the turn of the millennium. She is happy to answer all my questions.

  Renate was based in Gavva. The village is less than two miles from Ngoshe, Patience’s home village. Both places are on the side of the mountain away from the A13, in the valley known locally as Bayanduze, “behind the mountain.” The name is highly descriptive: until the 1960s, Renate tells me, the tribes there lived more or less in the Stone Age.

  On her laptop she has scans of old pictures, very old ones. She shows me the photograph of a laughing woman with a child tied to her back in a leather sling. Her torso is naked. On her upper arms she wears brightly colored bracelets, and chains around her neck. Her chin and earlobes are decorated with wooden spikes. Around her breasts and the child’s head the sling is decorated with lots of white cowrie shells sewn into the leather. A sign of wealth: these Pacific shells were used as currency here.

  “That was what the people of the Gavva tribe looked like before the missionaries came to the valley,” Renate tells me; she inherited the photograph from Werner Schöni, one of her predecessors.

  The Swiss founder of the mission station reached the Mandara Mountains—also known in the local tongue as “mountains of the spirit-believers”—in 1959 via Cameroon.

  The small tribes who were being hunted and sold as slaves by the emirs had withdrawn to this remote, even hidden region. Unlike the larger and more influential tribes of the Kanuri, the Hausa or the Fulani, they were not Muslim, but followed old African nature religions. The British colonial rulers didn’t get involved in the internal affairs of the north. They had made Lagos and the surrounding area their protectorate in 1862, and then declared it to be their Crown colony; the province became the core of the later protectorate of Southern Nigeria. In the south, where there had been missions since the early nineteenth century, the British exercised direct rule. But in the north they only applied the “indirect rule” that was later applied in other parts of Africa as well: they relied on already existing power structures. In concrete terms that meant that the emirs of the north kept their titles and largely operated autonomously within their own realm, although they could be deposed by the British district officers at any time. They collected taxes for the British and issued their directives. In return, the British accepted that sharia would remain the valid legal system, and restricted the activities of Christian missionaries. In this way the traditional structures of domination were preserved for some decades. So, until Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, the small tribes in the Mandara Mountains were completely untouched by outside influences and attempts at conversion by missionaries. All the tribes there still speak their own language and practice their own version of the old rites.

  According to Renate, you can get a vague idea of how these peoples lived before Christianization, and what they believed in, by visiting Sukur, an ancient cultural landscape only about twelve miles southwest of Gavva, on the same long mountain range. In 1999 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site.

  Their community, like the Guduf tribe, numbers a few thousand people and encompasses several small villages. They are governed from the palace of the chief, the Hidi, which stands on a hill. The fields are arranged in terraces. There are many sacred objects and little shrines that have been cared for by certain families for centuries; they are the spirits of the ancestors, which the people there worship. In certain places on the hills the people also pray to natural gods: Piss, the sun god, Sakur-yum, the rain god, Maila, the god of stars, and Shigal, the guider of worlds. They make sacrifices to them and dance to the rhythm of the drummers for them, just as their forefathers did.

  Renate tells me that the people of the Gavva tribe used to live in a similar way.

  “Yazhigilmara means ‘God’ in their language. Bocha is the name of the father of their tribe, the mystical primal ancestor who lives high on the mountain and actually wanted to leave his fortune, the farm and the fields, to his oldest son, Yaghwatada. But through a piece of trickery, his younger brother Gudulf took everything—and from now on Yaghwatada’s sons had to live further down the mountain—in Yaghwatatdacha or Gavva, as foreigners call the ‘area that runs along the high mountain.’”

  Renate speaks the foreign names without hesitation, and it sounds beautiful as she tells me the history of the area. I lean against the wall and close my eyes as I go on listening to her.

  “Among the Guduf people, every family had a Tlala, a small shrine in which the ancestors were worshipped in the belief that they had gone down to the Faya: a huge city of the dead in the underworld. In the ancestors’ hut the family also kept their treasures, such as spears, bows and arrows, iron points or cowrie shells. Communication with the ancestors represented an important part of the spiritual life. It was the res
ponsibility of the oldest son of a family, and he also had to make sure that the dead were always kept supplied with food in the afterlife. At least once a year they also demanded their festive meal of millet porridge, goat’s meat and beer. And woe to them who had only had daughters, who could not assume these duties.”

  “Could women not perform the rites if there were no male successors?” I ask.

  “No,” Renate explains. “A man without male heirs would inevitably fall into oblivion after his death. And everything he had built up in his life would decay.”

  What a long history contempt for women has, I think sadly as Renate goes on with her story.

  “Missionary Schöni, who lived for a time with the Guduf people in the mountains, studied all these practices and also learned the language of the tribe. Then he asked their chief for permission to settle in the valley. The chief declared his agreement, but assigned him a piece of land on which the tribes usually fought their feuds: a blood-drenched piece of ground. According to the old beliefs, the spirits of the dead got up to mischief there, and no local person had ever built on that land. That the Swiss missionary built his house there anyway, and seemed to be immune to the spirits, made a great impression on many of the tribespeople,” Renate explains to me.

  “And it doubtless made them curious about his religion as well: his god, who must clearly be very powerful,” I agree, and can’t help admiring the missionary for his strategy.

  “Yes, Schöni achieved a lot: he and his helpers didn’t just convince the mountain people of the power of Jesus Christ, but also persuaded them to give up their old life in the mountains. Up there the traditional believers were chiefly afraid of the Muslim tribes. On the other hand, down in the valley the earth was much more fertile. So moving meant better harvests and a more comfortable life—but also less protection against attacks from other tribes, which had previously made people hesitant about taking that step.

  “But the Europeans had an answer to that: the same Lord Jesus, to whom the mountain people now prayed, would protect them in future, they promised. It sounded almost too good to be true. But either way, it did seem to benefit the mountain-dwellers.

  “So the people of the Guduf tribe moved to the valley, they took Bible classes and built a church on the instructions of the missionaries. Soon they also followed their advice to put on clothes. Their private parts had to be covered, after all.

  “Look at this.” Renate flips her laptop open again and shows me more photographs. I see the first eight members of the Guduf tribe to be baptised standing in a tub of water in front of the mission station. They are all young men, including the son of the woman with the sling decorated with cowrie shells. The congregation stands around watching what is happening: about half of them are bare-chested or have their legs uncovered, while the other half are already dressed “decently.” Schöni himself wears short trousers. Apparently the influence was reciprocal, Renate giggles: “It happens to the best of us.”

  By the time she herself came to Gavva in 1999, most of the inhabitants had converted to Christianity long before. Renate still clearly remembers driving into the village for the first time, along a sandy track, and all the little houses and the people cooking and eating outside them, among chickens, goats and sheep. “I felt as if I was driving right through their sitting room,” she tells me.

  In the forty years since Schöni’s first contact with the Guduf a lot of things had happened. The life of the tribe had changed completely. The valley, which people had previously avoided, was now densely populated. The missionaries had helped them to plant orange trees and set up irrigation systems. They had also founded a medical station. Development money from Switzerland, which had been particularly abundant in the early years, allowed the area around the mission station to prosper.

  But Renate was especially impressed by the spirituality of the young congregation. “The people of Gavva had adopted the new religion with a great deal of idealism,” she tells me. “I have never met such enthusiastic Christians as I have here.” After the harvest thanksgiving that I witnessed, it isn’t hard for me to believe that.

  By way of welcome the village community performed an old rain-making song, in which the men danced stamping around in a circle. It worked promptly. “The rain came only half an hour after the men had finished their dance,” she tells me, not without a certain respect.

  “Were they Christians?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s not a contradiction in Africa.”

  Unlike her predecessors, Renate didn’t do classical Christian missionary work. She didn’t need to, because it happened of its own accord—via the church itself: any congregation that wanted to be accepted by the synod needed to show at least one hundred baptised members, who give a tenth of their income to the running of the church. Apart from the construction of a church building and the appointment of a vicar, their duties included setting up preaching stations in at least three other places where there were not yet any Christians, and doing missionary work there. In this way the influence of the EYN church was able to expand—without the addition of Western missionaries—further and further around the region.

  So Renate focused on continuing the development work. She was chiefly concerned with the education of women, among whom the illiteracy rate is particularly high: ninety percent of the women in the villages can neither read nor write. “I thought it was important to put them in a position whereby they could at least read the passages from the Bible unaided.”

  To bring education to small communities and remote villages, she invited a deputy to come to Gavva: he or she would be given a two-week crash course as a teacher. Then they were sent back and the education began. It could only happen during the rainy season, when the women didn’t have to work in the fields. For the first two years reading and writing were on the timetable, and maths and religious studies would follow later. But for many women who hadn’t gone to school as children, even learning the letters was a real challenge.

  “They had problems recognizing geometrical figures,” Renate recalls, “such as the difference between a rectangle and a circle.” So the teachers spent days drawing circles in the sand—the letter “O.” Recognizing the length of lines, one of the key qualifications required for reading, was equally alien to the women. They practiced by collecting sticks of different lengths. “If you have worked all your life in the field, your eye must get used to these things.”

  In the five years that she spent in Gavva, Renate founded around a hundred little schools in the nearby and more remote villages—work that she remains proud of. The progress and improvement in living conditions were quite tangibly apparent to her. “You can do so much with so little; Gavva was in a very good way at the time,” she says. Her voice sounds melancholy. “It was a wonderful patch of ground. I felt great there—and also safe.”

  She tells me about the mission house and her garden with the old orange trees and all the flowers that grew there. Particularly in the evening, when it became a little cooler, their blossoms had the most wonderful fragrance. “The old people warned us: they knew that this place was a battlefield.” She reflects. “But I couldn’t have imagined such a positive development turning into its opposite…”

  I feel a horrible suspicion creeping over me when I hear her talking like that. I almost hesitate to express it, but then I summon the courage. “If you hadn’t converted the people to Christianity, they mightn’t have so many problems now,” I dare to say at last.

  Renate looks at me despondently. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, because then they would still be up in the mountains—and Boko Haram would probably have left them in peace.”

  “I hardly believe that,” she says. “Boko Haram don’t just kill Christians, they kill people of all other faiths.” She explains to me that the radical Islamists hate the worshippers of the natural religions even more than members of the so-called religions of the book, which according to the Qur’an include not only Musl
ims but also Christians and Jews. “Just look at what happened to the people of Sukur. Did staying in their mountains do them any good? No!”

  “What did they do to them?” I ask nervously.

  “They shot them down and destroyed their sacred objects—just as they did in Gavva, Ngoshe and Gwoza. Hundreds of men were killed, and a third of their people are supposed to have been abducted.”

  I am very quiet, I didn’t know that. “I wasn’t trying to say you missionaries are to blame,” I say in a small voice. It sounds like an excuse.

  “And we aren’t. If a group of murderers decides to commit a crime, no one but those murderers is to blame.”

  “No, of course not,” I agree straightaway.

  “No one could have predicted that,” Renate goes on. “Even my husband and I didn’t notice what was brewing.”

  At that time violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims were only taking place in Jos, a town right on the unofficial border between the Muslim north and the Christian south. A lot of churches are based there—and the very Christian lobby annoyed the radical Islamists. Armed clashes often broke out there.

  But in the province it had always been peaceful in her day, Renate assures me. Apart from a few petty jealousies there had been hardly any animosities between Christian and Muslim inhabitants. “It just wasn’t an issue between people. One was Christian, another Muslim—end of story. At Christmas and at the end of Ramadan they wished each other a happy festival.”

  Gavva 2015

  “That’ll teach you to accept the white man’s religion,” said the men as they drove us towards Gavva. They had only killed the men. They took the women and children prisoner. “So where’s your white god now?” they asked. “Why isn’t he protecting you?”

  I was in a state of both shock and despair. It couldn’t be, I kept thinking: after only one day of freedom, here I was in captivity again. Could the world really be so horrible? There must have been a terrible mistake.