The elderly man sits among a crowd and speaks. He is lean and his face is like old leather. He enumerates the things they have lost.
“They took cows, sheep, 500 goats, several horses.”
His telling of this story is matter-of-fact. There is little emotion, just the right amount of seriousness. “They”, in his story, refers to Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group who have have gained worldwide notoriety for the mayhem they have been unleashing in Nigeria’s northeast since 2009.
Starting in Maiduguri, Nigeria and now in neighboring countries Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, the group has relentlessly pursued its agenda of terror and has had peak periods (between 2013-2015) during which it exacted massive casualties. In recent times, though, their action and fearsomeness has, comparatively, thinned. But violence never takes up its bag and leaves after a visit. It may lie down to sleep, but it never really goes anywhere. Boko Haram, although somewhat quieter now, has gone nowhere, and more importantly, it has left behind the handmarks of violence: loss, and the memory of loss.
Long after the world has moved onto other concerns, long after the hashtags have vanished from Twitter and matters have been left in the lackadaisical hands of relevant authorities and agencies, those deprived by violence continue to live with their loss; they bear it from morning until evening. Their loss becomes their possession.
The reign of violence that has plagued northeastern Nigeria — and in fact, the whole country — some eleven years now was born out of a complex dynamic of religious fundamentalism, government corruption, political ambition, economic instability, ethnic hatreds, and societal inequality. Boko Haram has shown itself to thrive in areas with dysfunctional governments and populated by people who, deeply dissatisfied with their economic station, are looking for outlets to express this grievance and make something of themselves.
The Nigerian government and the foreign military apparatuses that have at different times come to their assistance in combating the Islamist insurgents have focused almost exclusively on security: attack the terrorists, reclaim territory, maintain a strong military presence to keep out the terrorists, destroy their strongholds and holdouts, and so on.
These are necessary, but so is a careful attention to addressing the conditions that made it possible for such violence to spring up and thrive in the first place.
The conditions that lead to the birth of violence and the conditions in which people live in the aftermath of violence are two sides of the same coin. Both of them leave open sores of privation, discontent, and poorly redressed injustices. The most frightful thing they hold in common, perhaps, is how they leave people unable to see or imagine beyond violence to other models for redress and self-betterment.
Ever since Boko Haram began its campaign of terror, more than 30,000 people have been killed, with over 3.2 million displaced. The numbers are horrifying in themselves, but they reveal something more saddening: that for several thousand people, children especially, life will in all likelihood be seen and lived through a framework of violence. The displaced people are scattered about the country (as far south as Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city) and across the border (seeking refuge and sustenance in Chad or Cameroon). A number of them end up in refugee or internally displaced persons camps (IDPs). These camps are usually targets of random attacks by suicide bombers. Residents of the camps are also exploited by some of the security personnel who watch over them, some of them demanding sex in exchange for food or selling off camp relief supplies to local stores and markets and leaving the residents hungry.
The violence does not end. It is daily and ongoing.
Dalori Camp, a camp for internally displaced persons on the outskirts of Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria, shelters over 12,000 refugees, people displaced by Boko Haram. The camp is large and dotted with white tarpaulin tents stretching into the sun.
With the aid of the UNHCR, NGOs, and other humanitarian agencies, the camp is outfitted with tent materials, food, medicine, and other relief supplies. Despite these efforts, to live in this camp — or any of the IDP camps — is still to be reminded, up till the point of numbness, in small innumerable ways, of what one has lost and continues to lose. Several women in this camp and others have lost babies to malnutrition or to miscarriage, also due to malnutrition, and to stress. Men, women, and children, wait for news of loved ones from whom they have been separated, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters. But they wait dispiritedly, as the tired wait. Several, though, learn to let go of hope, or they have it wrenched from their hands. They add these new losses to their deep catalogue of loss.
Several of the cities and towns from which residents of the camps fled — Bama, Maiduguri, Gwoza, and others — have been severely affected, many of them almost emptied out. Although the Nigerian army and the Multinational Joint Task Force, with help from the Civilian Joint Task Force (a vigilante group formed by locals to rout Boko Haram), have retaken many of the towns, resettling has been slow and the people are cautious. Fear still pervades the air; everyone realizes that peace is tenuous; a delicate, fragile thing.
To live this way is to have one’s life shaped and staked out by a culture of violence. Culture, not as something they practice or take pride in, but as a way they understand their reality and take stock of their existence, as a motif in their stories. How do people take stock? How should we take stock? Is there a way to keep from being hemmed in by the constricting perimeters of violence?
I think of a girl like Leah Sharibu, one of the 110 Dapchi schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in February 2018. She had the chance to be returned home to her parents and family but, for refusing to renounce her faith and accept Islam, she wasn’t. I like to see this not only as standing against violence but also as stemming the tide of loss, the loss of one’s faith, the loss of oneself to fear.
It is true that there can be no easy promises or quick solutions, for violence does not make short visits and its handmarks are heavy. But there can be sincere examination and redress of the socio-economic and political imbalances that have created an atmosphere conducive to insurgency. And as Sharibu has shown, there can be small acts of courage to defy the powers that enforce suffering and loss. Because to live from day to day ruled by fear and saddled with the knowledge that your loss can only grow, your dispossession unredressed, is to remain, even when the bombs are not going off, victims of violence.
Image credit: Voice of America
