A Gift from Darkness Read online

  “My God, why are you doing this to me?” I whispered—and was startled to realize that I was asking almost the same question as the men. Was I allowed to reproach him? I couldn’t help it. After believing that I’d survived everything, I was bitterly disappointed.

  As I already had some experience of captivity and knew what to expect from my tormentors, I desperately looked for a chance to escape the column. But the men, probably about two dozen of them, surrounded us on all sides. “If any of you try to escape, the same thing will happen to you as happened to the men,” they threatened.

  One did try. She was a young woman who had sat in the cave with us in the evening. She pulled away from her guards and ran into the thicket. But she only got a few yards. One of the men shot her from behind. He hammered a great salvo of bullets into her back from his machine gun. She collapsed and lay motionless on the ground. They left her body there. “The vultures can have her,” they sneered. “Any more of you fancy a try?”

  They brought us to Gavva. The town consists of three settlements, Gavva-I, Gavva-II and Gavva-III, which run along the slope. Members of the Guduf tribe live in all three settlements; the members of the group used to live further up the mountain.

  The former mission station was in Gavva-II, and thus in between the two other settlements. There were also several churches here, two schools and even a Christian cemetery. Much of this had been built by the whites, who had worked here until a few years ago. They had ensured that the place was in a reasonably good economic state, which was why all the other villages had been a little envious of Gavva, including the people in my home town of Ngoshe.

  When our march took us past the property of the missionaries, I cast a curious eye over the garden, which lay behind a big iron gate that bore the inscription EYN LITERACY PROGRAMME. No one had so far taken the trouble to remove the sign. The garden was almost a forest, there were so many tall trees. Bright, ripe oranges hung from some of the trees, and Boko Haram fighters were camped among them. Right at the back, at the end of the drive, I could see the missionary house. The old villa shimmered white in the middle of a sea of magenta bougainvillea blossoms. Only at second glance did I see the traces of soot on the façade. There had clearly been attempts to destroy the building before the commanders decided to use it as a place to live. The old swimming pool was no longer filled with water, but was being used as a rubbish dump.

  The whole place was a curious mix of past and present; in the interplay between the two the leftovers from better times and the raw violence of war looked rather strange. For me the occupied missionary estate was a symbol of the decline of a flourishing town. Nothing would remain of the former glory and affluence of Gavva after the arrival of this gang, I knew. It made me sad to see it.

  We passed the cemetery. Again I caught my breath. The holy warriors had raged here too, and in a way that is incomprehensible in our culture. All the crosses had been taken down, the graves desecrated, leaving only gaping holes. The bones of the dead lay scattered everywhere.

  What an incredible act of blasphemy! I shuddered at the sight of it. How could they dare to disturb the rest of the dead? Weren’t they afraid of the consequences? After all, everyone knew that the spirits of the ancestors could become very angry. Would they now haunt the place? Would their rage be directed at the living?

  I felt very sorry for the people of Gavva, for what had been done to them. I hoped their ancestors understood that there was nothing they could do. Because the desecration of those graves was not their doing. Certainly their descendants had the duty to protect and honor the resting places of their ancestors. But what were you to do if a horde of murderers attacked the village? Nothing at all? You were simply at their mercy! I hoped that the villagers wouldn’t be exposed to the anger of the ancestors forever.

  The other prisoners were open-mouthed as well. They turned away in horror when they understood the monstrosity of the deed. I think the Boko Haram fighters brought us here deliberately: they wanted us to see their crimes. They were showing us that they had no scruples or respect for our Christian faith, or indeed our traditional beliefs, that they did not fear our God. Because would he not have held them to account long ago if he was really so powerful? In their eyes the desecrated graves were the best proof that he didn’t exist.

  “Lord, let them regret this crime,” I whispered.

  Then they led us further toward Gavva, which was once, as I have said, a well-presented village. Here too some of the people still lived in the traditional round mud huts. But some had rectangular houses made of stone with corrugated iron roofs that kept the rain off. Some huts even had electricity and running water.

  Normally there are lots of things going on in our streets. Children flit back and forth between the farms, street-sellers praise their wares and the women of the village chat as they shop, while the old people sit outside their huts and observe what is going on. But today it was deadly silent. There was no one about. In many places the settlement looked properly orphaned. In others, it seemed we could hear voices behind the walls—as if there were still people there. That struck me as strange. Had some families barricaded themselves inside their farms? Or did the fighters live there? At first I didn’t understand how Boko Haram had reorganized life in Gavva.

  They brought us to a walled compound. A man guarded its entrance. When he saw us coming, he greeted the other fighters and let us through.

  We stepped into the spacious courtyard, which contained several round huts. The large enclosure must once have belonged to a rich or at least a large family. But now the whole courtyard was full of women, all veiled in the Islamic style, showing as little skin as possible. They were of every age: elderly, young, a lot of children. But only girls.

  “This is your new home,” they said to us. “You will live here until we have turned you into respectable Muslim women.”

  “What do you get out of this?” one of them asked.

  “You’ll find out sooner or later,” a man replied.

  “Once we’ve converted you, we’ll distribute you among the fighters,” another blurted out.

  Some women protested loudly and pointed out that they were already married. But I said nothing. I knew that didn’t matter to them. “Your husbands are dead,” they said. “Didn’t you see us cut their throats? So be glad if you end up with one of us.”

  They began by weeding out the boys from the group. “You come with us,” they said to them. “Or do you want to stay with the women?”

  The boys looked nervously at their mothers. Some of them shook their heads, others went to the men of their own free will because they thought it was an accolade of some kind.

  “You’re not taking my child,” one woman called, and held back her son, a boy of about eight, when he was about to march off.

  “Oh yes, we are,” the men said and pulled him away from her. The boy looked rather confused. “After all, he isn’t a girl.”

  Another woman who had an even smaller boy with her struggled to hide him under her skirt. We stood in front of her so that the men wouldn’t notice. But the child was too curious, and peered out from under her clothes.

  “Come out of there,” a man said when he saw him. The frightened boy obeyed. His mother began to cry.

  “But he’s only five years old,” she said, “he’s far too little to be without me!”

  “Nonsense, he is the perfect age,” snapped the Boko Haram people. “We will make a real man and a warrior out of him.”

  No amount of protest by the women helped: they took their sons away. The boys who didn’t go of their own accord were violently dragged from their mothers. They even pulled male babies out of their mothers’ arms. But they killed the babies with machetes, right there in front of us. I don’t know what their plans were for the older boys. Perhaps they wanted to train them to be fighters. But only we women and girls were left behind in the compound, the mothers among us almost insane with grief, the rest of us frozen with shock.

 
I was in total despair. After the men had left us alone, I crouched down in my corner and wept. I simply couldn’t grasp what a mean trick fate had played with me again in the past few hours. What had gone so terribly wrong that I found myself in such a terrible position?

  I felt as if I had been through all this before. Essentially what was happening here in Gavva was like what I had already experienced in the Kauri camp.

  The hell that I had so recently escaped had very quickly caught up with me again. At the beginning of my time in Gavva I simply couldn’t accept it. I crept away inside myself and acted as if the outside world didn’t even exist. Perhaps these figures were only products of my imagination, or perhaps I’d been put under a spell. Was that why my family had left me behind?

  I sat there in silence and watched what was going on around me. Life in the Gavva camp—because these three settlements could hardly be described as a village—was more strictly organized than our everyday life in Kauri, which had looked different every day. Our daily jobs and tasks had varied greatly according to the raids undertaken by the fighters, the mood of the commander and the weather.

  In Gavva it was quite different. There was a very strictly regulated timetable: at five in the morning the fighters woke us with the call of the muezzin, and we had to go to first prayer. Then we had our morning wash. The fact that only women lived in the huts in our unit made that a great deal easier: at least we were able to perform our bodily functions in private.

  At daybreak we went to the primary school along with a group of guards, some of them boys. The school was at the other end of the elongated village. It took almost an hour to get there. We marched past fields and farms, which were either empty or occupied by Boko Haram people and their wives. According to the women all the Muslims in the village had joined the movement, which also meant that they were able to keep their property.

  Once, when we were crossing the fields, I saw a group of men engaged in weeding—all of them gaunt and tattered figures. Who on earth were they, I wondered. At any rate they weren’t fighters or members of the organization. And then I noticed that some of the women around me were glancing around at them. “Yousef!” one woman suddenly cried and waved like mad until one of the guards struck her with his gun. Then I understood: these men were the Christian former inhabitants of Gavva. I later discovered that they were kept prisoner in a school in another part of the village.

  I was honestly surprised to see that they were alive. Normally the fighters made short work of men of other faiths. But apparently they were able to use these men as slaves for the harvest. The fact that they were allowed to work on the farm was very different from the way things had been before: it might have represented an attempt by the group to become settled and no longer to live on plundering raids. Were there sometimes simply not enough Christian villages for the fighters to loot, because their own empire had become too big?

  Increasingly I had the impression that Boko Haram had turned my home into an enormous prison camp. The boys were being trained as fighters, the men were slaves in the field, and we women and children…well…they probably expected us to be sexually available for them. And in the meantime they were trying to convert us to Islam, to make us into compliant wives for them. What madness!

  I also thought of my family. Were my father, my uncle and my brothers in Ngoshe now living out their lives as slave laborers, as these men were doing? Were they still alive at all? And Ishaku? What had happened to my husband? Had he and Lara made it to Cameroon, or had they also been taken prisoner? Perhaps, I dreamed, I would one day find myself in the same position as the woman who had happened to see her husband in the field.

  Then we reached the school, a plain stone building with two classrooms. On the white outside wall the fighters had painted Arabic characters, which I couldn’t read, even though I had learned them in school, because that’s how Hausa is written. As I approached them I couldn’t help but shudder: the letters were made of dried blood. “It is the blood of a takfir, an infidel,” they told us. “He deserved only death. God himself killed him through our hand.”

  “Yes, God gave us this task,” agreed their imam, who had a long beard and a turban, which made him look like a real Arabic scholar. “He demands that we make you all into Muslims. Those who do not become good Muslims must die.”

  In broad brushstrokes he had been outlining the program for the education that was to come: it was designed to familiarize us with their religion, as part of the conversion process.

  Generally the imam first read to us from the Qur’an, in the Arabic language. Half asleep, we listened to the incomprehensible singsong. Then he gave us a summary of what he had said to us. And after that we spent a lot of time repeating individual sentences as a chorus. His goal was to make us learn as much of the text by heart as possible.

  This man was a genuine fanatic. He endlessly ran through the suras with us. He seemed completely obsessed with his mission to persuade us of the foundations of his faith. If one of us made a mistake she immediately received a sharp rap with a stick on her knuckles or her back—particularly toward the end of the lesson, when our attention wandered because of the heat. Quite honestly we weren’t very surprised by this, because even at normal state schools in Nigeria being beaten is part of the education process.

  Through the interpretations of the text that he gave us, I learned a lot about the worldview of Boko Haram. “Muhammad was a very wise man,” he said, for example. “But he was not just a preacher. He created a perfect state according to the law of God. Under his rule there was no criminality and no injustice. Because he ensured that everyone stuck closely to the rules. Adulterers were stoned, thieves had their hands chopped off.”

  Then he looked around to check that we were all paying attention. If he had a feeling that one of the women was daydreaming, he asked her, “What happens to thieves?”

  “They have their hands chopped off,” she would answer if she didn’t want to be beaten.

  “Exactly. And that is the ideal that we ourselves pursue,” he continued immediately. “We will tolerate no one who disregards the laws of God. What do we do with the enemies of God, the unbelievers and those who fall from the faith and turn against us?”

  “We cut their throat,” we answered in chorus. “We must finish God’s work. So he commands it.”

  We spent the whole day on lessons of that kind. At midday we took a break, but then it continued, again for several hours. It was only in the late afternoon that we were escorted back to our prison by our guards.

  Several times I saw women trying to escape on these walks. But they were quickly captured and beaten, and sometimes they fired at them. At first I was shocked by the cruelty with which they punished all escape attempts, again and again. But eventually I almost got used to it. The continual sight of violence left me desensitized: I didn’t expect anything else.

  When we returned to our quarters at last we were very tired. We didn’t have to fetch our water in Gavva, because the men wanted to stop us walking about in the street. The boys fetched the water for us. But we cooked the food that they provided for us. Usually they gave us some millet, sometimes some okra or potatoes. It was never enough for more than one meal a day. Still, I was glad that they let us prepare our own meals here. I can’t say if they held the same funeral parties that I had observed in the Kauri camp. As we lived separately from the men, I found out less about their rituals.

  But our evenings in Gavva were still not free of anxiety, let alone relaxed. Quite the contrary: it was at that time of day that the fighters turned up looking for women to marry.

  I still remember the first time: at dusk, when we were all gathered in the courtyard, three men suddenly came to our compound. One of them was very young, perhaps seventeen or eighteen. The others looked older, perhaps in their mid-twenties. They were wearing typical dress: a head-covering and a Salafist beard. One of the two older ones was even wearing a turban, and his beard was a bit longer than most, which made
me conclude that he was one of their preachers. And of course they were all armed with guns or machetes.

  The women cowered in a corner when they saw the men coming through the gate. The ones who had been here longer than I had knew exactly what would happen next. And it wasn’t good.

  “On your feet!” the men ordered. “We want to take a close look at you.” They made no secret of their plans. I tried not to enter their field of vision and went and stood inconspicuously at the side. Some of the younger girls hid in the same way. But they were the ones the men were interested in. “Hey, don’t do that,” they shouted. “Come forward!”

  They dragged a girl of about twelve out from behind her mother. The girl was shaking from head to foot. “You’re the one I want,” the eighteen-year-old announced, “you are to be my wife.”

  The young girl didn’t say anything and stared at the ground. But her mother could control herself no longer. “You should be ashamed!” she shouted at the young man. “She’s not even a woman yet and you know that! But you’ve had your eye on her before, haven’t you? You were creeping around our house all last year.”

  “Shut up!” he roared and struck her in the face. So the two of them knew each other from their former life; perhaps the boy had been a ne’er-do-well from the neighborhood who had been after the girl. At least he was probably one of the former Muslim inhabitants of Gavva who had joined Boko Haram and declared their deeds to be aikin Allah, the work of Allah.

  “According to the Qur’an she’s old enough,” the imam said. “Nine-year-olds can get married. It is written.”

  The other, slightly older man also chose a girl who was exactly as young as the first one. They clearly liked it when they’d only just reached sexual maturity. But with these two I wasn’t at all sure because they had no breasts, and their features were those of children.

  They were both in a state of complete shock. They wept and asked the men to spare them.