Bring Back Our Girls

The Astonishing Survival and Rescue of Nigeria's Missing Schoolgirls

Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062933942
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

A 2021 Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award

"Everyone should read the testimonies of the Chibok girls who survived the capture.We need to help with efforts to liberate all of them and become more responsible for women and girls' protection in conflicts." —Malala Yousafzai

What happens after you click Tweet? The heart-stopping definitive account of the mission to rescue hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls whose abduction ignited a global social media campaign and a dramatic worldwide intervention.

In the spring of 2014, millions of Twitter users, including some of the world's most famous people, unwittingly helped turn a group of 276 schoolgirls abducted by a little-known Islamist sect into a central prize in the global War on Terror by retweeting a call for their release: #BringBackOurGirls. With just four words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators. Soldiers and drones, spies, mercenaries, and glory hunters descended into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet.

When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As their days in captivity dragged into years, the young women learned to withstand hunger, disease, and torment, and became witnesses and victims of unspeakable brutality. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the one path offered them—converting to their captors' fundamentalist creed. In secret, they sang hymns, and kept a diary, relying on their faith and friendships to stay alive.

Bring Back Our Girls unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of northern Nigeria to the White House; from clandestine meetings in Khartoum safe houses to century-old luxury hotels on picturesque lakes in the Swiss Alps. A twenty-first century story that plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fueled by the power of hashtag advocacy, this urgent and engrossing work of investigative journalism reveals the unpredictable interconnectedness of our butterfly-wings world, where a few days of online activism can bring years of offline consequences for people continents away.

Part I

Kidnapped

1

“Gather Outside”

CHIBOK

APRIL 14, 2014

The class of 2014 at the Chibok Government Secondary School for Girls were only four weeks from finishing senior year when almost three hundred of them were seized by armed men and packed onto pickup trucks that disappeared into the night. It was a Monday, and the students had spent the afternoon finishing a three-hour civics exam and the evening relaxing on campus, studying in their dorms, or gathering in small circles in the prayer room. Some had been singing cathartic sabon rai, or “reborn soul” hymns or practicing a local dance called “Let’s Shake Our Waist.” The following day they were to sit for a math final, which their teacher, Mr. Bulama, had warned would be so hard it would make them cry.

The Chibok seniors, each wearing blue-and-white-checkered uniforms sewn with the motto “Education for the Service of Man,” were only a few tests away from becoming some of the first in their families to graduate. Nigeria, over their parents’ lifetime, had become one of the most literate societies in the developing world, but in their corner of it, just 4 percent of girls finished high school. To complete a basic education, the students each had needed to master two second languages, Hausa and English, in addition to their mother tongues, all on top of their chores at home: cleaning, babysitting, or cooking over firewood stoves. For the better part of a decade they had shared and fought over bunk beds in the overcrowded dormitories of a school with no electricity, trying to pass exams that were challenging for even the most high-achieving students in West Africa. But the real struggle of their lives was just about to begin.

At twenty-four, Naomi Adamu was one of the oldest, a student who had prayed and fasted more times than she could count to get through high school. Petite, with a teardrop-shaped face and slender arched eyebrows she liked to outline with an angled brush, she was known to her younger classmates as Maman Mu, Our Mother. Yet when the incident began, she would find no guidance to offer them, and it would be more than a year before she discovered herself able to be the leader she wished to be.

The air that night was stiff and muggy, cut by a breeze that rippled over the flat brushland outside the school gate and through the window, next to the thin foam mattress Naomi shared with her cousin Saratu Ayuba. Well over one hundred students were lying on rows of rusting spring iron bunk beds in the Gana Hostel, one of the school’s four single-story dorms. Above them, a dust-coated ceiling fan hovered idle. The teachers had all gone home for the night, and it was pitch dark, and quiet, until Naomi’s eyes opened shortly before midnight to the sound of distant popping.

Half asleep, her dorm mates turned to each other, confused as the crackling noise faded then returned. It was sporadic but growing louder and presumably closer, echoing off the cement walls. From adjacent bunks Naomi could hear the rustling of bedsheets, then anxious whispers. Her classmates were talking about Boko Haram. On campus, there wasn’t a single girl who hadn’t heard of what this group of fundamentalist militants had done at boys’ schools in distant towns. But the teenagers had been told by their teachers that a girls’ campus would be safe, protected by the military.

“Should we run?”

“No. They told us to stay.”

For a moment the girls debated.

Then came a thunderous roar, followed by the crash of deafening explosions, sending the hostel into pandemonium. Naomi threw herself flat on the cement floor, her cheeks next to flip-flops, open textbook pages, and scattered study notes. In one corner, a small group of students began running through a prayer, their heads bowed as classmates scampered between bunks or hid beneath beds. Some yanked the wire frames toward the wall to barricade themselves in. In the distance, the light trails of rockets cut across the night. Chibok was under attack.

“We should run!”

“No! We should not run! We should pray!”

The school’s security guard, a frail man in his seventies whom the girls called Ba, or Dad, hobbled into the dorm and asked for help.

“What should we do?”

The militants might spare the young women, but any man found would be slaughtered, he explained. “They won’t have mercy on me, let me go and hide,” he said, and disappeared into the night.

Girls began bracing themselves to run, stuffing clothes into bags, flashlights weaving skittishly in trembling hands. Students with phones were furiously dialing family or friends. But the cell service was weak, and for those who could connect, the clatter of gunshots and bursting grenades made it almost impossible to hear. Mary Dauda stared into a phone that had dropped a call to her brother, sobbing at her failure to reach him and mumbling, “God have mercy.” Margret Yama managed to briefly speak to her brother, Samuel. But she was so frightened she could barely talk, and as he begged her to flee, the line dropped. Naomi’s phone was ten years old, a battered but trusty gray Nokia 3200 handset held together with a rubber band, and she frantically dialed her contacts until she managed to reach Yakuba Dawa, a neighbor. “Stay where you are,” he shouted immediately, before the call cut out.

Separated from Saratu in the commotion, Naomi had only her ears to guide her. From beyond the school gates, she could hear the sound of motorbike engines approaching, then coming to a halt. Outside, two men’s voices were chatting over the clanging sound of metal on metal, trailed by the jangle of a chain. The rusted hinges squealed as the gate eased open.

“There is nobody here,” a male voice said.

“No,” said the other. “There are girls here.”

The school campus was an island unto itself, a yellow-painted congregation of one-story buildings, perched on the vacant scrubland on the far outskirts of town. Its low cement walls were the last structure on a road that meandered into a flat horizon, and there was nobody around to help as a convoy of Toyota Hilux trucks and motorcycles halted at the school’s green iron gate. An army of men began exploring the campus, their boots and sandals sinking into the sand of a courtyard lit by a full moon. One of the last was their leader, a stocky man with jutted front teeth wearing a red cap, who strode toward the dormitory and hollered to the teenagers inside. He hadn’t expected them to be there.

“Gather outside,” he shouted.

“Don’t worry!” said another man through the window. “We are soldiers.”

The students began to slowly move across their rooms, swimming through darkness toward the voices in the doorway. There was no alternative but to take these men at their word. Rhoda Emmanuel, a pastor’s daughter, grabbed a blue Bible and tucked it inside her clothes. Maryamu Bulama carried her own copy of the Bible. Naomi furiously stuffed a bag with as many essentials as she could think to collect: a red shawl, her school uniform, her blue Bible, 3,600 naira (about $23) in pocket cash, and her Nokia. “I’m very sure it’s Boko Haram,” she said as she followed the crowd filing into the courtyard. Naomi found her cousin Saratu in the scrum and in a whisper revealed the fear running through her mind. “I’m not baptized yet.”

2

The Day of the Test

Until the third week of April 2014, hardly anyone had ever heard of Chibok, a grain-and-vegetable-farming community of pink tin-roofed homes and whitewashed churches that stands alone under the hard desertlike skies of Nigeria’s northeast. Built at the foot of a solitary hill studded with jagged gray boulders, its patchwork of single-story cement buildings blends into a parched landscape of dusky yellow and brown grasses. It is home to around seventy thousand people, with the feel of a small town. The nearest village lies a half day’s walk over the sole dirt road available to cars, or along footpaths that skirt sand-clogged streambeds where creeks used to flow. Those trails thread through peanut, bean, or maize plots that fade away into the distance. After that, there is only tough soil for miles, punctured by a lonely set of four telecom masts providing patchy phone service for one of the dwindling communities on Earth still not reliably connected to the Internet.

At dawn, Chibok’s families step out together, or pedal single-speed bicycles, to reach small farms and tend their crops before the sun provokes daily highs that often top 100 degrees. Neighbors sell each other the crops they don’t eat themselves in the stalls of the town’s open-air market, where mechanics clang metal tools against the broken parts of motor scooters. The rhythm of commerce is slow. The grocery-stall shopkeeper, among the few residents wealthy enough to own a refrigerator, is nicknamed Dangote, after Nigeria’s richest billionaire. For entertainment, teenage girls dreaming of adventures beyond town often meet at a portrait studio where they pose in front of aspirational backdrops of gilded mansions, manicured gardens, or the skyline of Dubai.

For Chibok’s residents, April is traditionally a month of celebration. It is the time of year when the air is no longer spiked with the coarse, eye-aggravating sand brought by the harmattan, a harsh wind that blows south from the Sahara during the long dry season. It is also the month, along with December, when the town holds weddings. Local custom holds that each groom must give his bride a bicycle, for her personal mobility, and later, grant each of his daughters a parcel of land, for financial independence. May brings damina, the rainy season, when the streets, unnamed and unpaved, transform from dust to clay-like sludge. An apocryphal story holds that the word Chibok comes from the sound of a sandal slapping in mud: chi-bok.

The town is so detached from its neighbors that it speaks its own language, Kibaku. Just one-tenth of 1 percent of the country understands it. An hour’s drive beyond the boundaries of what is called the Chibok Local Government Area, it is rare to find anyone who can muster even the basic greetings of a community that might have remained in its pleasant obscurity were it not for an agonizing series of unexpected events that began one night while its parents were sleeping.

Mimigai? “How are you?” Yikalang. “All is well.”

SECLUDED AND RARELY VISITED EVEN BY ITS ELECTED OFFICIALS, THIS small town might not have mattered to the world if its story didn’t trace the fate of a country whose success or failure will shape the next century. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, home to 206 million people, half of them not yet adults, a citizenry that will double and outnumber Americans by 2050. Some five hundred languages are spoken on its soil.

And yet a picture is often drawn that Nigeria is two separate countries tucked inside the same borders, each complicating the fortunes of its opposite half. The south, verdant and tropical, is largely Christian and relatively more educated, with prosperity trickling into port cities along an oil rig–studded shore. The British Empire, which conquered Nigeria in the nineteenth century, considered the southerners more rebellious and pushed them to adopt Christianity, the English language, and the colonial school system.

The north, hotter, drier, and sitting on the southern fringe of the Sahara, was different. There, the imperial government coerced Muslim emirs and sultans into carrying out what Nigerian scholars would later call subcolonialism: a colonialism of the colonized. So long as northern elites obeyed the British, they were empowered to spread their religion—Islam—and their language, Hausa. By the time the empire fell, in 1960, the flag of an independent Nigeria would rise above a country that had been converted en masse to the world’s two largest faiths, a vast experiment to test whether any nation so conceived could long endure.

Chibok, however, became a Christian town in the Muslim north, one of the small communities complicating that broad and simplistic divide. It had been founded in the 1700s by refugees fleeing bands of Muslim slave raiders. The settlers built houses beneath a single rocky hill, a safe distance removed from the slow and violent decline of the Borno Empire, a trans-Saharan kingdom fading into sand. As locals would boast, not even the nineteenth-cen...