A Gift from Darkness Read online

  I was the maid of all work, as I had been at my parents’ house: I got up in darkness at four o’clock in the morning, dressed and walked to the village well to fetch water with a big bucket on my head. The well was about a half mile away from the huts. I met lots of girls my own age there. We chatted and exchanged the latest news as we filled our buckets. Of course the others had already heard about the blow that fate had dealt me. Many of them were also engaged or had just got married. The idea of losing their husbands as quickly as I had done was really horrific to them.

  “And you were there when they killed him?” asked Rifkatu, a former classmate who had been one of the bridesmaids at my wedding. I could still see her in the beautiful dress that she had worn to the party, and felt suddenly sad. All the hope and confidence of that time had gone up in smoke.

  “Yes,” I said. “They did it in front of my eyes.”

  Rifkatu shivered involuntarily. “They are a terrible sect,” she said, “they are completely mad. But people in Ngoshe wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said doubtfully. Because by now I knew that Boko Haram worked on the quiet. Even the people that Yousef and I had dealt with in Damaturu had always assured us that the group had no support in the town. And then it had happened anyway.

  “No, I can’t imagine that,” Rifkatu said, convinced. “We get on well here. I have lots of Muslim friends.”

  All the way home I brooded about whether she was right and we could really feel safe in Ngoshe—and reached no conclusions. The Muslims were in the majority in Ngoshe, we Christians in the minority. But in the past we had had hardly any problems with each other. There had been very little friction. And if there were any disagreements, they usually had less to do with religion than with concrete material issues. How can I put it? In local politics, the Muslims enjoyed some privileges over us Christians. Often their families were richer because they were closer to the emirs who used to rule in the north of Nigeria. Even today people join Islam if they want higher office or a career in politics. It’s the only way. It’s an unwritten rule that Muslims never allow anyone except their own into these positions.

  Christianity, on the other hand, was adopted chiefly by the tribes who were in conflict with the emirs or oppressed by them. My own tribe, for example, the Ngoshe tribe, lived completely withdrawn in the mountains until the 1960s. Even today, logically enough, they don’t have much power or wealth. Still some members of the tribe manage to work their way up and outrank the Muslims in material terms. That was what my husband Yousef had done, for example. And that was how he had earned their hatred. I was convinced that the Muslims of Boko Haram had murdered him not for religious reasons but out of pure envy.

  Unfortunately there had also been similar events in Ngoshe. Did Rifkatu not know anything about that, or did she prefer to keep it out of her mind? No, I thought, she was deceiving herself: even though we had gone to school with the Muslims of Ngoshe, even if they were our friends, we couldn’t feel safe here. When I walked past the dark mosque in the middle of the village, I noticed that my footsteps quickened involuntarily. Envy can poison the hearts of men. It already had.

  Back in my uncle’s kral I set down my water jug and put some wood in the stove. I didn’t have to poke it for long before the logs caught fire. I had to hurry to make breakfast. First I ground the rough millet seeds with a pestle and mortar, then boiled them up with water. They had to simmer for about an hour. While that was happening I fed the animals. Right at the end I added some sugar, tamarind and peanut butter to the mixture in the pot, giving it a sweet and sour taste. My kunnu was ready in time for sunrise. My uncle and his sons, who by now had got up, crept hungrily around the fire. Before they set off to work in the fields they consumed substantial portions of food. Kunnu keeps you full for the whole day, which is why we love it. Because where there’s kunnu in the morning, people are never hungry.

  After the men had gone, my aunt and her daughter-in-law, Savan, came to have their breakfast. It was particularly important for Savan, who was my age, to eat well, as she was nursing an infant. I secretly watched her giving the child the breast after her meal. How lucky she was! But apparently she wasn’t aware of it. She took her circumstances for granted. Probably I would have done the same in her position. Perhaps it’s always like that: if happiness is there, you don’t see it. In my marriage with Yousef I hadn’t felt especially happy. I had seen it as my natural right to be married to a man and have children with him. It’s only when happiness suddenly disappears that you understand what you had in your hands.

  When everyone had finished eating, I scraped the leftovers out of the pot. I ate some of it myself, and put the rest in a little plastic bowl to bring to my mother later on. She often went without at home, as she always let the rest of us go first. Then I washed our pots and pans.

  I usually spent the morning clearing up. Every day I took a broom and swept the whole of the yard, which was left in a poor state by rain or desert dust according to the season. I swept up all the leaves and twigs that had fallen from the neem trees during the night, and piled up the wood and leaves near the stove so that I could fire it up later on. (Neem trees are tall with dark green leaves and are hardy enough to grow in very dry areas. Their leaves are burned to chase away mosquitos, and they are also used in several local medicines.) Then I let the chickens into the yard and tied the geese to a tree outside so that I could clean out their houses.

  By midday I was usually quite tired. When the sun had reached its highest point I would often sit down on a mat in the shade of one of the huts and lean my back against the mud wall to rest a little. Sometimes I even dozed off for a while. But my duties in the household were by no means over. There was always something to do. Sometimes in the afternoon I cleaned the huts, sometimes I washed the clothes. That was quite tiring, as I only had very simple cleaning materials: I had to scrub each item of clothing individually with a lot of soap on the washboard to free it from dust. The next day my muscles always ached. Then I hung the washing out to dry on the fence between the huts.

  In the afternoon, when the shadows grew longer, I walked to the well again, because by then I had used up all the water. Then I started preparing the evening meal. In the evening there was usually millet or maize. We ate rice or even a piece of chicken only on Sunday afternoon after the service.

  Sunday was the highlight of the week. On Sunday I only did the minimum of tasks. Of course I had to fetch the water; I also made breakfast. But then I washed and put on my yellow floral dress, which I never wore on other days, to spare it for this occasion. When the bells rang, we all went to church together: my uncle and family, and my parents and my younger brothers, who still lived at home, all in their Sunday best. I loved it when we all turned up together as a clan like that. Because it meant I didn’t feel alone anymore, but part of a community.

  What I liked best about the service was the music. We had a pretty hot band and a church choir which would, every week, perform new pieces composed by its own members. I greedily absorbed their melodies and rhythms. Later, at work, I often found myself singing them to myself involuntarily, because they kept me company in my head for the whole of the next week.

  That was how I spent my days. After only a short time it felt as if I had never left Ngoshe and my family. My brief marriage felt like a dream. I almost doubted that I had ever been married. But unfortunately that feeling was deceptive.

  There was in fact one crucial difference from before: I was no longer one of the girls who hoped that one day a man would come and ask for her hand. My future prospects were worse than modest.

  The omnipresent danger

  Patience and I meet in the church compound every day. She comes with her baby on her back and we sit down on the bench beneath the big neem tree. While Patience tells her story the child either sleeps or wriggles in her lap, looking at the world with big eyes. Seventy-year-old Asabe, a retired English teacher and the spokeswoman for the widows
of Maiduguri, patiently translates each of her words for me from the Hausa language.

  At first Patience finds it strange that I should be interested in her story. “What happened to me is nothing special,” she says over and over again. “So many women were kidnapped or lost their families. Isn’t it going to be boring if I tell you all that in great detail?”

  “No,” I assure her, “none of it is boring. People in Europe and the rest of the world don’t know exactly what’s happening here.”

  “Really?” She shakes her head in disbelief.

  Patience finds it hard to think that she might be significant in any way: she’s always been told that she’s unimportant. So at first she can’t really believe that I consider her story to be worth telling. She can’t grasp the idea of the book that I’d like to write about it. The only book she knows is the Bible.

  But still I notice that she likes me being interested in her. So she willingly joins in with the experiment. The very fact that someone is listening to her seems to be a completely new experience for her. And after a few days I notice that the young woman is starting to trust me. She no longer seems as shy as she did at first, and even looks me in the eye from time to time. Her story becomes more fluent. Sometimes she even laughs when I ask her a particularly stupid follow-up question. “What? You don’t know how to plant millet?”

  “No, where I live we hardly have any millet,” I assure her. “Tell me about it, Patience! Describe to me exactly how your life here works.”

  “How it used to work,” she corrects me. “Everything’s changed in the meantime. Today we can’t plant millet anymore. The fields are all left fallow and we have little to eat. It would be much too dangerous to go back to the villages.”

  Patience’s remark brings me back to the present, an oppressive present. Because while we are spending our time together, the life—or perhaps I should say: murder—going on around us hasn’t stopped. It goes on, undiminished, day after day. The Boko Haram terror machine is in full swing.

  A wanted list with portraits of ninety-nine Boko Haram fighters hangs on the inside of the protecting wall that surrounds the church compound. The men on the poster are posing with machine guns. They are all armed to the teeth. Some of them give warlike grins to the camera, other photographs are blurred and clearly taken with a phone, or in passing. In the middle of the poster is a rather larger photograph showing Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau with his pointed cap: that notorious figure who presents himself to the public in his propaganda videos as a mixture of black magician and psychopath.

  Everyone in northern Nigeria knows his brutal messages; they terrify people. “We long for battle, for attack and killing as we might long for delicious food. We believe in that and we fight for that,” he announced in one of his videos in November 2014, a good six months after the spectacular abduction of the Chibok girls. “It is our goal that everyone on the whole planet will live according to the laws of the Qur’an.” No wonder that Patience looks away in horror every time her eye chances to fall on the portraits of that man.

  “Do you know them?” I ask Patience.

  She nods. “Yes, I’ve seen them, some of them.”

  “Even that one?” I point at their leader, Shekau.

  “In Ashigashiya. Yes, I think that was him: a terrible man.”

  It was also Shekau, the man with the pointed cap, who transformed Boko Haram into the killing machine that it is today: an army of an estimated 50,000 men who have sworn loyalty to Islamic State (ISIS). Well over two million people are on the run from these monsters.

  The group was founded in around 2003 by the Wahhabi preacher Muhammad Yusuf, who demanded a pure, unadulterated Islam: in Maiduguri he raged first of all against the “superstition” of many Muslims in northern Nigeria, who had remained true not only to Muhammad but also to their ancient gods and traditions—and for whom a rain dance and a visit to the mosque were therefore not a contradiction. Not many of his coreligionists were very interested in that. But when Yusuf began to criticize the establishment and the Christian-dominated central government, it appealed to people, particularly young unemployed males.

  The Muslim north is structurally the weakest region of Nigeria, and the people there feel chronically neglected by the politicians in the seat of government in Abuja. Here in the north the Muslim emirs held sway until the start of the twentieth century, and Western education was consequently prohibited. For that reason there is still a high educational deficit in the north even today: seventy percent of people can neither read nor write. Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa, with a quickly growing GDP, but the wealth is distributed very unequally from region to region. In comparison with the rest of the country the Muslim north is dirt poor. The state is perceived as an exploiter. Nothing reaches the people here of the wealth from oil in the south. So Yusuf’s question as to why some should live in expensive, guarded residences while others fetch their water from the well, fell on fruitful ground. Accordingly, he declared war on the “thieves” from Abuja.

  When a demonstration by Boko Haram in Bauchi was banned in 2009 there was unrest, which spread to the whole of the north of the country. The army defeated the uprising and the sect leader, Yusuf, was killed. After that nothing was heard from his movement for a while. It was only a year later that Boko Haram was revived, this time under Shekau: his people began shooting local politicians from their motorcycles, setting fire to police stations and setting off bombs in the street. As these terrorist acts were also at first limited to the north of the country, the politicians in Abuja did nothing about them. But in the summer of 2011 Boko Haram moved on to suicide bombings and also attacked the capital. First they hit police headquarters, then the UN building.

  Shekau declared a “religious war.” “We have attacked no one but the Christians,” he announced, explaining the violence. “Everyone knows what terrible things they have done to us. Everyone knows that the constitution is the work of unbelievers; everyone knows that the Western education system teaches things forbidden in the Qur’an. The only thing that we demand is that the will of Allah be respected. The work that we are doing is the command of Allah. Everything we do is written in Allah’s book.”

  Shekau set out his goals very clearly. First, the introduction of sharia throughout Nigeria as an alternative to democracy, which supposedly privileged Christians in the south. Second, “May God bring death to us all if his laws are not respected”—with these words the sect leader was calling upon the Muslim population to make martyrs of themselves.

  This was a declaration of war on central government—and a wake-up call for the politicians in Abuja. They could no longer ignore the problem. The fact that the terrorist organization still went on growing and gaining in strength for some time to come may have had to do with the involvement of many politicians with the secret association. “The challenge we have today is more complicated,” the then president Goodluck Jonathan said in his New Year address in 2012, in which he referred to the Mafia-like structures of the country, saying that no one knew exactly who was involved: “Some of them are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary-legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house. That is how complex the situation is.” At this point Shekau had already given the Christians in the north an ultimatum to leave the territory.

  A year later Boko Haram changed tactics again and began to conquer whole tracts of the country in the north. Rumors circulated about a meeting in Mecca between Boko Haram people and representatives of ISIS, al-Shabab and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The Islamists were supposed to have discussed this tactic there, and voted on it. The territorial conquests of ISIS in Iraq, and of Boko Haram in Nigeria in the summer of 2014 underpinned the rumor of this agreement. Shekau dec
lared his caliphate about two months after ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did the same.

  Within a very short time the man with the pointed cap managed to conquer a huge amount of territory in Nigeria. By the end of 2014 his empire was already the size of Belgium. Even experts were baffled as to how he could achieve this—and whether Shekau was receiving financial support from abroad.

  The leadership structures of his organization are mysterious; no one knows precisely what they are. Supposedly several groups are acting independently of one another, which always represents a big problem in attempts to negotiate with Boko Haram: no one but Shekau, who in his videos repeatedly and categorically rules out negotiations, seems to have the authority to speak for the organization as a whole.

  But it is not clear whether he did not become an imaginary figure long ago. The Nigerian secret services at any rate insist that the man who appeared as Shekau between 2011 and 2013 died some time ago: he is believed to have died on July 25, 2013, in the Cameroonian town of Amitchide, from bullet wounds inflicted on him by the army some weeks previously. Less than a month later he mocked the claims of his death in a short video: “We have killed countless soldiers and we will kill still more,” he laughs. “Our military power is greater than that of the Nigerian army.”

  However, Nigerian secret service experts point out that the man who now appears as Shekau has a rather wider face than the original. His upper lip is thinner and his nose rather bigger. The army also claims to have killed this new Shekau in September 2014 in Konduga. But his ghostly video messages did not stop even after that.

  The face of Boko Haram tirelessly calls for continuation of the bloodshed. “I enjoy killing the people that Allah commands me to kill—just as I like to kill chickens or sheep,” Shekau I announced as early as January 2012. And Shekau III confirmed this view in November 2014: “Shekau eats the hearts of unbelievers, because unbelievers violate the laws of Allah.”