The idea that the Nigerian story is a “tale of two countries” is not new. Chinua Achebe used it in his 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah, which depicts a fictional West African country called Kangan (a loose stand-in for Nigeria) deeply divided between its capital’s wealth and cosmopolitanism and the poverty and neglect of its interior. But many Nigerians (and a fair number of outsiders) see the most important division between Nigerians as civilizational, pitting an increasingly prosperous majority-Christian “south” against a “backward” Muslim-majority north. The two halves of what we call Nigeria today—brought together by colonial fiat in 1914—do have important and durable differences in terms of culture and language, in how they were governed by their colonial rulers, and (to some extent) in their levels of prosperity today. These differences are real, and they have played a significant role in shaping the country’s legacy of ethnic and religious conflict.
But are they inevitable and unresolvable? Many Nigerians still agree with the legendary politician Obafemi Awolowo, who wrote that Nigeria was a country without a nation, a “mere geographic expression.” For his part, Achebe, in his final book in 2012, There Was a Country, revealed that he had come to see the country’s pained history of violence and civil war in civilizational terms, describing his own ethnic group (the Igbo) as naturally open to cultural change and progress, while Muslims from the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups (collectively the majority in northern Nigeria) are “hindered by a wary religion” and their desire for domination.3
But if there are really two Nigerias, these simplistic and reductive accounts do not do either of them justice. For one, they mask the many ways in which Nigeria’s economic, political, and social interconnectedness transcends religious and ethnic differences. For another, in Nigeria, corruption and its benefits know no particular ethnic or religious boundaries, a fact that has often made it harder, rather than easier, to build coalitions to address the country’s biggest challenges. And, finally, they fail to recognize just how much the citizens of any country, whatever their differences, share a common fate. Sooner or later, a crisis for some Nigerians becomes a crisis for all.
The Stolen Girls
Unofficially, Boko Haram became a “crisis for all” on the night of April 14, 2014, in the sleepy town of Chibok, roughly 120 kilometers south of Maiduguri. There, members of Boko Haram stormed the compound of a girls’ secondary school, reportedly looking for building supplies. What they found instead were hundreds of young women who had recently returned from a break to take their final examinations. Despite rumors of an impending attack, government forces had been slow to provide additional security, so when the assailants arrived they encountered almost no resistance. In all, they kidnapped 276 students that night, girls who aspired to become doctors and nurses, teachers and scientists. Although “the Chibok girls,” as they would come to be known, were hardly Boko Haram’s first victims, their fate quickly became a symbol at home and abroad of the struggles and violence faced by many ordinary Nigerians living in the shadow of their country’s prosperity.
This kidnapping was only the most recent tragedy in a community that had suffered more than its share. The town takes its name from the local hills where its residents once fled to escape from slave raiders sent by powerful local kingdoms, who roamed the region until the late nineteenth century. More recently, as a Christian-majority enclave of roughly sixty thousand citizens in a state home to nearly six million, Chibok’s residents have often faced inattention or even marginalization from local authorities. Not that there was much to go around: Borno State and its neighbors in the northeastern region suffer from some of the highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, and child and maternal health risks in all of Nigeria.
Soon after the attack, there was a surge in international interest in Boko Haram, accompanied by new efforts to explain the group’s motives, goals, and place in the world of global terrorism. Much of it depicted the group’s actions first and foremost as an attack on girls and their access to education. American celebrities such Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and (perhaps most famously) Michelle Obama promoted the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, originally begun on Twitter by Nigerians, as a vehicle for drawing attention to the female victims of religious extremism around the world. Another similar narrative emphasized the role of poverty and a lack of education in driving extremist violence in places like northeastern Nigeria. After all, what better evidence of the link between poverty, ignorance, and violence than a group of radical extremists in one of the poorest parts of the world who declared “Western education” forbidden by God and kidnapped girls who attempted to access it?
Unfortunately, this outrage did little to stem the tide of violence. At best, stories like the Chibok kidnapping can lead to globally organized movements that lobby governments and international agencies. At worst, sensationalist international media coverage actively detracts from the work of local organizers, whose appeals are drowned out by the megaphone of what the Nigerian American writer Teju Cole has referred to as the “White-Savior Industrial Complex.” However well-intentioned, this global activism has had very little real on-the-ground impact on either Boko Haram or Nigerian policy toward the conflict. And while Boko Haram’s victims have certainly drawn less attention internationally than those of attacks in cities such as Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Istanbul (to name only a few), it is not a lack of press coverage that allowed the group to kill more than twelve thousand civilians and displace 2.6 million from their homes and communities from 2010 to 2017.
Boko Haram as a Nigerian Story
Chibok and its aftermath are essential to the Boko Haram story, but one of our goals is to take you beyond those headlines and into a deeper understanding of the conflict’s origins and its consequences for the millions of ordinary Nigerians caught in the crosshairs. Cutting through a tangled web of evidence, we hope to offer a clear and concise story about who the members of Boko Haram are, where they came from, how they have operated, and the toll they have taken on the ordinary Nigerians (and Cameroonians, Chadians, and Nigeriens) in their path.
More broadly, we hope that the book will help readers understand how the story of the “two Nigerias”—one wealthy and globalized, the other poor and insecure—has influenced both Boko Haram’s emergence and the Nigerian government’s tragically ineffective response to it. Certainly, it is important to acknowledge Boko Haram’s place in a larger global story about the rise of jihadist terror and insurgency in the early twenty-first century. But we also argue that the group’s history, rise, and (hopefully) fall are deeply connected to this Nigerian story, in which a country of great wealth and opportunity nonetheless found itself confronting one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies.
In the hands of the country’s ruling class, a simplistic version of the “two Nigerias” story emphasizing the inevitability of conflict over the country’s ethnic and religious differences helped nurture the conditions that made Boko Haram possible. Yet, as we hope to show, a more nuanced understanding of how inequality, injustice, and poor governance unite many Nigerians across lines of ethnic and religious identity also reveals how the struggle against Boko Haram has brought out the country’s best. Beyond discussions of Boko Haram’s history, ideology, and tactics, this book aims to tell stories about how a wide range of Nigerians—particularly artists, writers, and musicians—have responded to the crisis, often in ways that bring Nigerians together rather than pushing them further apart.
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As of this writing, the story of Boko Haram and the fight against it remains unfinished. Although the Nigerian government has repeatedly declared them “technically defeated,” they continue to kill. Millions of residents of northeastern Nigeria (and across the Lake Chad Basin) are unable to return to their homes and begin the long process of rebuilding their communities, while others are terrorized (and, increasingly, taxed for revenue to sustain the insurgency) by members