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Comment
Freedom of Belief
Trauma
6 min read

Nigeria’s terror survivors share their stories

This violence is not gruesome fiction, it’s reality.
A Nigerian man looks up towards the camera, behind him is dusty ground
Manga survived an attempted beheading.
Open Doors.

This article contains distressing content.  

Something is happening. And nobody is talking about it.  

Nigeria, the big and beautiful ‘Giant of Africa’, is becoming a place of increasing terror for the hundred million Christians who call it home. Since 2000, 62,000 people have been killed for having a Christian faith. Eight-thousand people were killed in 2023 alone. These staggering numbers mean that more Christians are being killed in Nigeria than in every other country combined.  

The violence is as extreme as it gets. And yet, very few of us know that it’s happening.  

When it comes to the Nigerian government and media, the relentlessly brutal attacks are seemingly hidden in plain sight; undeniable and yet somehow unstoppable. While, in the UK, we appear to be entirely unaware. This violence is out of sight, and therefore largely out of mind. The reasons why are admittedly complex, as outlined by Chris Wadibia. Nevertheless, the violence being carried out toward the Nigerian people, particularly those living in the Northern states, surely deserves our attention.  

Earlier this year, I took a trip to Northern Nigeria. While I was there, I got to know a group of people who had endured unimaginable trauma, largely because of their Christian faith. Every day, they would bravely tell their stories – who they were and what they had experienced. Every day, I looked into the faces of children who had lost parents, parents who had lost children, husbands who had lost wives, and wives who had lost husbands. All of a sudden, the bewildering statistics were people before me – people who were having to live with the images of their loved ones being ‘butchered’ before their very eyes. Their villages being burnt down. Their lives being turned upside down by militants with assault rifles and machetes.  

The only reference I had for stories such as the ones I was hearing were apocalyptic movies. But these things happened. They happened to the people sitting across from me. This violence is not the stuff of gruesome fiction, it’s the stuff of reality.  

As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety... 

I met one woman, she was incredibly gentle and kind, and told her story with a composure that’s hard to fathom. She was working on her land along with her husband and mother-in-law, a totally run-of-the-mill day. They were so engrossed with the task at hand, they didn’t notice that their village was being attacked by armed ‘Fulani’ militants (the majority of the violence being carried out in Northern Nigeria is at the hands of Islamic extremist groups such as Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP - Islamic State in West African Province). She looked up to find herself face-to-face with two attackers and despite their command for her to surrender to them, she ran, as did her husband and mother-in-law. While she was running, she could hear bullets flying past her head and the screams of her mother-in-law. Making it to a neighbouring village, she gathered help and eventually went back to find her husband and mother-in-law. Both of whom were stabbed and killed that day.  

The Fulani militants now have control over her village, and she told us how she’s been praying that she would be able to forgive these men for what they’d done, as she is now forced to live alongside them. And so, she felt proud because she had recently been able to respond to one of the men as they greeted her.    

There was another woman, she was strong and defiantly compassionate. Her story is laced with horror. She studied at a university – the discrimination she experienced there meant that a course that was supposed to be four years long, took her eight years to complete. In 2014, Boko Haram attacked the university – while she was trying to escape, her friend was shot and ‘hacked at’ while he refused to deny his Christian faith. She recalls how his last words were ‘I’m happy. I’ve saved lives today. And I have Jesus’.  

He died and she continued to run. As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety, as she did so, she heard the mother being shot behind her.  

She ran those twins to Cameroon, leaving them in safety, and now lives in a rural Nigerian village where she teaches the local children. Her Christian identity is no secret, and so faces continual danger. Her crops were burnt to the ground and destroyed, twice. And the villagers have tried, repeatedly, to get her to leave. One night, she came face to face with young men with bats and machetes who threatened her life – she told them – ‘you can’t scare me. I have seen the Lord’.  

And they left. Remarkably, that village is still her home.  

One heart-wrenchingly-young girl told us how, while she sleeping – she was awoken by her father who told her that they needed to run, they were under attack. She ran, hand in hand with her father, while her mother carried her younger brother. While they were fleeing, her dad was shot and killed. Her mother pried her hand out of her father’s and buried both her and her brother in sand, instructing them to stay hidden. The next day, they found that their house, their crops, their entire village had been burnt down.  

This is what is happening. This is what we are not seeing.  

While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.   

Since my return, I have met with a man who bears the physical scars of his trauma. He thought his house was being pillaged by armed robbers - it was only when they led him, his brother and his father outside, made them kneel with their hands tied behind their backs, and demanded that they denounce their Christian faith that he realised he was being attacked by Boko Haram. It was a regular evening, he was putting together a lesson plan for his class the following day, and now he was kneeling before an executioner. His father refused their demand, and they beheaded him. His brother also refused, and they took a blade to him, too. Then it was his turn, and while his mind was filled with thoughts of death and how much this was about to hurt, he also prayed that these men would be forgiven for what they were doing. Taking after Jesus, who forgave his executioners mid-execution, this man continued to pray as he felt the blade in his neck.  

Left to bleed to death, miraculously, both him and his brother survived. Now, his scar tells an astonishing story.  

This epidemic of violence seems to reside under our radar. It’s not quite catching our eye, is it? And, as a result, is not quite receiving the force of our outrage nor benefiting from the depths of our compassion. So many of the people that I met expressed a feeling of being neglected – like they’re suffering in deafening silence. While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.   

What’s happening in Nigeria is a crisis, one that we must acknowledge.  

Article
Comment
Romance
5 min read

Getting hitched should benefit more than the advantaged

Marriage’s decline impacts outcomes for all.
A bride dressed colourfully stands next to her groom, dressed similarly, as he sits in a wheelchair.
Ellie Cooper on Unsplash.

Of all the dramatic changes to Britain in the last half century, one of the least discussed is the extraordinary decline in marriage.  

The marriage rate has fallen by two-thirds in the last 50 years. It was just above six per cent in 1972 and has now been under two per cent since 2017. 

This remarkable decline has corresponded with a rise in a relatively new relation type: cohabitation. Cohabitation was extremely uncommon before the 1960s, and even by 1986 just 10 per cent of new mothers were cohabitants. It is, however, rapidly becoming the mainstream. Now 35 per cent of babies are born to cohabiting mothers, and the total number of UK cohabiting couples increased from 1.5 to 3.7 million between 1996 and 2022.  

Much of this is due to couples delaying marriage: 84 per cent of religious and 91 per cent of civil marriages are now between couples that already live together, and the average age when first marrying has climbed by 10 years since the early 1970s. But it is also due to many more couples not marrying at all. 

Opinions understandably differ on this social transition away from marriage and towards cohabitation. It is a point of progress worth celebrating that the previous societal shunning of those, especially women, who had children outside of marriage has been left in the past. However, such progress has not been without consequences. Cohabitations are less stable, on average, than marriages. Cohabiting parents are around three times as likely to separate in the first five years of their children’s life as married couples.  

This stability is not simply because wealthier, more highly educated people tend to have stable families and also tend to marry. Studies by World Family Maps and the Marriage Foundation have shown marriage to be a larger factor in family stability than either education or income.  

Nor does the stability come from couples staying together miserably.  Studies undertaken in 2017 and 2024 looked at the outcomes of couples 10 years on from considering their relationships to be ‘on the brink’. In the initial study, while 70 per cent of cohabiting couples had separated in the decade since considering themselves ‘on the brink’, 70 per cent of the married couples had remained together. Perhaps even more crucially, just seven per cent of those married couples that had stayed together were unhappy in their relationship a decade on. The 2024 study found none of the sample of married couples that had stayed together were still unhappy 10 years on. For those that had stayed together, things had improved. 

This family instability that the decline of marriage has caused is also unevenly distributed. Affluent couples – often those most likely to criticise the concept of marriage – are much more likely to marry than disadvantaged ones.  

Looking at socioeconomic groups, seven in ten mothers from the most advantaged group are married, while just a third of those from the two most disadvantaged groups are. The effect is geographic, too. Institute for Fiscal Studies research has found parents having children are more likely to be married if they are living in better educated areas. For the advantaged, it is compassionately affirmational to suggest that every relationship is equal, even though the advantaged themselves choose the most secure option of marriage: a hypocrisy only tolerated due to the potent fear of seeming judgemental. 

The consequence of this is deepening inequality: disadvantaged families are rendered more likely to breakdown, while children from affluent backgrounds are disproportionately likely to enjoy the ‘the two-parent privilege’, the substantial emotional and developmental advantages of growing up in a stable home. Melissa Kearney coined the phrase, and her evidence shows how children grow up, on average, to have better educational outcomes, better emotional and physical wellbeing, and higher incomes if they are raised in two-parent homes. 

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families.

So, why are marriage rates so much higher among wealthier couples than poorer ones, and why is this gap growing? 

We can isolate three reasons in particular, each more solvable than the last.  

Most challenging is the feedback loop effect: people whose parents, role-models, and friends have not married are unlikely to do so themselves. The demographic trend compounds itself.  

Second, and easily addressable if only the will was there, is the public messaging effect: politicians – and to some extent celebrities – have consistently told the public that marriage is unimportant. In 2017, Marriage Foundation research found that it had been a decade since a cabinet member had discussed marriage in a speech. This has hardly changed in the years since. In 2024, the only major party whose manifesto even mentioned marriage was Reform; even then the focus in the relevant section seemed to be less on marriage and more on getting ‘people trapped on benefits back into the workplace’. 

Third is the cost of weddings. A quick flick through top wedding magazines suggests that the average wedding costs upwards of £20,000. Survey evidence from both Marriage Foundation and the Thriving Center of Psychology have found that most young people view weddings as unrealistically expensive. 

This financial problem is solvable: much of the costs relate to venue hire. Unless they are having a religious marriage, a couple will need to find a venue that has gone through the bureaucratic process of becoming an ‘approved premises’. The cheapest of these are register offices which, including all expenses, still cost about £500. 

This is eminently mendable. The Law Commission proposal to reorganise wedding law around the officiant, not the venue, opens the door for a future of more affordable weddings by removing the regulatory barrier. It will also bring the law in line with that of other home nations. 

This proposal will not work by itself, though, it will need to be supported by creativity in wedding planning.  

Wedding costs can be substantially reduced by taking a DIY approach. Food, drinks, and decorations can often be coordinated amongst enthusiastic (and appropriately competent!) guests.  

Booze free weddings are a growing phenomenon, and especially good for weddings with children.  

Such ‘group-effort’ approaches often have a unique feel thanks to the high participation of guests, and people are more likely to remember events that they feel a sense of ownership of, having helped make them happen. 

Alongside this is a recommendation by the Centre for Social Justice. It proposes subsidising the necessary statutory fees for the poorest couples, up to £550 per couple. An inexpensive and hugely beneficial adjustment to improve wedding accessibility for the least fortunate.  

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families; perhaps it is time for all of us to make tying the knot easier.  

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