‘I have never seen the General vulnerable to any situation. He is always in control’

Fatima told me once. Well neither had I, until it was my turn on the duty roster to clean his house. I spent a week and some days doing everything he asked me to. He didn’t speak much. The sharp contrast between who he was outside his house and his personality indoors was staggering. I came to the realization that he was human after all; and that was like a groundbreaking discovery for me.

He always drove me out of the room when he received a telephone call.

‘Nobody is allowed to remain in the HQ when I am on the phone’, he would say.

On the last day of my assignment to the General’s house, he received a call by his bedside while I was sitting on the floor dusting the numerous pairs of boots under the bed. He knew I was still there but strangely, he received the call anyway. Whoever was on the other end of the line seemed far more powerful than General Abubakar. After saying ‘hello’, the General froze and stared out the window as if he was having an out-of-body experience. Then he attempted to speak a few times, but the words came out incomplete. It was clear he was being cut-off by the caller with  every attempt he made at speaking. Finally, as if given the go-ahead now, he started mentioning cities in the Northern parts of Nigeria and some figures:

‘In Kano, 20. Maiduguri, 12. Kaduna, 11….’.  He choked for a while and then went on to say ‘No, we are not wasting your money Sir, we haven’t been too successful in our latest attacks because the government forces have been a thorn in our flesh’.

Sir? The General had a boss? The whole conversation began to make sense to me at that point. Those numbers he was mentioning were the death tolls from their recent attacks. I had already heard the numbers; I had heard them from the stories the militants told us when they arrived at the camp after each invasion. So I knew. Had the death tolls been lesser, I wouldn’t be any less devastated than I was already. Apparently, ‘Sir’ wasn’t too pleased by the small number of people losing their lives to Boko Haram invasions in the past weeks. He should have been there to see the militants gloat over their kills like some village boys retelling the story of their snail-catching expedition.

I wanted to know who ‘Sir’ was. I wanted to know the person whose voice made General Abubakar stroll back and forth in his own room with less confidence than even I would. I wanted to know who it was that was throwing money behind the terrorists. I really wanted to know. Was he the same person behind those trucks that marched into the camp at midnight almost every fortnight to deliver guns and all kinds of weaponry to the militants? All those sophisticated machines and cameras stashed away in boxes inside the General’s house, who bought them?

The revelation I had after eavesdropping on that telephone conversation left me more petrified. It was like a door had been opened right before me, revealing who the real enemy was, only that he was faceless. The deception of terrorism is that we often loath the puppets parading themselves on the internet and on the news without thinking who could possibly be the puppeteer. ‘Sir’ could be taking a stroll on a beach at Hawaii. He could be walking in the midst of the horde on the sidewalks of New York City or jogging with his dog down a sandy path in Saudi Arabia. Whoever he was or wherever he lived, we should all be scared because he is faceless. If ‘Sir’ was that nasal voice on the phone that could make even General Abubakar look like he needed to use the bathroom, then we should all be really scared.  I just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that a worse-than-the-General walked freely somewhere on God’s green earth yet the General was in the news because he posted videos on YouTube proudly claiming responsibility for every Boko Haram invasion. They are fooling us all. What hope do you have in a war when you don’t know the real enemy? The guy who claims to be behind the evil acts of Boko Haram is actually a front. That is very scary!

Early the next morning after the telephone incident, the militants came into our tents to wake us up. They came wielding assault rifles as if preparing for a war or another invasion. We would have known if they were about to embark on another attack. Before they left the camp for any attack, they were always taken through a series of rituals. I couldn’t tell whether the rituals were for fortification or a preparation for death – seeing that their whole psyche was conditioned to accept death for a ‘holy’ cause. Then out comes the Babalawo from nowhere. None of us had ever laid eyes on him on any ordinary day in the camp. However, the day before every Boko Haram attack, he would appear and lead the jihadists through a series of rituals. The atmosphere was extremely charged by their chanting and dancing. Baba blew white powder over each of them while hopping and throwing himself about as if possessed. He had this eerie appearance. He was barely clothed by the animal skin he threw over his left shoulder. Anytime I saw him, I made funny mental pictures of his appearance, because I felt he was too small to be of any spiritual use. A beaded dark imp was what I often pictured in my head. His whole demeanor spelled evil. The beads on baba’s wrists and waist rattled abruptly with each step he took and that made it easy to notice his presence even while we were half-asleep. Sometimes at night we could hear him reciting incantations outside our tent.

So it was obvious the militants weren’t preparing for another invasion. I was amongst the 30 girls selected and forced to get dressed as quickly as possible. We were packed in the bed of one of the big trucks. The truck took off right after the General took his seat in the front. It was quite a nostalgic moment for me when we drove through the gates: I was reminded of how they brought us in. We were driven to a secluded part of the forest where the grass was ankle-height. The militants went about setting up cameras, hoisting their flags and posing with their guns in front of the camera. Within a few minutes we were all before the camera. The General gave a lengthy speech about selling some of us into slavery and how his aim was to establish a caliphate in the northern parts of Nigeria. Even the Boko haram militants were oblivious to the main reason why the General was making those claims in the video. But, I knew it. It was all just a ploy to remain relevant in world terrorism. He had to do something to salvage his fading image as a sadistic terrorist leader. He wanted to get into the good books of ‘Sir’ again. Pathetic!

Fatima crept into our tent that very night and slapped me on my back to wake me up. She whispered in my ears:

‘Isa, has agreed to help us escape. He will be here at 12 am. Stay awake. I’ll come for you’.

‘Ok’

I kept my eyes open for the next 5 minutes. I needed to stay awake to mentally process what had just happened. First of all, I was the one who was always talking about escaping. So if there was ever a plan to escape, I had to be the one to initiate it. The Lord knows how much I had to fight to maintain my relationship with Fatima because of the number of times I spoke about escaping. She simply didn’t want to hear it.

‘It wasn’t worth it’, she often said. I couldn’t blame her though. She had been a witness to the execution of so many girls and even militants who attempted to escape. The terror of those scenes had crippled her. To her, the mesh fence surrounding the camp was rather imaginary but the terror and confinement she felt from within were shackles she couldn’t shake off. This same Fatima was the one initiating our escape. How she got to convince Isa to be of help, I couldn’t tell. Isa was the water tanker driver; he sometimes drove into the camp with a truckload of drums filled with water too. I knew Fatima had an amorous relationship with him to some extent. She told me how he often expressed disgust at the activities of Boko Haram. Isa was driving the water tanker purely for the money and not out of principle. He was vehemently opposed to terrorism – but he needed the money. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that he was the one assisting us in our escape. What would make a man want to put his life on the line for two captives? We didn’t deserve any of this. I feared for his life because even if we were successful with our escape, he would be going back to the camp every other week to deliver drums of water. They might trace our escape to him and he would be executed. He of all people should have known this. And if the reality of that didn’t deter him, then nothing else would.

I must have dozed off. Fatima with her baby strapped to her back came calling again. I didn’t pick anything. We stepped out of the tent and there they were crowded around the truck. They were offloading the drums. I pulled at Fatima’s dress and told her ‘let’s go back inside, they will see us’. Apparently, she had a plan. We stood frozen in front of our tent, all that while Fatima looked away from the militants standing around the truck and focused her attention on the two conversing in front of the empty drums arranged a few feet away from the truck. I wanted to go back in. We would have been severely punished for staying up that late not to talk of standing outside the tent. When Fatima whispered ‘let’s go’ I knew it was time to run because of the urgency in her voice. The two militants had walked away so we ran towards the empty drums. The rest of them were standing at the opened end at the back of the truck. Our only option was to climb up from the side. Fatima let me go first. She unstrapped her baby from her back, handed her to me and then she joined us a while after. The two of us squatted in the midst of the empty drums while the militants packed more into the bed of the truck.

The engine of the truck started. The drums were shaking and knocking against each other. There was nothing to hold onto. Nevertheless, we remained still till the truck left the camp. Then Fatima stood up and span the lid of one of the drums open. In a single leap I entered the drum, Fatima handed her sleeping baby to me first and then she climbed into the drum slowly.  

‘Today is the happiest day of my life’

‘Ada, Me too oo’, Fatima responded.

She left the lid halfway open to let in some air. I thought of Mariama and the other girls and how I would miss them. But nothing could be compared to the sweet taste of freedom. We were crammed up in a drum, but we knew we were freer than we had ever been in the last few months.

‘It is their guilty conscience that keeps them away from Allah’s presence’

No, I do not agree with that! The cloths they loosely covered themselves with at night probably did a better job of pinning them to their beds and away from their maker’s presence than the guilt of their evil deeds – that is if there was even a hint of guilt in their hearts.

The heinousness of their actions was like a pungent smell attempting to choke you to death. So I feared the dawn and all the anticipation of daylight terror that it brought.  I was often either snapping out of a scary nightmare or in a limbo between sleep and consciousness, fighting gory images from the scenes I had seen the previous day and the stories I had heard told. Somewhere in between the fear of the known and the anticipation of unknown evil, I had made my bed. And that was how the dawn of every morning at Sambisa was like for me.

I remember vividly, the morning after our first night there, we were introduced to the ‘Boko Haram wives’. There were so many of them! Most of whom either had babies strapped to their backs or they carried them on one hip while slightly bending in the opposite direction. That was when I first saw her … Fatima. Fatima wore a long flowing hijab that almost touched her waist. The circle her hijab made on her face made her appear as one peeping at the whole world through a hole. Her facial skin resembled a stretched elastic material, the way it allowed pointy bones to protrude at the corners of her eyes and cheeks. Unlike the others, her countenance appeared heavy with concern and affection. Maybe we merely reminded her of herself. But you could almost feel the kindness radiating from her stare.

So when it was time for them to teach us how to wear the hijab, I walked straight to her. She told me her name was Fatima and I told her mine. We made a connection right there and then. Fatima didn’t bother teaching me how to put on the hijab … she just did it for me.

‘Stiffen your neck Ada, or else the hijab will slip off your head’. She said.

I held still and made sure my entire body was stiff. She nudged at my shoulders and upon noticing how stiff I was, she giggled. By that, what should have been a madam-servant relationship melted into a friendship. Formality dissolved into cordiality. I felt I could ask her anything. When she pressed her hand on top of my head to hold the cloth in position, I felt the weight of her palm. Not like a burdensome weight but as an act depicting ownership. I was hers from then on. The other girls were being knocked and smacked in the face for not following the exact instructions given them. But Fatima gently wrapped the cloth around my head and pinned it beneath my chin.

‘I want mine to be as long as yours’ I told her. She giggled again and said ‘Ok’.

Her friendship came in as a timely relief. Mariama and I had grown distant after we arrived at Sambisa. I often saw her emerging from one of the wooden structures close to the fence at the far end of the camp. And anytime she saw me looking at her, she’d quickly look away and feign ‘busybody’. Mariama wouldn’t maintain eye contact with me for more than 5 seconds. She sometimes worked with the rest of us but for some reason she was often excused from fetching water from the tank to the quarters of the General and his men. I couldn’t believe the rumors, but with the benefit of hindsight I can boldly say she was married off to one of the high-ranked militants in Boko Haram. According to Fatima, Boko Haram wives are forced to reduce contact with the other girls. The rest of us were just human bombs waiting to detonate at some market place or school at the command of General Abubakar. Girls like Mariama were married off to high-ranked militants. They were the hens destined to lay and brood over eggs that would hatch to reveal the much anticipated foul fowls: a new generation of Boko Haram terrorists. The rest were also sold to some human traffickers and rich herdsmen from neighboring countries. Fatima had been with the militants for 18 months and knew the ins and outs of the camp, so I believed her.

‘I am a widow’

She told me once. Her husband died in kano. He was one of the militants. Fatima still spoke of him with such fondness that you would imagine they had a fairy-tale kind of marriage. They didn’t. She chuckled sarcastically when she said:

‘Alidu was only there to ward off the other militants who attempted to rape and physically abuse me so he alone could do that to me’

Fatima was confident in her guts. She believed Alidu was scared that night before he went to Kano. General Abubakar summoned all the jihadists the night before they left the camp. When Alidu came back to their wooden shed, he couldn’t look at her or their son. His last words to Fatima were, ‘… take care of your son’. There was a surge of mixed feelings that ran through my heart when she spoke about how the trucks came back to the camp the following day with fewer men than they left with. At the gathering where the militants were telling their stories and various experiences at Kano, she looked everywhere for him but couldn’t find him. I imagined the scene was just like the day we came: too chaotic for anybody to care to tell her the whereabouts of Alidu. The surviving militants took turns in mentioning names of those who had passed on to paradise. That was when Fatima heard Alidu’s name mentioned. The mixed feelings that must have hit her: news of the death of her husband and abuser. From that moment on, her life changed for the worse.

She was raped almost every night since then by different men.

‘Sometimes two. Sometimes three. Sometimes I didn’t know how many, because I passed out in the middle of all the torture only to wake up in a tent full of stinking snoring men’.

When she said this I could feel the tears sting at my eyes. Then she told me she sometimes even woke up in a different tent from the one she remembered being taken to. At this point I lost the fight to my tears; warm tears came streaming down my cheeks. I was scared. In my fear I yearned to comfort her, but words failed me.  What do you tell such a person? That it was going to be alright? In hell? I couldn’t lie to her even if I tried. I wish I could uplift her spirit but mine was quickly sinking into an abyss of despair and in need of urgent rescue too.

‘You have been through hell’. I finally said.

‘Yes I have.’ She heaved a long sigh.

‘It may be your turn soon. When they come for you remember to keep your legs wide apart, eh?’ She pulled at her left earlobe with her left hand while saying this. ‘And close your eyes till they are done’.

That was it? That was the drill? How was that supposed to make it any bearable? All the time I spent with Fatima revealed one thing: though she never mentioned it, she had no desire to escape. She never called Sambisa home, but she pretty much was at home there. And I felt she was walking me down that road too. I didn’t like it.

As our custom was, before we went to sleep, one of us would share her experience with the rest. Often sad stories. Often stories of rape and abuse. That was one way we bonded as fellow Boko haram slaves. One night Hawa narrated her ordeal at the hands of one of the militants to us; it was the saddest story I had heard told. Whispering to nobody in particular, she narrated her story knowing that she already had our ears without asking. Hawa’s made us all scared. Fear hanged in the room. The fear was so tangible, you could touch it. She recalled being hit from behind with the butt of a gun by one of General’s men. The heavy knock rendered her comatose for hours. The very moment her eyes were opened, she felt a sharp pain at the back of her head and the militant’s heavy arm resting on her bare back. Hawa turned around and saw the heaving hairy chest of the beast next to her. She panicked, but mastered the courage to get up. Finally she covered her nakedness with a cloth, stepped out and took slow painful steps to our tent in the dark.

Hawa had always attracted so much attention from the militants because she had a fine body. For obvious reasons, she was always sent for to run some errand or clean their wooden sheds. She couldn’t find the words to describe the torture but we perfectly understood her cries and cried with her. When she said her head still hurt, three girls drew closer to comfort her.  With a soaked rug, one of them massaged her head where it hurt. As if rehearsed, she dabbed at the back of Hawa’s head after each sentence she whispered. The incident inspired more than sympathy in us  – we were all petrified! I thought it was a case of paranoia at first when she said she suspected the Boko Haram wives had a hand in it.  But she went on to tell us how she had always been harassed by them.

‘You want to come and steal our husbands abi? We shall see…’

One of them had said this to Hawa a day before her bitter experience.

And as she walked through the dark after the rape, a bunch of them saw her and immediately started scoffing at her.

For this reason and many more, I was always grateful for Fatima. Her love and affection kept me sane. Sometimes I felt she went through all the pain for my sake, that I wouldn’t have to taste much of it. She taught me when to feign period cramps to avoid being whisked away in the night. Her predictions were so accurate, it was as if she knew the times the libido of the militants peaked. Yet, she still assured me that a time was coming when that trick wouldn’t work anymore. A harsh reality I had to face. But who am I to complain? In the middle of a God-forsaken forest, I found a sister and for that I was very grateful to God.