Many people can recall where we were in April of 2014 when the news broke that almost 300 schoolgirls from the remote town of Chibok in Borno state, north-east Nigeria, had been kidnapped. As well as sparking immediate national outrage, the story also quickly became a subject of global concern as the fate of the girls was relayed around the world at the lightning speed of social media. Soon, everyone from America’s first lady to A-list celebrities was sharing photos and videos and the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.
Nigerian security forces were joined by western intelligence agents and international mediators, who all descended on the forest controlled by the Boko Haram militant group in a concerted effort to free the kidnapped young women. Yet, as Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw recount in painstaking detail in Bring Back Our Girls, the rescue effort faced myriad hurdles, from the difficult terrain to the shadowy nature of the kidnappers.
Its significance also reached way beyond an impoverished region in west Africa’s regional powerhouse. The kidnapping, they write, is “not just a story about a remote tragedy-stricken town in Nigeria, but a parable and perhaps a cautionary tale about the flawed interconnected workings of our butterfly’s-wings world”.
The story also shone a light on a protracted regional cross-border jihadist militancy that has swelled its ranks with young men enlisted against their will and used girls as bargaining chips for its war against secular authority in and around the Lake Chad region.
The authors, journalists with the Wall Street Journal, are careful to properly situate the events of April 2014 in the broader context that was lost in the initial celebrity hashtag-fuelled news blitz. Education and the young were a particular target for Boko Haram. Their jihadist campaign has seen the torching of dozens of schools as well as the slaughter of teachers accused of “polluting children with godless knowledge”. Then there is the group’s established practice of kidnappings — of boys as well as young women — which in the 2014 case was made more complicated by the sudden rise in the “value” of this group of girls who had become subject of a global campaign.
Here, Bring Back Our Girls is particularly illuminating when it turns its focus to the rich cast of players in the complex art of conflict mediation. However, the most remarkable and humanising part of the book is not the story of the men who took these girls or those who sat in secret meetings trying and often failing to rescue them, or even of the protesters whose voices took their plight to the world through the internet. It is the story of the girls that they themselves documented at great personal risk.
These brave secret diarists are the true heroes of this interrogation of why it took so long and so many attempts to get any results despite all the resources invested in the rescue efforts. The authors delicately record how these young women chronicled their own abduction, their captivity and trauma, the Bible verses that gave them strength and kept their hearts defiant, the phone numbers of family members, love letters to their crushes back home. They were the primary witnesses to this event that shook the world; witnesses to acts of rebellion and acts of torture. It is thus significant that this book puts these young women centre-stage in a space that has made them victims, currency for trade and a claim to fame for bounty and glory hunters.
There are a few historical inaccuracies early in the book relating to the arrival of Islam in northern Nigeria. But these are mostly oversimplifications rather than outright errors and do not stand in the way of what ultimately becomes a gripping narrative. Elsewhere, important background information appears to have been sacrificed on the altar of narrative.
In introducing new Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s fundamentalist origins, little is mentioned of his actual ideological roots or those of his predecessor, Mohammed Yusuf. It is important to understand the theological roots of the violent engagement with the secular Nigerian state.
While words like “radical” and “fundamentalist” see a lot of active service, it might have been useful to examine more of Yusuf’s and Shekau’s Salafist jihadist ideology that seeks salvation through a return to purist Islamic governance. This world view has inspired many a fundamentalist and is not simply the creation of two deranged hotheads with an axe to grind with the Nigerian state.
Almost seven years after the Chibok kidnapping, many of the girls have been freed. Yet, with Boko Haram still waging its campaign of attacks and kidnappings, understanding the movement’s underlying dynamic is as urgent now as it was back in 2014.
Bring Back Our Girls: The Astonishing Untold Story of the Survival and Rescue of Nigeria’s Missing Schoolgirls, by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw, Swift Press, RRP£18.99/Harper RRP$28.99, 432 pages
Elnathan John is the author of ‘Born on a Tuesday’
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