A Gift from Darkness Read online

  “Shut up!” the imam ordered. “Say after me: Bismillah al-Rahman ar-Raheem Al hamdu lillaahi rabbil ‘alameen…In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate, praise be to Allah, the Lord of the world…”

  I recognized al-Fatiha, the opening sura of the Qur’an, because we had been through it with the imam in one of our first classes. It’s very important to Muslims, and a crucial part of many of their prayers. So it is indispensable at weddings. The loud declamation of the sura is seen as a blessing for the union. But the girls kept their lips tight shut and didn’t say a word.

  “Would you get a move on?” the imam said menacingly. “If you don’t want to get married we’ll take you to the Sambisa Forest, where the mosquitoes will devour you and you will get nothing to eat. So, are you going to be good wives, or will we have to force you?”

  When the girls still said nothing, the cleric gave the men a sign. They grabbed their chosen girls and beat them. They gave them a good thrashing. They didn’t stop until the two girls started whimpering and asking for mercy.

  Then the imam asked them again: “Will you say the al-Fatiha now?” Again he began to recite the Arabic words. Afraid of being beaten again the girls didn’t dare to resist any further, and murmured something. No one really cared if it was the words of the sura. The mother of the first girl sobbed so loudly that no one could make out a word. But the main thing was that the illusion of Islam was preserved.

  To maintain the appearance of a legitimate wedding, the men then ostentatiously counted out a “bride price” of 500 nairas to the girls’ families. About twelve dollars. And that meant they were married.

  “Swine,” hissed the mother of the first girl when the eighteen-year-old handed her the money. She spat in front of him but hid the banknotes before he could take them away again.

  The second girl had no family members in our unit. She was allowed to keep her bride price herself. So everything was in order, at least from the imam’s point of view.

  The men dragged their new “brides” outside like booty.

  It was like that almost every evening. Men came to view the brides. Soon they had “married away” all the young girls of the age they found attractive. We knew they lived with them in the houses and farms that had once belonged to the Christians, not very far away.

  For those of us who were living in the unit, the disappearance of the girls meant that the warriors would now seek out older women, or go after the children. Usually they chose the latter. That was always horrific for the mothers and daughters. There were many discussions about the age of the girls. The mothers always claimed their daughters were younger than nine, the magic threshold. The men disputed it and accused them of lying. They demanded that the imam perform the wedding ceremony anyway, and that was usually what happened. It was only when they discovered that the bodies of their “brides” were actually too small to have sex with them that they brought them back and chose another one instead.

  The more our ranks thinned out, the more nervous I became. Unlike in the Kauri camp, there were no additional women joining us, because the fighters went on fewer raids. That made my own situation dangerous. Admittedly, at the age of eighteen I wasn’t one of the very young women they immediately chose, but I wasn’t one of the old ones either. So I knew that it was only a matter of time until one of them went for me.

  One evening—I think I’d been in Gavva for three weeks—another marriage delegation came to our compound. I was poking the fire, and interrupted what I was doing when I saw them coming. There were six of them. I knew one of the fighters, because he was one of our guards. He was a strong man in his mid-twenties. He had often given me lustful looks. So I flinched when he came purposefully toward me. I immediately looked away. Maybe he hadn’t been looking at me?

  “Hey, you!” I heard him say. My heart thumped with fear. But I didn’t react. I stared stubbornly at the firewood.

  “Hey—what’s her name?” he asked the others.

  “Her name is Patience.” The name Binto, which I had been given in Ashigashiya, had only applied in Kauri. No one here knew it.

  “Hey, Patience!” he repeated. I still didn’t look at him. Now he was coming too close to me.

  “My name is Mohammadu,” he said quietly. “I’ve been watching you for a while. Would you like to be my wife?”

  I shook my head violently.

  “You know I can force you,” he said.

  “You would be sinning. You mustn’t take another man’s wife,” I said. “I’m married already.”

  “But your husband is dead!”

  “I don’t know that. And because I don’t know, I can’t marry you. Please understand that.”

  He said nothing at all for a while. I expected him to draw his machete at any moment and press it to my neck to force his will upon me. But he did nothing of the sort. He didn’t shout at me or hit me. “Fine,” he said. “I won’t take you by force, because I really love you. But please at least think about my offer. It could be good for you.”

  His words made me think. I watched after the group for a long time as they left. All the men apart from Mohammadu had chosen a wife and “married.” But he kept his word and didn’t force me. Even though the others looked at him slightly askance, he went home alone. I thought well of him for that.

  But would he leave me in peace in the future? Or did he think I might change my mind once I’d had some time to think? And how would he react if I didn’t? How tolerant was he?

  I didn’t see him over the next few days. Quite honestly I was glad of that. I thought long and hard about whether marriage might be a possibility for me. Because by now I had a very different and far bigger problem. When I looked down at myself I could clearly see my clothes stretching across my belly. My pregnancy was slowly becoming visible. That frightened me. Only recently I had seen them kicking a pregnant woman in the belly until she curled up with pain and at last had a miscarriage. They would treat me like that, or worse. Dear God! I thought: I didn’t want that to happen to my child. I had to act before it was too late. I hoped nobody else would see the change in me.

  I listened to my inner voice. Could I palm off someone else’s child on Mohammadu? If I could have saved it like that, presumably I would have done, I think in retrospect. But at the time I didn’t see that possibility.

  What I saw, on the other hand, was an incalculable risk: if Mohammadu noticed that I was pregnant after our “marriage”—which would inevitably happen in my current condition—he would feel I had deceived him, and he would want to take his revenge. He might take advice from the imam. I hadn’t forgotten the sight of the woman who had bled to death in Kauri after her belly had been slit open—and I was sure that that would be my fate and the fate of my child if I dared to deceive him. No, marriage wasn’t a solution anymore. Perhaps I should have gone for it earlier, but now the moment had passed. I had hesitated for too long.

  One morning Mohammadu was suddenly standing outside the gate of the compound. His superiors had assigned him and two other men to guard us during the day and go with us to our religious studies classes. Soon our group was walking together down the long path past the farms and fields to the school building.

  I avoided looking at Mohammadu on our march. But I immediately noticed that he wanted to talk to me. Eventually, when we were halfway there, he was suddenly walking beside me. “Have you changed your mind?” he asked.

  I barely dared to say no, so I didn’t say anything at all. He understood my answer anyway. “So you haven’t,” he said.

  “I can’t. Would you want to marry an adulteress?”

  “Your loyalty to your husband is an honor to you,” he said. It sounded half mocking, half genuine. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.” He edged closer to me and looked around to check that no one was listening to us. Then he said quietly, “You’ve got to get married anyway. If you don’t marry me, then marry someone else. No woman who refuses will be left alive. Do you understand?”

>   I looked at him in alarm. Did he want to threaten me now?

  “We’ll kill you all,” he said seriously. “So if you really don’t want to get married, I urgently advise you to get as far away from here as possible.”

  Shattered dreams

  Renate blanches when I tell her about my last conversation with Patience. “Boko Haram has occupied Gavva?” she asks, unable to grasp what I’ve told her.

  She knew that Boko Haram was active in the area, and had attacked the church in 2013. But now I’m confirming her worst suspicions about the tragedy that’s being played out there. “Yes, they’ve taken Gavva,” I say, passing on Patience’s report to Gavva’s former missionary. “They have turned the village into a concentration camp. All the people who didn’t manage to escape are being kept there as slaves. The men are forced to work, the boys are made into holy warriors and the women and girls become ‘wives’ to the fighters as soon as they are forced into marriage.”

  Renate is frozen with horror. “Our village—a camp!” she says over and over again. “How could that happen?” She looks into the sky, almost as if she is angry with her God. But she doesn’t utter a word of criticism, just a sigh. “And my house?” she asks. “The mission station?”

  I don’t want to answer, but she’ll find out anyway. “Patience says Boko Haram people live there now. She saw them in the garden.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” she says. “The beautiful garden I loved. I don’t want to imagine what’s happening there.”

  Renate is completely beside herself. She is deeply shaken by the tragedy that is playing out in the place where she once lived. She thinks about the people she knew there, and wonders which of them managed to escape in time. She has seen some of them in Maiduguri. And what about the rest of the congregation?

  “I feel so sorry for the people who are being humiliated and tortured in the camp,” she keeps saying. “It’s so unfair. They always tried to make life better. And so did I.” She can’t come to terms with the fact that the disaster seems to mean the end of all her endeavors. She did so much there. Was it all in vain?

  The vicar wants to know more about the situation in Gavva. She systematically begins questioning people who might be able to tell her something. First she talks to her closest colleague, Rebecca from Ngoshe. But Rebecca left the area just in time, and hence too quickly to be able to give any reliable information on what had happened in the meantime.

  “We haven’t had telephone contact with the villages for ages, either with Ngoshe or Gavva,” she says. “Boko Haram destroyed the towers.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Renate says impatiently. “But what do the women who have come from there report?”

  “I’ve stopped asking them,” she admits. “What I know already is quite enough. I don’t want to hear anything more.”

  Renate shakes her head disapprovingly. But the fact is that the women who have escaped the horror are only willing to reveal a little of what they have seen or experienced. The memories are too unpleasant to share. And they make people feel ashamed. The only thing they are willing to discuss is the whereabouts of relatives.

  The same is true in Renate’s workshops. When the widows come to the church compound to be initiated into the mysteries of soap-making, or to bake muffins together, they focus strictly on the task at hand: they eye the ingredients curiously, talk about their prices and listen closely as the individual steps of the manufacturing process are explained. The ones who can write record the recipes that Renate gives them. And when the pieces of soap are laid in the sun to dry and the first self-baked goods are being tasted, the women’s conversations revolve around things close to home: their accommodations, their children, the various ways of earning money. But none of them willingly talks about their own story. They each keep their pain to themselves.

  Renate is now terribly anxious about the situation in Gavva. On the spur of the moment she asks Daniel to come with her to a refugee camp where some women from Gavva live. It is right next to our church compound. I go with them.

  As a journalist I’ve already seen various refugee camps: in Iran, in Iraq, in Pakistan, even in Mali. And I actually thought that nothing could shock me in this respect. But the Nigerian camp goes beyond anything my jaded eye has ever seen. An incredible number of people are crammed into a tiny space. They sit on the floor, cook, eat, sleep, flick the flies away. You look in vain for white UN tents, only the camp management has one. The rest of the people are living in wooden shacks they’ve nailed together themselves, or under plastic sheets. Everything is incredibly dirty, and the impression it makes on me is of how squalid conditions are.

  We step into the camp, and it isn’t long before we are recognized. “Bature, bature—white woman!” the children shout. “You’re the vicar,” an elderly woman says to Renate. She is one of the ones who took part in the literacy program. Renate doesn’t know her personally, but the woman greets her as if they were old friends.

  “Which village do you come from?” Renate asks her.

  The woman names a little village near Pulka.

  “Do you know where I can find people from Gavva?”

  “Oh, yes.” She guides us to a group of women sharing one of the shacks made of plastic sheets. They too give Renate a warm welcome. They think highly of the vicar for not forgetting them in their misery.

  In fact it’s an important sign. So far no representative of the mission in Maiduguri has paid the refugees a visit—let alone offered them help. Since the mission station in Gavva was officially closed in 2004 the program is considered to have been wound down by its Swiss headquarters. Only Renate, who came here as a private individual, seems to be interested in the incalculable suffering of the people here.

  “What’s happening in Gavva?” is her burning question. “Is it true that our lovely village has been turned into a prison camp?”

  “Yes, that’s true,” a woman tells her. “I was there myself and saw it with my own eyes. I escaped from there.”

  “How long ago was that?” I ask.

  The woman looks uncertain; measurements of time are difficult in Africa. “About two months,” she guesses. According to the others, she’s the last one to have seen her home village at close quarters.

  Nobody really knows if Boko Haram is still occupying the town. The women don’t agree: some are inclined to believe the army, which is spreading optimistic reports. Others are skeptical. Still others suspect that the fighters can’t be far away. “I’ve heard that they’re holed up in the Mandara Mountains,” one woman says.

  Many of them can confirm Patience’s horrific account. And also that all the women in Gavva have been forced into marriage. “My daughter is living with a man like that now,” says a middle-aged woman. “She has a baby with him and she can’t run away anymore.”

  “And the mission house I lived in?” Renate asks. “Is it still standing?”

  “Yes, it is. But recently the Boko Haram fighters lived in it. They’re using it as their headquarters for the valley.”

  The vicar lowers her head. Now she feels exactly like all the others: she really doesn’t want to hear these terrible things. But she forces herself. She asks questions all afternoon and the women tell her more and more dreadful details about the practices of the sect.

  One recurring motif in their accounts is the fetishism with which the group regards the blood of their victims. It isn’t unlikely that these are African rituals with their roots in black magic. Because everyone here knows that the life-spirits of an adversary who has been killed pass to those who drink his blood or eat his organs. The practice is ancient. That is how a warrior symbolically absorbs the strength of his opponent.

  The intimidating power of the demonstration of such practices should not be underestimated. Many Nigerians assume that the fighters—and principally their leader, Shekau—have magical powers that make them immune to army attacks. The sect was even said to have protected the access routes to the Sambisa Forest, Boko Haram’s p
lace of retreat, with a magic spell. The people had no other way of understanding how the terrorist leader had managed to hole up in swampland a couple hundred square miles in area. Presumably the legends formed around Boko Haram are deliberately fed and provoked to win respect and keep the population in a constant state of fear. Neither politicians nor the army, which should in fact be fighting Boko Haram, are entirely free from this.

  The women suffer from all this. The ones whose husbands have been cut down in front of their eyes, and the ones who have survived the horror of being taken prisoner. The worst, they report, is the feeling of helplessness “when you are left at the mercy of these bad people and there’s nothing you can do.” Traumatology teaches us that these terrible impressions will pursue them throughout their whole lives. And the feeling of impotence will stay with them.

  When we leave the women, my sixty-five-year-old companion is shattered. The women’s accounts have realized her worst fears: Boko Haram, Renate is forced to admit, have destroyed her life’s work.

  That may not be easy to accept. I can see the state that Renate is in. Perhaps she is wondering why she should set up anything at all here, if men then come and destroy everything again. She walks restlessly back and forth in the church courtyard. She talks to Rebecca, discussing what can be done. But the vicar is just as powerless with regard to the violence as the rest of us are.

  “Perhaps we’ll soon be able to build everything back up in Gavva again,” Rebecca tries to comfort her, but she doesn’t seem to believe her own words. Because like everyone in Maiduguri she knows that going back in the near future will still be far too dangerous.

  We have seen what can happen when the fragile equilibrium between the tribes is destroyed—in Gubla, for example, a majority Muslim town near the villages of Sukur with their traditional beliefs. After being liberated by the army, the people of Sukur carried out an unbelievable massacre, Renate tells me: they accused the Muslims of cooperating with Boko Haram and invading their land. The people of Sukur even killed 150 young men of their own tribe, accusing them of being traitors.