A Gift from Darkness Read online

  A slimy bundle lay between my legs—and started crying. I was absolutely exhausted, but also incredibly relieved. When I was about to heave a sigh of relief, the labor pains began again and one more bloody lump emerged from me. I didn’t care. My child was alive, I was alive. But when I tried to lift it up, I noticed that it was still attached to the umbilical cord.

  I hesitated for a moment. I was carrying a knife with me. The knife with which Ishaku had been murdered. Should I use it, I wondered—and knew the answer straightaway. I couldn’t sully this little creature with the instrument that had killed its father. I spontaneously bit through the cord with my teeth.

  Then I lifted the child and looked at it in the moonlight: it was a girl, a beautiful little girl. “A gift,” I thought as I rubbed off the mucus. “You are a gift from heaven. I will call you Gift!”

  I tenderly kissed my daughter on the forehead. It was done, I thought blissfully: God had placed a daughter in my arms. And I would do everything to ensure that her life was better than mine.

  A bundle of hope

  The birth had robbed me of my last ounce of strength. After I had cleaned the baby as best I could, I wrapped her in the scarf that I normally wore around my head. I pressed her close to my chest and leaned against a tree. Somewhere in the background hyenas were howling, but Gift made contented smacking sounds as she sucked on my milk, which smelled of vanilla. Then she gave a satisfied burp and we both went to sleep exhausted.

  As soon as it was day I gathered myself together to continue on my way. My whole body was in pain, particularly my abdomen, which felt as if it was on fire. But there was nothing I could do. I had to get back to the camp. Because here, in the wilderness, Gift and I would die of thirst and hunger. We urgently needed water. My mouth was completely dry.

  So off I set. As my headscarf wasn’t big enough to tie Gift to my back, I carried her in my arms, which was both unusual and difficult. I must have looked completely unhinged, with my hair in disarray, still exhausted from giving birth. I hadn’t even had the chance to wash.

  After a while I encountered a group of five women that I knew from the camp. They had been my neighbors there. In the camp they had all had husbands, but now they only had their children with them. When they saw me with a newborn child, they immediately knew what had happened. “When did your child come into the world?” they asked. “Were you all alone?”

  “Yes,” I said, and told them about giving birth in the wilderness.

  “And…the child’s father?” one dared to ask.

  Tears welled up in my eyes.

  “Yes,” they said. “We know how you feel. We have experienced it ourselves.”

  I discovered that during that terrible night all five women had been widowed. So they wanted to go back to Nigeria. “There is no protection for us here in Cameroon,” they said. “You would have to be insane to stay here.”

  Their words made me think. They were completely right: Boko Haram had also become a terrible threat just across the border; the fighters could come back at any time. We had to seek protection from them elsewhere.

  “You’re only safe from them in the large cities,” the women said, “in Maiduguri or Kano.”

  “Is there any chance that I could come with you?” I asked them spontaneously. The decision was as good as any other: I didn’t know what was going to happen next. And in Nigeria at least I had a chance of finding relatives.

  “Do you think you’ll survive such a difficult journey?” they asked critically. One woman gave me the cloth that she had wrapped around her shoulders so that I could wrap my baby up in it. “Here, take this,” she said. “If you tie the child to your back you’ll find it easier to walk.”

  They handed me a bottle of water. My body craved it. I thanked them and took small, respectful sips.

  I was very glad that I was able to join the group. Because of my weakened condition I found it quite difficult to keep pace with them. And I felt quite ill at the thought of having to travel a considerable distance on foot. But their company kept my spirits up: at least I wouldn’t be wandering around this area on my own.

  As the attackers had come from the north, we headed south. Eventually, by traveling in that direction, we hoped to reach the border. And we didn’t have to walk very far before we reached a larger road that ran parallel to it.

  Quite naturally we assumed that we would simply be able to cross the river bed, which was now completely dry, as we had done on the journey there. So we were quite surprised when we saw the soldiers. Apparently they had now started guarding the border.

  The men, who wore the uniforms of the Nigerian army, met us with extreme suspicion. “Halt! Stop!” they shouted at us from a distance.

  I was worried, as I had no papers identifying me as a Nigerian. None of us did. “We are refugees. We want to go back to our homes,” we called.

  The men beckoned us slowly over. “Are you Muslims?” they asked suspiciously. We said we weren’t. Very, very carefully they searched us and the little luggage we had with us. They clearly thought we were on the side of Boko Haram, and that we might be on a mission for the terrorist group. What an absurd thought!

  “Hey, you there, what are you carrying on your back?” a soldier asked me. “Is it a bomb?”

  “Take a look,” I said. He did.

  He could barely believe his eyes when he saw the tiny baby. “How old is this child?” he asked, startled.

  “Less than a day,” I replied truthfully.

  “Then you shouldn’t be traveling!” He lowered his gun and frowned thoughtfully. The same soldier who had just been so curt with me suddenly became friendly and soft-hearted. “You can’t go wandering about the place in your condition,” he said to me. “Where do you want to go?”

  “To Maiduguri.”

  “And where is your husband?”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  Now the other soldiers who had been listening to us looked shocked. None of them believed any longer that we were devotees of Boko Haram. “If you like, you can come and rest for a while,” they suggested. They showed me a shack where their wives lived. “They will look after you until you’re stronger again.” I gratefully accepted their offer.

  So my companions traveled on without me, and I stayed with the soldiers. Their wives looked touchingly after me and my baby. First they brought me something to eat: warm kunnu. Oh, that lovely smell of millet and tamarind! For a moment I forgot all the horrors I had been through.

  After I had regained my strength, they washed us. As we hadn’t yet had a chance to do so, our bodies and our clothes were still stained with the fluids of childbirth—and we probably smelled terrible. The women brought a barrel of water from the well behind the house. Then they scrubbed us both with a soft plastic sponge and soap.

  Gift protested at first when she found herself in contact with the water. But as the women had small children themselves, they were very good at dealing with her. Soon she stopped crying, and even cooed with pleasure when she lay in the sun in the water barrel being touched and rubbed by so many women’s hands. When she was quite clean, the women dried her, laid her on a cloth and rubbed her with shea butter. “That will make her strong and protect her,” they said to me.

  We spent several days with the women, chiefly eating and sleeping. In their care I soon recovered from the exertions of childbirth, and my strength returned. Gift developed marvellously well too. She was a very calm and even-tempered baby. It was a relief to me that she knew nothing about her father’s death and the tragic circumstances of her birth. This little person seemed completely contented with me and the world, as long as she lay at my breast. Sometimes I envied her peace of mind.

  Eventually I felt that I was in danger of outstaying my welcome. After all, these were not rich people. “Thank you very much,” I said to them. “I will continue on my way tomorrow.”

  “Where will you go?” they asked me.

  “I will go to Maiduguri to look for relatives
of mine.” I hadn’t actually come up with a concrete plan. I just knew that a lot of refugees were stranded in Maiduguri, and that I would have to find someone from my family to support me. Because, without a husband, what else could I do?

  “Maiduguri is much too far—and the way there is too dangerous,” they warned me. “You can’t go there on foot. Take the bus.”

  “I have no money for the bus.”

  They put their heads together. In the evening they consulted their husbands and found a solution. “We’ve clubbed together to buy you a bus ticket,” they told me. I didn’t know how to thank them.

  The next morning the soldiers took me to a bus stop in an armored car. Several other people were already waiting there with various bits of luggage, large and small. I myself had nothing at all, apart from the baby on my back. Everything I owned was hidden under my clothes, so that no one could see it. It was the long knife that had been used to murder Ishaku. For some reason I was unwilling to part with it.

  “Does the bus to Maiduguri go from here?” I asked the people, after I had said goodbye to the soldiers.

  “The bus goes to Yola,” they corrected me. That was in precisely the opposite direction.

  “But I want to go to Maiduguri!”

  “Then you’ll have to go via Yola.” It was the only route. The road to Maiduguri had been abandoned long ago, they explained to me, because it traveled right through the middle of dangerous Boko Haram territory.

  I felt quite sad as we set off southward: my home in the north was still an area that had to be avoided. I hoped my relatives, or at least some of them, had managed to escape in time. But how was I supposed to find them?

  After a few hours we reached the more southerly city of Yola; Boko Haram hadn’t yet advanced that far. But there had been suicide attacks. The bus station was busy, some people were waiting there clutching photographs. They were looking for their relatives. Clearly more and more people were coming from the crisis zones. I looked around too, to see if I could spot any members of my family, my father or my uncle. But of course no one was waiting for me. It would have been too lovely.

  At the station I bought a soup and looked to see how much money I still had: 500 nairas. The women had counted the sum out very precisely, just enough for another ticket. Before I could spend it on anything else, I bought the ticket to Maiduguri, which was about two hundred and fifty miles further north. In normal times we would simply have taken the A13, the main artery between north and south, which also led past the Mandara Mountains, past Gwoza and Bama. But now we had to take a big diversion via towns like Bauchi further to the west.

  We drove all through the night. The next morning we reached Maiduguri. As soon as we entered the city I saw the refugees camped out on either side of the road. Above all, women, and very many children. They slept under trees or in shacks made of plastic sheets. The whole of Maiduguri seemed to be one big refugee camp. Gift was resting against my chest in her sling, and I stroked her on the forehead. And I wondered anxiously where we would stay in this overcrowded city.

  When I got out of the bus I didn’t really know which way to turn. I followed some women who also looked like refugees. In that way I reached a school building where the new arrivals could register if they had no relatives in the city who could take them in.

  The whole place was in complete chaos. Women sat in a classroom, writing our names down on long lists. They told us we were going to be assigned to the various camps if we had no relatives. When I told them I was from Ngoshe, they told me to go to the camp near the airport, as that was where most of the people from my hometown were to be found. They gave me a number with which I was to report to the camp administrators.

  I set off for the camp. At that time, in the spring of 2015, Maiduguri was a ghost town. Even though it was bursting at the seams, and people were living on every imaginable corner, the main crossroads and squares were curiously empty. There were few street traders, no motorbikes and hardly any cars. It seemed as if all the inhabitants and guests in town had put their business activities on hold for fear of attacks.

  When I approached the camp, I could see the people sitting in the street from a long way off. The tent city was already so overcrowded that people were actually spilling out of it. Lots of children were frolicking around. I asked the way to the camp administrators. A man jotted down my number and pointed me to a big communal tent that housed about fifty women and children. Now, by day, they had pushed their bundles and mats to the side. I sat down on the floor and began nursing Gift.

  Then a woman suddenly came toward me. I looked at her, and couldn’t remember exactly where I knew her from.

  “Patience!” she cried. “Where have you come from?”

  As soon as I heard her voice, I remembered: it was Rifkatu, my old friend from Ngoshe, who I had always met at the well. Once a happy young girl, she now had careworn features. Or perhaps it just looked that way because she was so gaunt. We fell into each other’s arms.

  “Are you all on your own?” she asked me. “You’ll see: half the village is here.”

  “And what about my family?”

  She looked at me seriously. “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  Rifkatu confirmed what I had feared for a long time: that my father, my uncle and two of my brothers had been killed in another devastating attack on Ngoshe. That day, she told me, almost the entire male population of the village had been slaughtered. “All the ones who weren’t quick enough were beheaded,” she told me. Her own husband had been one of them. She and various other women had been forced to watch, before they themselves were locked up. “They showed us deliberately, to intimidate us,” she said. “You can’t imagine how cruel they are.”

  “Oh, I can,” I said. She understood what I meant. Neither of us asked the other any further details about her time with the fighters.

  I also learned from Rifkatu that my sister Ladi was in Maiduguri. She was living with her husband in the city—and she probably had a flat outside the camp. Someone even had her telephone number and informed her.

  Ladi hurried straight to the camp. She had her three children with her, two little girls and a boy of about ten. As I hadn’t seen my sister since she got married, I didn’t yet know her children. “This is your aunt Patience,” my sister said, and her children smiled shyly. Then they turned away in embarrassment. And Ladi was a little wary of me too. She looked considerably older than I remembered. Her features were harder now. Still, she was glad to see me and immediately invited me to stay at her flat. “I hope my husband will agree,” she said, and told me that he had left her a short time before, for a younger woman. But then the pastor had talked him into changing his mind. And now everything was fine again.

  She insisted that I come with her straightaway. “Where is your luggage?” she asked.

  I told her I had only Gift. “She’s all I own.”

  “Then it’s a good thing that you’re coming to us,” Ladi said, as if to herself. “You are my sister. It’s the only way.”

  Ladi lived in the district called Jerusalem, the Christian part of town. It was a poor area. I noted uneasily that the whole family had only a single room.

  That was where Ladi, her husband and the children all slept. She assigned me a place on a sleeping mat. I was glad to be able to rest at last.

  Moussa, her husband, who worked by day as a security guard at the market, came home in the evening. He wasn’t exactly delighted when Ladi told him she’d moved me into their flat. He peered at me over dinner and didn’t say very much. But I had a bad feeling about the way he looked at me. “At the market we’ve just started searching women like you,” he said at last. “Boko Haram trains you up as suicide bombers in the camps, isn’t that right?”

  Ladi looked at him in horror. And I was so startled that I didn’t know what to say. “Nobody has trained me as a suicide bomber,” I stammered.

  He didn’t believe me. “They turn your heads; you women are easily i
nfluenced,” he said. “Only recently one of you blew herself up.”

  Embarrassed, I didn’t reply. I myself was startled to hear that there were clearly now female attackers as well. And all the more so to learn that they came from the camps. Had that been the real purpose of our religious studies lessons? Would they have been planning to make me do that in the end?

  “What’s a pretty girl like you doing all on her own? You need a husband, a protector.” He gave me a predatory look. I noticed that Ladi was incredibly embarrassed by his words. She and I tried simply to ignore him. But Moussa wouldn’t stop making ambiguous remarks. “It used to be normal for a man to look after two or more women,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  When Moussa came home the following evening he had been drinking. I could smell it straightaway. Over dinner he was convivial and made jokes. Then, when it was time to go to sleep, he said, “Patience, why are you lying on the cold floor? Come and join us in the bed. There’s plenty of room for three!”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard. But my sister was rigid with horror. I was incredibly sorry for her for having to put up with this. “Don’t be like that,” her husband said, and tried to pull me to him with his hands.

  As he had been drinking, as I’ve said, his reactions were poor, and I easily managed to wriggle away. “It’s much more practical for me to be here on the floor if I have to nurse the baby at night,” I said, as if I thought his suggestion was the most normal thing in the world. Luckily that evening he was too tired or too drunk, or both, to insist.

  The next day I said goodbye to my sister. She didn’t try to make me stay. We both knew I had to go. Still, she felt guilty and pressed into my hand 200 nairas that she had secretly saved. “Where will you go?” she asked. “What will you do with the baby?”