A Gift from Darkness Read online

  Ishaku sensed that. “I suggest the following,” he said. “Let’s make our way down there very slowly and turn round immediately if anything seems at all strange. What do you think?”

  I said I agreed.

  “Good luck!” the old man called after us. “I hope you find your parents!”

  We climbed further downhill along the paths that led between the bushes and boulders. Then we left the shelter of the undergrowth. There was a ghostly silence as we approached the settlement. A smell of burnt straw hung in the air. I could see that some of the roofs of the round huts were charred. Boko Haram had clearly set them on fire. But in the rainy season millet straw didn’t burn particularly well. Had they created havoc in my parents’ farm or my uncle’s?

  We approached the kral. That curious silence again. There was no one but us in the street. All the people who had stayed in the village or come back to it were hiding in their farms. I saw two human bodies lying at the end of the path. I felt an impulse to hurry over to them. But then I became aware of the sickly, rotten smell that was coming from them. I was terrified when I realized that they were corpses. Ishaku held me tightly by the hand.

  “We should get back,” he said. But by now we were only a little way from my family’s farm.

  “Let me just check on them quickly.”

  “All right then,” he said rather reluctantly. “But then we should get out of here.”

  Ishaku walked with me to the gate and we stepped into the farmyard. I found my family gathered there: my father, my uncle, my aunt and one of my brothers. But then I was struck by their frozen faces. They were standing in a circle around a hole which—probably in great haste—they had dug beside the thorn fence. They didn’t say a word when I walked over to them. They didn’t need to. Strangely, I knew exactly what was happening here. I barely dared to look into the hole.

  Yes, there she lay, my dear mother. She was wrapped in a white cloth with a big red stain level with her chest. Her eyes were closed for ever.

  I felt a sense of utter despair when I saw her like that. My mother! Why had they focused their rage on my poor, sick mother? And since when had this sect murdered defenseless women? Women who had never done anything to them did not deserve such a death.

  Suddenly I felt utterly alone within my family circle. I was the loneliest person in the world. Tears sprang into my eyes, but I couldn’t cry.

  “What happened?” I asked my father.

  “We found her not far from the church. She couldn’t get to safety quickly enough,” he said. It sounded almost like an apology. Of course, while the attack was actually going on it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to look for my mother. Their first instincts had been to get themselves to safety.

  I didn’t reproach them for it. If I blamed anyone it was myself for leaving her on her own. If I hadn’t recently got married and moved away I would have been able to protect her. I would have taken her by the hand and gone with her into the mountains. Then she wouldn’t have been lying lifeless in that damp hole.

  My father drew the cloth over my mother’s face. He hurriedly said the Lord’s Prayer. Then he began to cover the corpse with soil. I had to turn away because I couldn’t bear the sight of it. How could it be that the people close to me were being slaughtered while I went on living?

  “Forgive me, Mother,” I whispered. “Forgive me for not being able to do anything for you.”

  Ishaku helped the other men to fill the hole. Then he called for us to hurry. “We shouldn’t stay here any longer than necessary,” he said to me. “It’s not over yet.”

  “You think they’ll come back?”

  “I’m not a clairvoyant. But it’s better not to run the risk.”

  So we climbed back up the mountain. My father, my brother, my uncle and my aunt came too. They wanted to camp out near the field for a while and they brought with them all the food supplies that they still owned at that time of year, to hide them up in the mountains, because there had also been looting in the neighborhood.

  “We’ll be safer in the mountains,” my father said. “Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn’t have been better off never leaving them.”

  That was an old debate in the villages, which reared its head every time there was a crisis. Whether our lives were made difficult by a bad orange harvest, a dried-up well or arguments with the Fulani nomads, the valley-dwellers always asked themselves the same question: hadn’t the life that the tribe had led up in the mountains until the middle of the previous century been better than our lives were now? Had it been the right thing to follow the call of the missionaries and cultivate the valley?

  If they had decided otherwise back then, much in our present situation would have been simpler. On the one hand we wouldn’t have had quarrels with our Muslim neighbors—and no one would have sympathized with Boko Haram just to settle a score with us. On the other hand, up there we would have been much better protected against attacks. For the older generation it was still a well-practiced tradition to seek refuge in the mountains. So I wasn’t surprised by my father’s decision. Soon more villagers were bound to follow.

  And then I thought of us, of Ishaku’s family, mine and Lara’s. Yesterday the attackers had been in Ngoshe, carrying out a massacre. But who could guarantee that they wouldn’t find their way to Gwoza tomorrow? The district capital, with a majority Christian population, was only a stone’s throw away on the other side of the mountain. And there too, there were Boko Haram sympathizers. We knew that from their attacks on individuals. Perhaps they would soon be hosting bloodbaths like the one in Ngoshe?

  “I think they want to drive us out of the whole region,” I said to Ishaku, as we walked through the undergrowth.

  “Yes, it’s very worrying,” he agreed. “They’re active all over the whole Gwoza district now. What happened in Ngoshe yesterday probably happened in other villages at the same time. Something’s brewing.”

  His words made me even more anxious. “Don’t you think we should get out of here?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “Where do you want to go, excuse me?”

  “I don’t care. Anywhere. Maybe Cameroon.” The border was only about six miles away.

  “Fine, then, Cameroon.” Ishaku repeated the name of the country as if I’d been coming out with a lot of nonsense. “And where are we going to live?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “We can sell the goats. I mean…It would only be temporary.”

  “Are you trying to ruin me? I have three children to feed!”

  Four! I wanted to correct him: he had clearly forgotten already that I was expecting a child as well. But I choked the words back. There was no point arguing with him. We were both tense enough.

  “You should at least think for the sake of your children,” I said in a conciliatory voice.

  He said nothing, and actually seemed to be brooding on the subject for a moment. “You know that’s not possible,” he said. “Not during the rainy season. We can’t just leave the millet in the field.”

  “What about after the harvest?”

  “If the situation hasn’t improved.”

  I could see that he was right. We simply couldn’t afford to abandon the harvest. Our families would starve, and I didn’t want that. So I agreed with him that for now we would continue as before. In the evening I knelt on my straw mat and folded my hands to have a conversation with God. I wanted to ask him for protection. As the army and the state administration were both failing, I was convinced that he alone could help us drive Boko Haram out of the region. “Now those animals have taken two beloved people away from me,” I told him. “Was that a test? If so, that’s enough. I can’t take any more.”

  Over the next few days more and more terrible details came to light about the massacre that had taken place on June 2, 2014, in the villages of Ngoshe, Attagara, Agapalwa and Aganjara. We learned that on that day several hundred people had been killed. The male inhabitants in particular had been systematically slaughtered. The one
s who had tried to escape by the main road had been intercepted by motorcyclists. Children had been torn from their mothers” arms and shot.

  I was shocked when people told me these details. If I hadn’t seen the dead in Ngoshe with my own eyes, I would have found it hard to believe that the group was capable of cruelties on such a scale.

  People said it might have something to do with the fact that the Sambisa Forest was getting too small as a place of retreat. Boko Haram had recently grown considerably. Many Muslims who were dissatisfied with the central government and wanted more autonomy for the Muslim population in the north were joining of their own free will. Others were forced into it. When the sect members stood at the door with machetes they had no choice but to pretend solidarity with the group. At any rate they were constantly growing in number.

  And they no longer lived in the shadows as they had done in the early years. What had previously been a secret association was developing more and more into an army of militiamen. Their members had to be given food and board. So they were carrying out more and more robberies and plundering raids.

  Given this development it would have been only logical for them to demand their own territory: a place to which their fighters could retreat if they weren’t actually fighting—and one that might be a bit more pleasant and accessible than the mosquito- and malaria-infested Sambisa swamps. Had they chosen our home for that purpose? Did they want to grab the villages of the Gwoza district and drive us all out? Or kill us? Or what exactly did they plan for us?

  Of course our neighbors in the district capital were worried about events as well. Relations between Muslims and Christians here were more tense than they had ever been. It made us Christians furious that the Muslims were so passive, and didn’t speak out more clearly against the group’s atrocities. They were our neighbors, after all! Why weren’t they standing by us? Did they secretly support the goal of driving us away? Or were they afraid of revenge attacks? We didn’t know who to trust in this situation.

  The next three weeks passed uneventfully. My family and I stuck to our regular rhythm: we set off at the crack of dawn to spend the day in the field, and in the early afternoon I always came down a little earlier than the others to the kral to make dinner for everyone. Then we ate together, did the work that needed doing around the farm and let the day slowly fade.

  By now we were a highly effective team. Quite honestly, at first I couldn’t have imagined that this three-partner marriage would have worked so well. But I must admit that in terms of labor organization it had its advantages. And where the other aspects of marriage were concerned, Lara was hardly competition for me; at night I had Ishaku to myself, and enjoyed his undivided attention. So in spite of all the uncertainties and the adverse circumstances in which we found ourselves, I was happy in my new marriage: I had found my place. And once I had had a baby, my membership in the family would no longer be negotiable, I knew that.

  When I trudged back down to the valley as usual on the afternoon of June 23, I was in a good mood. I was wondering how long it would take for my belly to swell and make my condition apparent to everyone, particularly to Ishaku. As far as I knew it would be months before other people saw anything.

  Once I got home I filled a big pot with water, stacked the firewood and lit the flames between the three cooking stones. While I was looking for some ingredients to make the millet broth a little tastier, I hummed a hymn that I particularly liked. It had been buzzing around in my head.

  Then suddenly I heard the rattle of engines and shots nearby. My heart froze. Was it what I feared? Had they come to Gwoza? “Please God, don’t let it be true,” I prayed.

  I doused the flames and looked around to see where I could hide. “Allahu Akbar,” I heard the men shouting outside. They were already pushing open the door to our farm and storming in.

  “Where is the infidel who owns this kral?” they asked me, pointing their guns at me; maybe our neighbors had told them we were Christian. “Where is your husband?”

  “I have no husband,” I lied, because I knew that they always killed the men first. That was what they had done in Ngoshe, after all. “I am unmarried.”

  “All the better,” they laughed. “Then we’ll improve your luck a bit!”

  “No!” I cried.

  “Don’t argue.” Two of the armed men held me by the arms. I lashed out and kicked around me.

  I watched them taking all the food supplies from our hut and carrying them away. They untied the animals too. “Have you any more hidden away?”

  “No,” I insisted. “These are all we have.”

  “Then off we go. You’re coming with us.”

  “Have pity on me!” I pleaded.

  But they dragged me away.

  Women as spoils of war

  Sitting on the bench in front of me is a middle-aged woman with jet-black eyes, her full face framed in an Islamic headscarf. There are dark horizontal stripes on her forehead and cheeks. She was tattooed with the signs of her tribe during an initiation ritual when she was a teenager.

  That’s an old local tradition, and there are historical reasons for it. It meant that a girl’s membership of a tribe was visible even if she was abducted by other tribes. You hardly ever see women with tattooed faces anymore. The practice fell out of fashion once the age of women’s abduction seemed to have come to an end. “We had no idea that the subject would one day be current again,” the woman says with a sigh.

  No one knows the topic better than she does. Asabe Kwambula is headmistress of the school from which the Chibok girls were kidnapped in April 2014. Since the schoolgirls disappeared, she has been fighting for their release. But Asabe has a hard task ahead of her: the guards on the gate don’t want to let her into the church compound. Unlike many of her pupils, the headmistress is an adherent of the Muslim faith, and is dressed accordingly. She wears a black veil with white dots, though she hasn’t covered her face.

  I have been in contact with Asabe ever since her pupils were abducted. I have called her many times from Germany and asked her how the search was going. She was rarely able to tell me good news. For a long time the army’s efforts seemed fruitless. Several times she was asked to identify girls who had been freed. But none of her pupils was ever among them. The first “real” Chibok girl wasn’t to reappear until the spring of 2016.

  Meanwhile Asabe herself—like so many of the people of Chibok—has become a refugee. She now lives in Maiduguri. Even though she’s a Muslim, living in Chibok became too dangerous for her. She has come to the church because I asked her for an interview. She agreed straightaway to meet me in the grounds of the EYN church, and wasn’t worried about coming into contact with the other religion. “That’s not an issue: here some people believe this, others that,” she claims and tells me that her nephew is getting married in this church on Saturday. She has been invited to the wedding. “Families here are a mixture of religions, no one wants to do anything bad to anyone else.”

  But when you see the dark looks that the Christians in the compound give her, you get another impression. The Muslim headmistress is fighting against a wave of suspicion. People know her. “What’s she doing here?” they ask behind their hands.

  Many members of the Christian community in Maiduguri think Asabe Kwambula gave tacit agreement to the abduction of the schoolgirls, or was at least informed in advance. Why else was she the only one to urge that they take their school leaving exam when the governor of Borno had already called for all activities at schools in his jurisdiction to be postponed to the next school year for safety reasons? And why did she happen to be away on the night of the attack?

  “That’s absolute nonsense,” she says stoutly. “I’m a victim of this crime myself. I’ve been driven from my home too, as have many of my Muslim neighbors.”

  She insists that she thinks day and night about the girls. Sometimes she dreams about them. “They’ve become a security pledge of the war raging between the Islamists and Nigeria’s central gove
rnment,” she explains. There is responsibility on both sides: “As women here are traditionally seen as the ‘possessions’ of men, in cases of conflict, they try to take them away from their opponent in order to weaken him.”

  She is referring to the fact that Boko Haram and its leader Shekau only allowed the mass abduction of girls and women after a particular event: when Shekau’s own wife and his three children had been taken prisoner by the army.

  That happened in September 2012. Shekau and his family were attending a naming ceremony with relatives near Maiduguri. That ceremony is very important in Africa, and is celebrated accordingly. However the Nigerian army had got wind of the event. Dozens of soldiers burst in on the party and opened fire on the guests. Shekau was shot in the thigh. Even though he was badly injured, he managed to flee. But the soldiers took his wife and children into custody. They are still behind bars even today.

  That was a great defeat for Shekau, both a hard personal blow and an insult to his pride as an African and a Muslim man. With the “theft” of his wife and children he had been profoundly humiliated, particularly in the eyes of his own men, who—encouraged by Salafist preachers—have an extremely conservative view of women. According to this, it is the supreme duty of a man to protect his wife against other men. If he doesn’t manage to do so, both of them are dishonored. Shekau couldn’t put up with that. To restore his reputation and win back respect, there was only one possible option: revenge.

  A little later Shekau published a video. The film shows him sitting in his tent in some unknown town, holding his Kalashnikov. He announces in the plainest terms that he will take revenge for the theft of his wife: “Wait and see what will happen to your wives according to sharia law,” he says. Even then the message made me shudder. It was unmistakable: Shekau was telling his opponents that he was going to attack their women too. In a later address he even threatened the president directly: “I will take Jonathan’s daughter prisoner…I would like you to know that there is slavery in Islam: even during the battle of Badr the Prophet Muhammad took slaves.”