You might vaguely remember the shocking news of 276 girls in Nigeria who were kidnapped by Boko Haram.
Maybe you ramped up the Twitter storm by reposting #BringBackOurGirls, a hashtag that spread globally and piled pressure on the Nigerian government to mount a rescue mission.
That was way back in 2014, and the world soon moved on to the next disaster and outrage. To be honest, I couldn’t even remember what happened in the end.
Bring Back Our Girls by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw is the complete opposite of that brief and shallow flurry on social media. The authors are two of The Wall Street Journal’s most experienced foreign correspondents, and this book is a solid, incredibly well-researched account of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, the messy and conflicting efforts to rescue them and the far from satisfactory outcome.
The story also explains some of the philosophies and behaviour that characterise Boko Haram and other Islamic terrorist groups. The book’s insights on this and the messy state of Nigerian politics is information to store in a section of your brain marked “hopefully I’ll never need to know that”.
Parkinson and Hinshaw describe the book as narrative nonfiction, with every thought, conversation, fact or description it contains having been told to them or to other people.
They amassed the information over six years by interviewing hundreds of individuals involved in the drama, including 20 of the schoolgirls. A map at the front is helpful for picturing the scene, and at the back is a large section of collaborating notes and research references.
The story itself is so well written that with a vivid imagination you can visualise it playing out. It goes to admirable lengths to flesh out the background of the girls so you begin to know them, and centres on one of the older students, Naomi Adamu.
She became the bravest resistor to her captives, helping many of the others survive and retain their faith and independence. Not easy when they were faced with beatings, starvation and other brutal treatment if they refused to convert to Islam and accept a forced “marriage” to a fighter.
“Boko” is a Hausa word for non-Qur’anic learnings and “haram” means forbidden, and this Nigerian sect is fighting to eradicate anything it finds offensive — like education for girls, singing or believing that the world is round. The authors trace the radicalisation of its leader at the time, Abubakar Shekau, and show how he begins to lose control and has some of his highest commanders beheaded for disloyalty.
The story follows parallel threads, one featuring the girls and the other unravelling the often-bungled rescue attempts. The authors also analyse the role and effects of social media, with Tweets by celebrities including the then first lady of the US, Michelle Obama, shining the spotlight on the kidnapping. Disturbingly, the Chibok case was just one of numerous kidnappings, with countless young boys stolen to become soldiers, and women and girls stolen as chattels and for “re-education”.
It’s an interesting study in how power has shifted to allow celebrities to force political action, with social media turning the girls into an international cause célèbre. But it was a double-edged sword. “To what degree was any of this celebrity attention helpful?” the authors ask.
Millions of tweets clamouring for their release inadvertently turned the girls into the terrorists’ most jealously guarded assets and changed the reality on the ground. It also attracted “a bizarre cast of have-a-go-heroes and foreign misfits” who flew to Nigeria chasing money and fame.
Parkinson and Hinshaw obviously blame the keyboard warriors for making the negotiations far more complex. But they can’t condemn it outright, because without this blaze of outrage, Nigeria’s political, economic and warring reality would have seen the Chibok girls vanish like all the others, with nobody beyond their region aware of it, much less likely to resolve it.
One key group trying to negotiate a release was a little-known Swiss bureau led by diplomat Pascal Holliger, who is a fascinating chameleon-like character who previously worked in SA running township tours for foreigners.
Another SA link was Eeben Barlow of Executive Outcomes, who took in a force of more than 100 SA mercenaries when then-president Goodluck Jonathan was about to lose an election and wanted to win public approval by finally bringing the girls home. Whatever you think of Barlow, it’s hard not to agree with his grizzled comment: “The western response was hashtag-save-the-girls. That type of nonsense does not save girls.”
It took almost three years before a significant batch of the girls was freed. So far, 164 have made it back home. In the early days of their capture 57 fled, while four escaped later. Officially 112 remain missing, but at least 40 are known to have died. The Swiss mediation rescued 103, in exchange for some jailed terrorists being released and a bagful of high-denomination euros — money that helped Boko Haram escalate its warfare in the following months.
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