Acknowledgments
Thank you to Gill Berchowitz of Ohio University Press for her tireless support and encouragement of this project. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions. Over the years, we have both accumulated substantial debts in the form of support and encouragement, and we cannot thank everyone here. Nonetheless, we wish to especially acknowledge Cornell University’s Institute for Africa Development, the University of Vermont Rakin Lecture series, and the Northwestern University Nollywood Working Group, who hosted presentations of this work in draft form. We are also grateful to Philip Ostien, who provided invaluable primary sources on Boko Haram’s early days, and to the communities of Kannywood filmmakers and Jos-based music video producers who were generous with their work responding to and influenced by the conflict. We dedicate this book to the lives of all of Boko Haram’s victims, and to the remarkable courage of so many Nigerians affected by its violence.
Map 1. Nigeria. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
Map 2. Northeastern Nigeria. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
Introduction
In July 2009, a showdown was brewing in Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria’s largest city. On one side were the followers of a charismatic local Muslim scholar named Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf had risen over the course of a decade from relative anonymity to become one of the most influential (and radical) clerics in the country, building a community of thousands of followers informally known around the region as “Boko Haram” (roughly, “Westernization Is Forbidden”). A powerful public speaker and skilled organizer, Yusuf taught that Nigerian Muslims had fallen away from the “true” Islam of the Prophet’s time and that it could only be restored by rejecting outside influences such as democracy and Western-style education. To that end, he and his supporters had amassed money, property, and (it was rumored) weapons in anticipation of a showdown with a government they regarded as entirely illegitimate.1
On the other side were fearful local authorities, many of whom had watched Yusuf’s rise with interest and even sought to co-opt or collaborate with him on their own political schemes in the years following Nigeria’s surprising return to democratic rule in 1999. In recent months, they had responded to growing evidence of his strength and rumored connections to more violent movements in North Africa and the Middle East by stepping up their campaign of public harassment and intimidation, and the situation was clearly escalating. It would take only a little spark to set off an explosion.
On July 26, Yusuf’s supporters struck first, and the police and military responded with their full might. Within just a few days, eight hundred members of the group were dead, many reportedly killed in cold blood by security forces after the fighting had stopped. The tally included Yusuf himself, illegally executed behind a police station after interrogation. Soon after, the Nigerian government declared the movement over and the problem solved. Yet within a year, Boko Haram had rebuilt itself under the leadership of a charismatic and vicious figure named Abubakar Shekau, Yusuf’s former second-in-command. Under Shekau, Boko Haram fashioned itself into a violent jihadist movement dedicated to destroying the Nigerian state and establishing its own strident vision of Islam as the law of the land. Within just a few years, it would become one of the deadliest insurgencies in the world, capable of mounting well-planned bombings, brutal hit-and-run attacks and assassinations, and even winning pitched battles with the Nigerian Army.
Yet for the vast majority of Nigerians, the realities of the war—and by 2013 it was indeed a war, with a federal state of emergency in three of Nigeria’s thirty-six states and a massive troop deployment—made little impression. Nigeria’s political leadership downplayed the conflict’s severity, both to its own people and the international community. Meanwhile, rumors (partially true but often wildly exaggerated) that the group was supported by foreigners circulated as proof that Boko Haram was not really a Nigerian problem after all but a local affair for Muslims “up there” to solve.
Even after nearly a decade of conflict that has displaced more than two million people, killed tens of thousands of civilians, and opened up a massive new front in the “global war on terror,” the conflict’s geographic isolation to one of the country’s poorest corners has left many Nigerians deeply alienated from the war in their midst. And although the broader global public has occasionally caught glimpses of this conflict, it remains poorly understood and underreported. The result has been nothing less than a massive and complex catastrophe that, as of this writing, affects millions of people across the Lake Chad Basin region, even as politicians in Abuja (Nigeria’s capital) and international officials debate potential courses of action and struggle to provide security and assistance to some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
In part, this book is the story of Boko Haram as a movement and the violence it has perpetrated. But it is also a social history that examines the conflict in northeastern Nigeria as a phenomenon much larger than a single terrorist group and its actions. We have chosen to tell this story because, as you will soon see, we view Boko Haram’s rise and bloody career as not only a product of its religious vision but also a consequence of Nigeria’s deep-seated social and political challenges. Understanding Boko Haram and the destruction it has wrought requires first understanding the local circumstances that gave rise to it and that have fed the conflict ever since.
A Tale of Two Countries
In 2013, a story in the British newspaper the Guardian reported that Nigeria was the second-fastest-growing market in the world for champagne.2 When Nigeria makes the international news, it is often for this sort of human-interest narrative that points a bit too cleverly to the country’s vast contradictions. The country is home not only to famous oil reserves (35 billion barrels as of 2017) but also to two of Africa’s three wealthiest men (entrepreneurs Aliko Dangote and Mike Adenuga). For anyone who has spent time in the tonier parts of Lagos, Nigeria’s 21-million-person megacity, or encountered wealthy Nigerians abroad, it is not hard to believe that this rapidly growing country of 180 million citizens is an increasingly profitable market for luxury goods.
In recent years, Nigeria’s wealthy reputation has become one of its most visible exports. Everything from a 2016 documentary called Lagos to London: Britain’s New Super-Rich to a recent “Kleptocracy Tour” of London highlighting suspiciously expensive real estate owned by Nigerian politicians paints an admittedly not particularly flattering picture of a nation in ascendance. And, indeed, at least some Nigerians see this extravagance as an opportunity. Since 2009, when Nigeria’s Ministry of Information launched a notorious “rebranding” campaign designed to change the country’s international image, the government’s goal has been to repackage it as an up-and-coming power, deflecting attention away from the corruption and poverty that remain major problems in the lives of ordinary citizens.
This new Nigerian image—a country that dominates international music and film charts, hosts powerhouse media and fashion industries, and is a hub of investment and financing for technological innovation—is true, and it reflects improvements in the lives of many Nigerians. But it also obscures other, harder realities. Nigeria is the only large country in the world that has seen an increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty since 1990, and, although it returned to civilian rule in 1999, the promise of (as many Nigerians put it) a “democratic dividend” paid off to ordinary, working-class people in the form of better government and greater attention to issues of social justice has not arrived.
What does this inequality look like? Lagos’s glamour hides massive slums such as Makoko, where hundreds of thousands live in ramshackle houses built on stilts in the city’s lagoon. And the country’s inadequate infrastructure means that even middle-class Nigerians struggle to obtain services