‘They would tell the girls, “In heaven there is a special house for you made of glass,” and that is how they got them to blow themselves up,’ a Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) commander translated excitedly for me. I was interviewing a group of vigilantes to understand how Boko Haram managed to engage in so many female suicide bombings, recalling stories of adolescent and even prepubescent girls transformed into weapons in the markets and bus stations of Nigeria’s north-east. The response to my question came from a boy who could not have been older than 15. The baby blue football jersey he was wearing and his shyness around strangers like me accentuated his youthfulness. Over the course of our interview, he revealed that he had been abducted by Boko Haram and had served as a driver for two years before he was able to escape. He made his way to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, where he joined the CJTF – a vigilante group that has fought alongside the Nigerian military in the state – as an informant.
Sitting across from me at an off-kilter plastic table under an unrelenting sun, he and the other vigilantes relayed what life was like on the front lines of the Boko Haram insurgency. Amid the stories of the insurgency’s brutality, one striking feature of the conflict became evident: women and girls were central to understanding the crisis that was tearing apart the Lake Chad Basin. They fulfil a number of roles, serving as wives of the insurgents, weapons in the war, powerful symbols of both state and insurgent power, and witnesses to the violence and post-conflict rebuilding processes.
Other conversations I had during my visits to north-east Nigeria, with non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers, politicians and internally displaced persons (IDPs), highlighted a devastating feature of the north-east’s social structure: by and large, women are excluded from influencing government policies and programmes. Their marginalisation became clear to me in the trips that I took to the country’s seats of power, in government offices in the capital city of Abuja and in Governors’ mansions in Adamawa and Borno, and in the makeshift shelters that have blossomed in the secure urban centres as the crisis has dragged on.
This project originated in work that I did to record incidences of lethal violence in Nigeria as part of the Nigeria Social Violence Project (NSVP) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Culling newspaper reports from Nigeria and news outlets around the world for information relating to political, religious, state-led and communal violence in Nigeria since 1999 sparked an interest in understanding the motivations of those who joined the groups. Subsequent research in the field, as well as the media attention devoted to the Chibok abductions and the stunning rise in the use of female suicide bombers by Boko Haram, inspired me to examine the insurgency through the experiences of women.
The research for this book draws from the data I collected with NSVP, a desk review of relevant literature, and interviews conducted during multiple trips to the region between 2015 and 2016 and whilst living in Nigeria for the first half of 2017. Much of the desk review was based on NGO reports and ‘grey literature’, as the academic literature on Boko Haram is limited. While NGOs have their obvious biases and do not always adopt the best methodological practices, groups such as Mercy Corps, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have all gained reputations for probing and sound research. I have relied on these organisations, as well as on reports funded by USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), for significant portions of my research and to help inform the questions that I asked while conducting fieldwork.
I conducted interviews with IDPs living in informal settlements and government-run displacement camps in a number of cities, including Yola, Mubi, Damaturu, Abuja and Maiduguri. In the course of the project, I interviewed more than 50 women; some of these were cursory interviews, others were extensive, in-depth interviews that lasted several hours and were conducted over several days. I also interviewed ‘host families’ and ‘host organisations’ to better understand the strain that caring for IDPs can cause. The interviews were conducted one on one when conditions allowed, but were mostly with small groups of women, often from the same community, sharing their experiences. The most comprehensive interviews that I conducted were at a camp run by Governor Kashim Shettima in Maiduguri, which held more than 20 women who had joined the sect voluntarily and who maintained their loyalty even after being ‘liberated’ from insurgent control. Over the course of four days at this ‘Safe House’, I conducted interviews with more than six of these women. The small size of the camp often allowed for these interviews to be held individually.
In addition to these interviews with displaced people (generally women), I also interviewed a number of vigilantes in Yola and Maiduguri. These men (and some women) had fought alongside the Nigerian military and were able to provide insight into the ways in which the insurgency functions and the conditions in liberated areas. Again, a mixture of group and one-to-one interviews were conducted; in total, I spoke to roughly 30 vigilantes, and approximately six of these interviews were in-depth.
In Maiduguri, I travelled to the razed plot where Mohammed Yusuf’s mosque once stood and interviewed members of the community who remembered what the area had been like before the state crackdown in 2009. I was also able to speak with members of the northern political elite, including the Governors of Borno and Adamawa States, as well as with a smattering of their staff. In addition to these politicians, I also spoke with members of groups such as the Borno Elders’ Forum and the Victims’ Support Fund. In planning and conducting my visits to IDP camps, I also interviewed humanitarian aid workers at both the managerial and implementation level responsible for providing care to IDPs. These NGO workers included both Nigerians and international staff. I also spoke with a number of advocacy NGO workers, and particularly with humanitarian aid workers. These workers are in short supply throughout the north but provided great insights about the condition of the women arriving at the camps.
Through these interviews, I found that women’s exclusion from policy planning in the region is a result of the scarcity of female-focused civil society groups, as well as being influenced by the characteristics of some Nigerian politicians and international groups. While the contentious relationship between the #BringBackOurGirls movement and the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan (whose wife tried to have some of the family members of abducted Chibok girls arrested for protesting outside government buildings in Abuja, the capital) was the most visible manifestation of the disconnect between the needs of women and the government, so-called ‘women’s issues’ have been widely ignored by politicians throughout the country. Sprawling across the couch in the foyer of his residence in Yola, the otherwise charming Governor of Adamawa State told me that ‘my wife is working on that problem [of women and girls]’, with a wave of his hand. He then returned with gusto to describing the intricacies of the cattle market in his state. This attitude is shared by many who consider women’s empowerment to be a luxury that they cannot afford when responding to the crisis in northern Nigeria.
It is important to note that, even when women’s needs are recognised as important, policy programming to that end faces a number of challenges. The Governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, has identified that investments in women and girls are critical to overcoming the impacts of the insurgency; he asserted proudly that ‘a deliberate policy of gender empowerment’ guides his initiatives.1 Shettima’s emphasis on empowering women was not mere rhetoric – it was incorporated during the planning of the 2016 Ramadan feeding scheme in Borno State, when 1,000 families in each of the state’s 28 wards were targeted to receive food assistance. Given that the average family unit identified by the scheme contained 20 people, this was no small endeavour. The Governor was at pains to emphasise that the women in the household would be the ones to receive the assistance; yet every day the crowd collecting the bags of rice was overwhelmingly male.2 Some days it seemed as if the entire population of able-bodied males in the city was queuing outside the Governor’s palace, shifting uncomfortably in the sun and hoping that they would be among the lucky few to hoist bags of rice onto their shoulders and make their way home. The Ramadan feeding scheme illustrates that targeting women alone is insufficient – they must be incorporated into the decision-making process.
The results of the simultaneous centrality of women to the insurgency and their marginalisation in society are evident across northern Nigeria. Camps and informal settlements for the internally displaced are swollen with those who were abducted by Boko Haram and fled the group to live in these settlements; most had lost a family member to the insurgency, and nearly all were without a means of earning an income or a sense of their future.
Toma,3 a remarkable 20-year-old woman living in the grounds of Madina mosque in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, had lost her husband, father and siblings to the insurgency. After her town had been held by Boko Haram for more than two months, she managed to flee to the city and now cared for four children of her own and her ten nieces and nephews, who were orphaned by the violence. Not providing for these children was never an option for Toma, who stated simply: ‘They are my family – the children of my dead brothers and sisters. How can I not care for them?’ Although Toma had the dedication to provide for the 14 children who depend on her, she lacked the resources. ‘We all go on the streets and beg, from the sunrise until the sunset,’ she told me. It was the only way to get enough to eat. Her story was not remarkable in the Madina settlement; nearly every hand-constructed shelter housed a woman who shouldered the burden of extended family members and who had overcome incredible risks to reach safety.4
Although the temptation is great to cast all women’s experiences in relation to the insurgency as victimising and traumatising, it would be dishonest to do so. From the group’s inception, Boko Haram’s ideology provided opportunities for women to advance their own agendas. In a revealing exchange, the wife of a Boko Haram member asserted that the group had been successful in overrunning territory as a result of Divine will. She explained with a discomforting pride: ‘Allah gave us the power to hold this place.’5 The power to assert oneself, to claim a place in a movement and in society generally, is a powerful factor in explaining female participation in Boko Haram’s activities. The group’s radical return to scriptural interpretations and practices (which include the ‘proper’ practice of bride price, access to Qur’anic education, and prohibitions against women farming) and their advocacy of the adoption of sharia law have a number of gender-progressive implications, giving women an opportunity to assert their place, as difficult as it is to believe that such a thing is possible. Many women married willingly into the group, followed spouses or accompanied sons because the lives they were promised under the rule of Boko Haram were tangibly better than their lives as Nigerian citizens. The discrimination, misogyny and structural violence that women face in Nigeria make it difficult to draw clear distinctions between actions that are coerced, voluntary or merely coping mechanisms.
This book seeks to debunk the conventional wisdom surrounding both Boko Haram and women, which portrays the group as an inherently violent, transnational jihadist movement and depicts women universally, as victims lacking autonomy. Discussions about the role of gender in the crisis have been reduced to merely recalling the horror of the Chibok abductions and celebrating the corresponding advocacy movement #BringBackOurGirls. Despite this oversight, it is clear that gender has been used strategically throughout the crisis by both Boko Haram and in the Nigerian military’s response to the insurgents. Boko Haram has roots in the political debate over the implementation of sharia law in Borno State, a debate in which a number of actors (both Muslim and not) across civil society and the government contested the role of women. While not the only factor in enabling Boko Haram’s rise and continued relevance, gender politics are one of the least understood aspects of the region and the insurgency. The role of women and girls in the affected communities is also relevant, as the brunt of the process of rebuilding and reconciling the north-east will be borne by them.
There is a pressing need to improve our understanding of Boko Haram’s operations. At the time of writing, the Boko Haram insurgency is one of the most lethal contemporary terrorist groups in the world and the greatest security challenge that Nigeria has faced since the country’s brutal civil war in the 1960s.6 The group’s violence has spilled across borders, attracting recruits and taking lives in Chad, Niger and Cameroon, establishing it as a regional crisis. Amid the din of high-level political and military agreements, the stories of women like Toma are often lost. This is not only a humanitarian travesty and a continuation of patriarchal gendered discrimination, but also counterproductive to establishing stability in the area. If we overlook women’s position in the roots and operations of Boko Haram, we miss an opportunity to understand the internal dynamics of the insurgency and to cultivate more effective counter-insurgency strategies; ignoring the role of women in the post-conflict rebuilding process sets the stage for continued instability in the region by affirming the discriminatory institutions that prime an area for rebellion and violence.