The Chibok Girls by Helon Habila

Author:Helon Habila
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241980903
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Maiduguri

Three days before my trip to Chibok I had flown into Maiduguri from Abuja. The flight had been delayed for over an hour due to bad weather. The Harmattan hung over Abuja and most of northern Nigeria in a white, soupy pall, cutting visibility to near zero. The weather is fickle and changes fast around this time of the year. By May, Maiduguri would get so intolerably hot that if you took a shower, before you left the bathroom the water on your body would have turned into sweat. But despite the swirling dust and the dehydrating wind, this was, weather-wise, the best time to come to Maiduguri. Because electricity and air-conditioning cannot always be guaranteed, better the Harmattan than the hellish heat. It gets so hot here, the joke goes, that you don’t need to boil water to make tea—it comes out of the tap already boiling.

The invisible landscape below our plane was mostly Sahel savanna, the vegetation getting progressively thinner and drier as one leaves Abuja and enters Borno State in the northeast. Borno State is vast, covering 27,372 square miles, making it the second largest state in the country. It has the most international borders of any state, adjacent to Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.

In the heart of the state and running toward the southeast is the Sambisa Forest, which stretches from Borno State to neighboring Yobe, Gombe, Bauchi, and Kano. It is populated by thick-barked and thorny trees and bushes, which makes it hard to penetrate. A few hundred miles northwards the vegetation peters out into the Sahara. Southeastwards it meets the Mandara Mountains and the Gashaka Gumti National Park, which forms a corridor into the central African forest.

This is Boko Haram territory. If the group, which sprouted up organically in this region, were to randomly pick any terrain in the whole country for the best cover and the best bolt-holes, it couldn’t have hit on a better place.

Abbas and I took a taxi into town from the airport. A reporter friend had told me what happened when he mentioned Boko Haram to a cab driver. He had arrived from Lagos and at the airport he had grabbed the first taxi he could find. Pressed for time and always conscious of his looming deadline, he had blurted out to the driver, “Can you take me to where I can meet Boko Haram members?” The car came to a screeching halt and the driver turned to him. “Don’t ask me about Boko Haram. I don’t know them. My agreement with you is to take you to your hotel, no more.”

So I employed a less direct approach. “The last time I was in Maiduguri was over twenty years ago,” I told the driver. “So much has changed.”

Our driver, however, turned out to be rather garrulous, his Kanuri accented Hausa rising and falling with the cadence of his speech.

“Our problem is modernity,” he said. “We accept modernity too quickly. Now a woman will go out with a foreigner, a white man.

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