There are vast distances between the cities. The terrain is varied. Forest gives way to savanna with scattered trees (shea, locust bean), and then to drier Sahel landscape. On these journeys one forgets city life, enters into something more delicate and more fragile.
Girls walk by the side of the road, a cluster of bright patterns. Boys play in the dusty fields. Every now and again, a church flashes by, whitewashed or with a plain mud façade. Ways of life mix here in northern Nigeria; there are many Christians and Muslims, and many languages. “The Christian south,” it is often written, “the Muslim north,” but the country’s truth is coexistence. This is true of the so-called Middle Belt, and in Kaduna, and Jos, and, continuing in the northeast direction, beyond my journey, in Borno.
In the town of Chibok, the girls, mostly sixteen or seventeen, had been cautious. They knew, as everyone did, that schools were being targeted. About forty boys had been killed at a school in Yobe last July. They’d been lined up in their dorms and shot. In the same state, twenty-nine others had died in February, their bodies burned, the culprits never found. And so the girls had come back to Chibok only for their exams—a quick, calculated risk before they returned home.
Where are they now? The shock of a sudden captivity will have given way to other fears. There are more than two hundred of them, Muslim and Christian. Nigeria’s northeastern border is massive, porous. They don’t know when they crossed the border, or if they crossed the border. They could be in Niger, or Chad, or Cameroon (these three neighboring countries are impoverished states with weak security). The girls know only what their captors say. They have lost track of time. But they feel, in their bodies, the distances covered by the rumbling trucks. They cannot imagine what the world is thinking about them, or if it is.
And what are they themselves thinking of, huddled in their dozens, warned to stay quiet? Not of the murders of Boko Haram’s founder and some of his followers by Nigeria police five years ago, which sparked the violent phase of the group’s campaign of terror. Not of the thousands killed during that campaign, in suicide bombs, attacks on churches, and shootings at restaurants, a frightening catalog of atrocities. Not of the global war on terrorism, nor of America’s strategic goals in that war. (Already, in Niger, a drone base is assembled; already American specialists are on their way to help the Nigerian government.) Not of Baga, some two hundred miles from Chibok, where last year government forces massacred two hundred civilians, nor of Maiduguri, where, in mid-March this year, more than five hundred men were executed on suspicion of being terrorists. Not of Abuja, where bombs now explode with unnerving frequency. Not of next year’s elections, which the President wants to win at all costs, nor of the corruption fueling his reëlection bid.
They are not thinking of Twitter, where the captivity is the cause of the day, nor of the campaigns on the streets of Lagos for a more competent and less callous government, nor of the rallies in front of Nigeria’s embassies worldwide, nor of the suddenly ramped-up coverage by international media, nor of how this war will engulf even those who are only just beginning to hear about it, nor of those who, free for now, will someday become captives.
They are perhaps thinking only that night is falling again, and that the men will come to each of them again, an unending horror.
Teju Cole is a photographer, and the author of two works of fiction, “Open City” and “Every Day Is for the Thief.” He contributes frequently to Page-Turner.
Read Alexis Okeowo’s reporting on Boko Haram and the Chibok community’s response to the kidnapping.
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Photograph: Christoph Bangert/Iaif/Redux.
