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| Janet Daniang, 15, bears scars from a 2012 church bombing by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram. |
A bloody insurgency tears at the fabric of Africa’s most populous nation.
By James Verini
Photograph by Ed Kashi
The ticket taker, who worked at Kano’s bus station, had his
back to the blast. Before he heard it, it knocked him to the ground,
and flame licked his head. He lay facedown, dazed, his ears ringing,
blood streaming from a shrapnel wound in his leg, but still he knew
instinctively what had happened: There was a bomb in the car.
The driver of the Volkswagen had acted strangely. After pulling
into the dirt lot of the station, he and the man in the passenger seat
had been approached by touts—ticket salesmen who compete for fares—and
had told them, “We don’t know where we’re going.” But when the ticket
taker went up to the car, the driver said, “We already bought tickets.”
Not thinking much of it, the ticket taker walked away.
And then—boom.
As his ears stopped ringing, the screaming grew louder. He got up,
and through the thickening black smoke he saw people staggering away
from the buses. Burning bodies hung from what had been their windows.
Moments before, they had been sleek, new 60-seaters waiting to head to
points south. Now they were a pyre, like some awful ancient ritual
offering. On the ground around him the ticket taker saw the corpses and
remains of passengers, of the touts, his colleagues, the women who sold
boiled cassava and roasted fish from plastic tubs carried on their
heads. Friends he saw every day were now “separate people parts,” as he
put it to me.
He looked down at his leg and saw that he too was on fire.
Frantically, he pulled off his clothing. Then he made his way out of the
lot, one in a crowd of unclothed people stumbling out of the clouds of
black smoke billowing from the station. “I walked naked to the
hospital,” he said. He lost consciousness along the way. Someone, he
doesn’t know who, carried him on.
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| These survivors of a March 2013 bus station bombing in Kano were treated
in city hospitals. Many of the dead were incinerated. Estimates of
their numbers vary widely, but few believe the government’s toll of 22. |
The ticket taker came to in a nearby hospital. Then he was
transferred to Kano’s National Orthopaedic Hospital, where, the
following week, I met him. (The hospital’s director would not allow me
to ask his name.) His ward and two more were filled with victims of the
bombing, and their wounds were eerily repetitive.
For those lucky enough
to have escaped the worst, faces were singed, and skin was missing from
arms and waists, stripped off with burning clothing. Those not as lucky
were no longer visibly African; the outer layer of flesh had been
burned from their bodies, leaving them looking—as some joked to each
other, when it wasn’t too painful to move their mouths—like
beke, the Igbo word for a white man. It was as though their identities had been taken.
One such man sat on his bed staring at the wall in an effort to
withstand the pain, while nurses wrapped him in gauze. He turned and
looked at me with an expression of such kindness that I smiled. I
asked—the stupidity of my question apparent immediately—“Are you OK?”
“No,” he said calmly, and returned to staring.
When the car exploded, the same two words occurred to him,
and to the ticket taker, and to every other person who saw or heard the
blast, which could be heard on the other side of Kano, Nigeria’s second
largest city: Boko Haram. That neither they, nor practically anyone else
in Nigeria, knew what Boko Haram was exactly or why it would want to
bomb a bus station was beside the point.
Officially, according to the Nigerian government, Boko Haram is a
terrorist group. It began life as a separatist movement led by a
northern Nigerian Muslim preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, who
decried the
country’s misrule. “Boko Haram” is a combination of the Hausa language
and Arabic, understood to mean that Western, or un-Islamic, learning is
forbidden. In 2009, after Yusuf was killed—executed, it’s all but
certain, by Nigerian police—his followers vowed revenge.
The world is coming to the unwelcome realization that, 12 years
after 9/11, violent Islamist extremism and the conflicts it ignites
aren’t going away. Accompanying that is the equally unwelcome
realization that these conflicts afflict, more than ever, Africa, a
continent still unequal to the challenges of the 20th century, never
mind this one. In the Sahel, home to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and
to the jihadists who until recently controlled northern Mali, Boko
Haram has emerged as the nastiest of a nasty new breed. Calling for,
among other things, an Islamic government, a war on Christians, and the
death of Muslims it sees as traitors, the group has been connected with
upwards of 4,700 deaths in Nigeria since 2009. And although Nigeria,
with 170 million inhabitants, is the continent’s most populous country
(one in six Africans is Nigerian) and has sub-Saharan Africa’s second
largest economy, even by its immense standards the carnage attributed to
Boko Haram is immense.
So much so that unofficially, in the national collective
consciousness, Boko Haram has become something more than a terrorist
group, more even than a movement. Its name has taken on an incantatory
power. Fearing they will be heard and then killed by Boko Haram,
Nigerians refuse to say the group’s name aloud, referring instead to
“the crisis” or “the insecurity.” “People don’t trust their neighbors
anymore,” a civil society activist in Kano told me. “Anybody can be Boko
Haram.” The president, Goodluck Jonathan, an evangelical Christian,
wonders openly if the insurgency is a sign of the end times.
After the bus station bombing I twice traveled to Atakar, a
hilly area in Kaduna state, where mass killings had been reported.
Before the first visit I consulted officials. They hadn’t gone to Atakar
and wouldn’t, because they believed Boko Haram was behind the killings.
Everyone killed had been Christians, they assured me. “It’s not
unconnected with the quest for the Islamization of the north,” one
official said. “They want as much as possible to annihilate the
Christians.”
In the first village I visited, I met a family huddled by their
roofless, charred homes. They were, in fact, Fulani Muslims, and they
claimed they’d been attacked by marauders from the other side of
Atakar—Christians, they presumed. Some of them said the attack had been
ethnically motivated, others religiously. A young man told me that the
original
incitement had to do with a poisoned cow. “We were attacked
because we are Fulani—and because of the cow that died,” he said. He
wasn’t being
facetious: Northern Nigeria has endured decades of
ethno-religious slaughter, often enough touched off by
peccadilloes. In
2002, after a journalist remarked that the Prophet Muhammad would have
approved of a beauty contest, riots left hundreds dead.
Later I traveled to the other side of Atakar and found that
villagers there, Christians from the indigenous Ataka tribe, had also
been attacked. They’d assembled in a refugee camp in a schoolyard. One
man told me that he was in his home when he heard gunfire. He went
outside and saw men dressed in black shooting “powerful guns.” He barely
escaped with his life, he said. He was certain the attackers were
Fulani, as was a neighbor who joined our conversation. When I asked the
neighbor why, he said, “My people don’t wear black.” Both suspected the
attackers were also Boko Haram, though why that group would want to
assail this remote place they couldn’t say.
“We want to believe it’s Boko Haram,” a local aid worker told me,
in such a way as to
denote that life had become so incomprehensibly
frightful in northern Nigeria that wanting to believe Boko Haram was
involved was enough to make it so. “We don’t have any other
information,” he said, expanding on the thought, “so we want to believe
it’s Boko Haram.”
In his autobiography Ken Saro-Wiwa, the son of the Nigerian
activist of the same name who was executed by the state on trumped-up
charges in 1995, writes that “Nigeria should be God’s own country in
Africa.” This could be
dismissed as just more of Nigeria’s famous nativist braggadocio if
its neighbors and its despairing partners in the West didn’t agree. That
braggadocio—and a fierce ambition—are matched by the country’s
resources, among them gas, minerals, good harbors, and
fecund soil that
once helped propel the British Empire. Nigeria boasts an educated middle
class, industrious cities, a rowdy, if not exactly free, press.
The most lucrative of its resources, however, since its discovery
in the 1950s, is crude oil. Nigeria is the world’s fifth largest
exporter; yet nearly two-thirds of its citizens live in absolute
poverty, meaning that they have just enough to not die. Oil has made
government the best business venture in Nigeria, and because oil, and
not taxes, accounts for most of the state’s revenue, it also makes
politicians unanswerable. A newspaper last year estimated that since
President Jonathan entered office in 2010, $31 billion have disappeared.
“There’s been a failure of government at all levels historically in
Nigeria,” a Western diplomat working there told me.
This failure is everywhere apparent, but nowhere as much as in
Kano, once one of the great cities of Africa and of the Muslim world.
Islam arrived with merchants and clerics in the 11th century (giving it a
much longer history there than Christianity); the Hausa king of Kano
adopted it in 1370. In 1804 a caliphate was established. The British
toppled it in 1903 but retained its
pliant emirs. Kano, the heart of
regional trade since antiquity, became an industrial and agricultural
hub. So well was the arrangement working for him, the Emir of Kano
opposed Nigeria’s independence, gained in 1960. A half century later
roughly half of Nigerians are Muslims, the vast majority living in the
north.
The emir and the British kept out Western education and other
advances but allowed in Christians from the south. Kano’s fortunes began
to slide in the 1970s, and as they did, its lack of development—and the
lack of oil in the north—grew more apparent. Current statistics are
unnerving: More than half of children under five in northern Nigeria are
stunted from malnutrition. In the northeast, where Boko Haram started,
only a quarter of homes have access to electricity, which would be a
bigger problem if more than 23 percent of women could read. In the
1980s, 1990s, and again in the early 2000s ethno-religious conflicts
killed thousands. Then Boko Haram came in.
Today Kano feels like a weary garrison. Approaching it, you come
to checkpoints every few hundred yards. Between them you pass farms left
fallow by neglect and desertification and through the half-alive
villages they used to support. In the city, urban desertification:
streets, parks, plazas empty. Signs are gone from any place deemed
vulnerable to attack, which, since the bus station bombing, is any
place. At police headquarters the only notice, spray-painted on an
exterior wall, instructs, “Do Not Urinate Here.”
The most visible figures of authority in the city, the only
visible figures of authority, are the Joint Task Force units
(JTFs)—paramilitary teams made up of police, soldiers, and agents from
the State Security Service, Nigeria’s equivalent of the FBI, who patrol
in reptilian armored vehicles and canopied pickups. They’re known for
their brutality and
venality and have become as feared as the insurgents
in some quarters, particularly in poor Muslim districts.
The real power in Kano is hidden,
conspicuously. Behind tall walls
in the city center is the state government’s sprawling seat. In his
office there, the governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, greeted me from an
archipelago of leather sofas. On one wall was a life-size painting of
Kwankwaso; against another, a life-size stand-up cardboard cutout of
him. In both he was wearing exactly what he had on when I met him: a
white
babban riga robe and red brimless cap, emblems of his Kano revitalization campaign, which he calls the Red Cap Revolution.
“I have no doubt in my mind that one day Nigeria will overcome
it,” Kwankwaso told me, referring to Boko Haram. “How it will happen, it
is difficult to say now.” A trio of aides nodded. “This is the time to
listen even to foolish people, to hear what they are saying, because we
don’t have answers.” Kano hasn’t upgraded its power grid in years, and
as he talked, the lights went out. They came back on, and he continued.
“You have to prevent violence. On the other hand, government has to do
so many other things. What we are seeing is just a symptom of what has
happened in the past.” After Kwankwaso’s first term in the governor’s
office ended in 2003, he was indicted for embezzling $7.5 million in
state funds. He was not prosecuted and in 2011 was elected again.
In Kano’s old walled city is the emir’s palace. Amid the poverty
of his subjects, the emir, now 83, still lives very much like an emir. I
wasn’t granted an audience with him, but one morning I was invited to
look around the palace, a rumpus of alcoves and anterooms. I arrived
alongside a busload of Gulf-state visitors filing in with gifts in
duty-free bags. After convening with them, the emir emerged in a
meringue of robes, mounted a horse, attendants shielding him with a
giant, tasseled umbrella, and rode to his mosque. It used to be that
anyone could come and watch these rituals. That ended in January, when
men drove up alongside the emir’s Rolls-Royce, pulled out guns, and
opened fire. Two of his sons were shot, several of his entourage killed.
The assurance of violence hangs in the air. While I was in Kano,
there were near-daily reports of shootings and a series of botched
bombings, including one at the palace. On Sunday mornings police park
water-cannon trucks outside churches, and preachers inside talk about
the “Lord’s battle” against Boko Haram; in nearby mosques clerics
condemn Goodluck Jonathan’s “war on Islam.” On Easter a TV reporter
friend of mine got a call. JTFs had raided a suspected Boko Haram
hideout. He returned a few hours later with familiar footage: an orderly
array of guns, bullets, and homemade bombs, and near it an orderly
array of bodies of slain “militants.” Among the dead on this day I could
see at least one woman and a child. The position of the bodies
suggested that the people had either been piled together after being
shot or were killed en masse.
There are various creation stories for Boko Haram. The most
common I heard in Nigeria is this: In the early 2000s in the
northeastern city of Maiduguri, Mohammed Ali, a preacher fed up with
poverty and disorder, embarked on a hegira, a Muhammadan withdrawal from
society. He and his followers created a commune and practiced sharia.
After a dispute with authorities, the Nigerian Taliban, as they’d become
known, attacked a police station. The army laid siege, and Ali was
killed.
Survivors regrouped around a promising contemporary of Ali’s,
Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf built a bigger commune, described in a report as a
“state within a state, with a cabinet, its own religious police, and a
large farm.” He called his group Jamaa Ahl al Sunna li al Dawa wa al
Jihad, or People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings
and Jihad. Possibly deriding Yusuf ’s religiosity, someone called it
Boko Haram. Yusuf was carrying out forced conversions to Islam,
according to reports, and likely ordered the murder of a rival.
Nonetheless he gained sympathizers around Nigeria, not all of them
Muslim. “Boko Haram is a resistance movement against misrule rather than
a purely Islamic group,” one bishop said. Yusuf, a Maiduguri reporter
told me, “was so charismatic. He could talk to people very gently, very
simply,” but “when he preached, he acted. Overacted.”
In 2009 Yusuf’s followers clashed with security forces. The army
shelled the commune. Yusuf had predicted that if he was ever arrested,
he would be killed without trial, and that’s exactly what happened.
Surviving devotees went into hiding. Some traveled abroad for training
with other militants, and some regrouped in Kano around Abubakar Shekau,
Yusuf ’s deputy. They set out to “liberate ourselves and our religion
from the hands of infidels and the Nigerian government.” Northern
Nigeria was overtaken by bombings, arsons, and shootings—at police
stations and government offices, then at churches, mosques, schools, and
universities—and by assassinations of officials, politicians, clerics,
and others. The federal police headquarters in Abuja was suicide-bombed,
then the UN compound. A residence of the vice president’s was shot up.
A deadly attack hit Kano on January 20, 2012. Waves of gunmen set
upon police stations and State Security Service offices. The official
estimate of the dead was 185, but according to Kano residents I spoke
with, the real number was much larger. I was also told that some people
risked their lives to gather outside police stations to cheer on the
attackers, so despised are the authorities in Kano.
The resentment that impelled those residents is summed up
in a favorite saying of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s, which his son likes to quote:
“To live a day in Nigeria is to die many times.” The smallest tasks in
Nigeria sap one’s dignity. En route to Kano, I flew through the Lagos
airport, where the guard at the bag scanner shook me down for a bribe in
front of his expressionless superiors. I refused. He negotiated: “Money
for water?” I told him that if he really was thirsty, he could meet me
in the snack bar. A half hour later he arrived, uniform gone, now in
natty denim, two mobile phones in hand, and leaped into a chair with a
“Here you are!” We talked for an hour. I ended up buying him water and
lunch. He in turn called a friend who picked me up at the Abuja airport.
“Anything you need,” the guard said as we parted, and he meant it.
Such is the polyphony of interaction in Nigeria—“affectionate
extortion,” I heard it called. In a country that’s endured a civil war,
six military coups, two assassinations of heads of state, and at least
three crippling domestic insurgencies in just over 50 years of
existence, and where
contempt for leadership has hardened into a
perverse kind of civic responsibility, this mixture of menace and
generosity, officiousness and humor—the attitude that allows a man whose
skin has been burned off to joke that he’s been turned white—is
indicative of a certain flippancy, part of that Nigerian braggadocio.
It’s also a way of keeping sane. And to that end it orders Nigerians’
complex perspective on sedition. They condemn Boko Haram and see its
hypocrisy. As one soldier, a Muslim, said to me while guarding a church
on Palm Sunday, “They say Western education is wrong. But that book
you’re reading, how was it made? That pen you’re using, how was it made?
That gun you have, where was it made?” But they pay Boko Haram a
grudging
deference too. They know well the frustration that would drive
someone to take up arms against the state.
This deference takes subtle forms. On Kano street corners vendors
sell DVDs of insurgent attacks downloaded from the Internet. Saying Boko
Haram aloud is discouraged, but you can refer to the Boko Boys, or BH,
as though it were some hot rap act.
The extent of the insurgency’s strange effects on the Nigerian
psyche became apparent as I looked into the bombing at the bus station.
Unlike Boko Haram’s signature attacks, this one was indiscriminate,
meant to kill as many as possible, whoever they were. But theories about
its meaning vary. Kano is majority Hausa and Fulani, but Sabon Gari,
the district where the station is located, is home to many Igbo. They
tend to be Christian, and they operate the bus lines. So the most
widespread theory is that the bombing was an attack on Igbo Christians.
“To me it’s an extension of killing Christians in their churches,” a
security officer in Abuja told me. A traditional Igbo leader in Sabon
Gari who goes by Chief Tobias said, “Igbos were the target.”
But this theory goes only so far. The bus operators are Igbo, yes,
as were many of the passengers and station workers who died. But many
others were not. Some were Hausa or Fulani, some, possibly, Kanuri, the
majority ethnicity of Boko Haram’s originators. Sabon Gari is home to
most of Kano’s churches, but it also has many mosques. It is the most
diverse part of Kano, a throwback to the city’s old cosmopolitanism, and
on a given day any number of the 250 or so ethnic groups that make up
Nigeria might be represented there.
A prominent former Kano parliamentarian, Junaid Muhammad, a
Muslim, told me that Chief Tobias’s claim was ridiculous. “You cannot
tell your bullet or your bomb, ‘Go and hit an Igbo man’ or ‘Go and hit a
Hausa man.’” I went to see Boniface Ibekwe, the supreme leader of the
Igbo in Kano and a Christian, and was surprised to find he agreed. “It’s
not a direct attack on Igbos,” he said. “Boko Haram’s objective is to
get where people are gathered together and destroy it.”
Some people believe the bus station was bombed because it is a
center of commerce. It represents the
influx of foreign goods, foreign
ideas, impious ideas. Others wonder if the bombing was meant to protest
the economic dominance of the south over the north. Perhaps what Boko
Haram really wants, one theory holds, is regional
equity or a new
northern nation. Among northern politicians, secession is an oft talked
about, if impracticable, idea.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that when the authorities
got involved, the confusion increased. Take what ought to be the most
basic fact: how many died. I spoke to one reporter who put the total
around 30; another said around 40. Chief Tobias said 75. The real number
will never be known, because no official account of the incident has
been given. The government’s tally—22 dead—is a fiction.
The government won’t say who it suspects the bombers were, aside
from Boko Haram; how the car bomb was made; or even whether there was
only one bomb. Some witnesses claim there were two. Most people agree
the car was a Volkswagen, but some—including the ticket taker—say it was
an Opel. Some witnesses claim there were two people in the car, others
three. According to local journalists, security forces removed corpses
from the station as quickly as possible and moved survivors from one
hospital to another in an effort to keep reporters away from them. The
authorities “don’t want the public to know what is actually happening,”
Nasir Zango, a Kano reporter, said.
Why? There are varying theories about that too. To head off
reprisal attacks. To protect their jobs. Because they deceive a lot. The
most common explanation offered to me, and the most troubling, is that
security forces didn’t properly investigate the bombing because they
can’t. They don’t have the training or the experience, not to mention
the interest. They don’t have the equipment to analyze bomb fragments or
the intelligence networks to lead them to the bombers. Often police
don’t even bother taking statements from witnesses after attacks, I was
told.
Still, the government and the press are equally quick to pin any
violence in the north on Boko Haram. For the former, it distracts from
mendacity and ineptitude. For the latter, it provides copy. Privately
many people agree that criminals have found in Boko Haram a perfect
cover. The result of all this no longer stops at confusion. “You begin
to think it’s as though someone’s hellbent on seeing these problems
continue,” Lawan Adamu, another Kano reporter, said. “The conflict, the
crisis, is taking a very big dimension that is really making many of us
start thinking or believing that there is a conspiracy. Many people have
said this before, and I didn’t want to believe, but now I’m starting
to.”
Ken Saro-Wiwa the younger, who now is (in a perfect Nigerian
irony) an adviser to President Jonathan, told me that Boko Haram is
“typically Nigerian, in that it started as an ideological movement. Then
it was co-opted by political opportunists. Then it was mixed with
economic issues. And now it’s muddied, so that you can’t tell what it’s
about.”
When I asked a local community leader in Atakar why no state
officials had come to the attacked villages there, he said, “Why would
they come? They are the sponsors of these things.” And was Boko Haram
involved? “Why not?” he said. “What is the difference?”
It was a sentiment I heard again and again. Almost no Nigerian I
spoke with believes Boko Haram is just Boko Haram. Some claim it’s the
creation of Wahhabis from the Gulf states; others, of “the West.” Still
others believe Boko Haram is backed by northern politicians vying for
power; or by southern politicians who want to destabilize the north; or
by people in President Jonathan’s party who want to unseat him; or by
Jonathan himself, in an effort to cancel elections in the north; or, if
not by him, by the people around him. In fact, Jonathan apparently
believes the last. In a moment of unbuttoned paranoia at a church
service last year he said, “Some [Boko Haram] 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.”
And some Nigerians say that Boko Haram doesn’t exist at all. “We
believe Boko Haram is a political expression,” Chief Tobias said. “We
don’t believe there is an organization Boko Haram.”
As I continued reporting, it became apparent that the insurgency’s
gravest toll on Nigeria isn’t physical. It’s existential. Boko Haram
has become a kind of national synonym for fear, a
repository for
Nigerians’ worst anxieties about their society and where it’s headed.
Those anxieties touch on the most elemental aspects of Nigerian
life—ethnicity, religion, regional inequities, the legacy of
colonialism—and not least is the anxiety that Nigerian leaders are
wholly incapable of facing this insurgency, indeed unwilling to face it,
much less the social
fissures beneath it. Or worse, that the leaders
are no better than the insurgents. That the state is Boko Haram.
 |
| In the city of Kaduna people scavenge amid trash heaps. Nigeria is the
world’s fifth largest oil exporter, but nearly two-thirds of its
citizens are abjectly poor. The north, long neglected by the central
government, is especially bleak. |
It’s not an entirely unreasonable supposition. Of the more
than 4,700 killings associated with Boko Haram to date, almost half have
been at the hands of security forces, according to Human Rights Watch.
Many of those killed have been civilians who were just in the wrong
place at the wrong time. As the insurgency gets more vicious, so does
the government. In July suspected Boko Haram militants set fire to a
boarding school in Mamudo, killing 42 students and teachers. In April
the military assaulted the village of Baga, claiming militants were
hiding there. At least 200 were killed. Witnesses described soldiers
gunning down people as they ran from their homes.
I interviewed people in Kano who claimed they’d been harassed,
beaten, or shot by security forces. In my last days in Nigeria I went to
Abuja, where I recounted their stories to a general, one of the main
architects of the campaign against Boko Haram. He wasn’t moved. In fact
he wouldn’t concede that there had been any abuses. When I pressed the
point, he began yelling and pounding his desk. He said such stories were
invented by journalists sympathetic to Boko Haram, including, he
intimated, me. “We know there are some journalists deliberately siding
with Boko Haram in this war!” said the general, who did not want to be
named. “I have found some journalists, and they confessed to me they
were deliberately siding with certain sides. Deliberately! Some based in
Western countries.”
Calming down, he went on, “Look, it’s a shadowy war we are
fighting.” To prove how shadowy, he showed me a video found in a raid.
It showed Abubakar Shekau. Bushy-bearded, muscular, with a bit of a gut
and a limp, the Boko Haram leader is training three young men to wield
an AK-47. They’re in the closed courtyard of a residential building
somewhere, maybe Kano. Children can be heard playing inside. Suddenly
there’s a knock at the gate. Shekau lurches to a wall, as one young man
lifts the rifle unsteadily, ready to fire. A man comes in, carrying a
shopping bag. They know him. Everyone laughs with relief.
“You see, they could be anywhere, anywhere!”the general said. “Not
only in the north—in the whole of the country! [Nigerians] still don’t
understand the challenge—the real challenge—we’re facing, the
seriousness of the situation. They don’t understand.”
As he said this, I thought back to the hospital in Kano and to a
woman I met there. She’d been selling water in the bus station the day
of the bombing. Her young daughter had been helping her. When the car
exploded, the girl vanished. In the darkness the woman called out for
her. When her daughter didn’t respond, she began looking for a body.
When she couldn’t find a body, she looked for an arm, a leg, clothing, a
shoe, anything. She found nothing. She told the police what had
happened, but they didn’t care and ordered her to leave. The woman’s
husband went to every hospital in Kano, to no avail.
“I never saw my daughter since that day,” she said. Dominant in
her cracking voice as she said this were grief and confusion. But when
she spoke of the police, another note took over. It was anger.
_____________________________________________________________
1. What is Boko Haram? When and why was it formed? What are its goals?
2. Describe the demography of Nigeria. What ethnic and religious divides exist?
3. Describe the economy of Nigeria. What resources does it possess? What are its top exports?
4. What has been the Nigerian government's response to Boko Haram? Why has it been ineffective?
5. What human rights are people in Nigeria being denied?
6. What can and should be done to help solve Nigeria's problems?
