What’s Worse Than a Girl Being Kidnapped?

Abuja, Nigeria — We were late getting to Chibok. Our driver was delayed. On the way to meet us, he explained, he had seen a mother carrying a sick child on her back and stopped to give them a lift to the hospital. By the time they arrived, the child had died.

Two years ago, more than 200 girls were kidnapped f-rom the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok by Boko Haram. A few dozen have since escaped, but a vast majority remain prisoners of the Islamist insurgents. A Nigerian nonprofit group, the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, had asked me to organize a team to interview the families of these girls, in order to cre-ate a book memorializing them. We spent a few days in Chibok, in September and October. I was prepared to hear many stories of anguish. What I was not prepared for was the realization that what had seemed, f-rom the outside, like one of the greatest horrors to befall a people appeared f-rom the inside as just another great misfortune in a land whe-re tragedy is an everyday occurrence.

We spoke with the families of 201 of the 219 girls who are still missing. (Only a few actually lived in Chibok town; most lived in surrounding villages.) In addition to their daughters, many had lost at least one other child. Some had lost three, some had lost six, one woman had lost nine out of 12. “He had a fever” was the most common explanation for the death of an infant. For older children, we were often told, “He was bitten by a snake and died.” One mother told us how, a month after her daughter was kidnapped, another daughter died during childbirth. A few months later, yet another died f-rom an unknown illness.

Many mothers had between seven and 12 children. The typical man with more than one wife had about 20 children. When you do not expect all your children to grow into adulthood, it makes sense to have as many as possible, whether or not you can afford to feed them or send them to school.

Girls in Chibok marry early. April and December are the seasons of weddings there, with marriage ceremonies taking place almost every day. One girl, Deborah, was married the weekend before she was abducted; she had returned to school because of her impending exams. Another girl, Mariam, was married a week earlier. Her husband had promised her parents that she could complete her secondary education, and so a few days after their big day, he saw his wife off to school.

The fact that these girls were getting an education at all was remarkable. One of the kidnapped was the only one of her 20 siblings to have attended formal school. “The rest attend Quranic school,” her mother said. When we visited, virtually all the government schools in the entire state of Borno, in northeast Nigeria, had been shut because of the threat of Boko Haram. Some reopened at the end of last year, but the one in Chibok remains closed. Even before the Islamist insurgency began, Unesco estimated that Nigeria had the highest number of out-of-school children in the world.

There was no electricity when I was there. Apart f-rom some communal wells, the residents have no source of potable water. Following the kidnapping, the government drilled a borehole for the community, but it is out of use because the cost of running a generator to power it is too high. Many sons of the families we met had left home in search of work. “He is working as an okada rider in Lagos,” a number of parents said, referring to the motorcycle taxi drivers notorious for their daredevil attitudes and disregard of basic traffic rules.