Nigeria’s terror survivors share their stories

This violence is not gruesome fiction, it’s reality.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

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.

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Comment

Gaza

Israel

Politics

4 October 2024

7 min read

Israel-Gaza war anniversary: why peacemakers need a touch of doubt

Which narrative do you believe?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Split-screen on TC shows many different news channels in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

Split-screen reporting.

Al Jazeera.

As the focus of the crisis in the middle east shifts from Gaza to Lebanon, and as the anniversary of the October 7th attacks comes round, a look at the narratives that surround this conflict helps chart a way forward.

At the heart of the Middle Eastern crisis involving Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon, are two very different stories.

One of them goes like this.

Israel is the only properly functioning democracy in the Middle East. It is a sanctuary for the Jewish people who over centuries, and around the world, have experienced extraordinary levels of persecution and discrimination. As a small country it has bravely established itself over the past 76 years as a haven of liberal, democratic freedom and prosperity despite the hostility of its neighbours, such as the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Hamas attacks on October 7th 2023 were an unprovoked murderous assault on innocent citizens, the butchery and savagery of which was unprecedented in recent times. Hamas and Hezbollah both represent an Islamist ideology which has been a recurring thorn in the flesh of all democratic states, and which has taken root in Gaza and Lebanon. Israel's response of attempting to drive out such a deadly enemy from neighbouring states is entirely justified and reasonable. Any country faced by neighbours dedicated to its destruction would do much the same. Yes, there are civilian casualties in the conflict, but there always are in war. To oppose Israel’s campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon is in fact to lend covert support for terrorism, and a form of antisemitism, because it challenges the right of Israel, and the Jewish people, to self-determination and self-defence.

Yet there is another other story, which runs thus: At the time of its founding in 1948, the pioneers of the state of Israel committed an original sin which has plagued it ever since - its expulsion of much of the indigenous Palestinian population from the land in the Arab-Israeli conflict which followed the founding of the state. Ever since then, Israel has sought to subjugate the remaining Arab population, treating Palestinians within its territory as second-class citizens. Since 1967, it has illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza, denied Palestinians basic rights of civic equality while enabling and encouraging Jewish settlers to gradually steal land which is recognised by the United Nations as Palestinian. Within Israel and the Occupied Territories, Palestinians find it harder to get building permits, to find jobs, to be properly represented in parliament or to have opportunity for education. Therefore, it is not surprising that that the simmering resentment such treatment provokes leads to occasional resistance such as in the intifadas of the 1990s and 2000s, the election of Hamas in Gaza, and even the attacks of October 7th. Israel regularly accuses anyone who criticises its policies of antisemitism, using it as a shield to hide its mistreatment of the Palestinian minority. It has used the occasion of the October 7th attacks to launch a massive assault on Gaza and now southern Lebanon, regardless of the civilian casualties. The result is, at least in Gaza, a humanitarian disaster which will takes, years, even decades to resolve.

Which of these narratives do you believe? Depending on a whole set of other commitments you probably resonate with one or the other. If you are more left leaning you probably favour the Palestinian account. If your instincts are more right-wing you will tend to favour the Israeli one. And I’m sure you can pick holes in the opposite narrative if you want to.

Christians fall on both sides of this debate. Christian Zionists tend to see the emergence of the State of Israel as a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy that God would one day bring the Jewish people back to the land from which they were exiled in the distant past. Supporters of the Palestinian cause point to the Bible’s injunctions towards justice, its regard for the poor and oppressed, and to Israel’s Old Testament calling to look after the alien within their nation. Surely Israel has a duty to treat the Palestinians within their borders as equal citizens?

To love your enemy does not mean to pretend that your enemy is a friend - at least not yet.

So, does Christianity bring anything to this conflict? Or is it just as divided on this issue as anything else?

One the most distinctive notes in the teaching of Jesus is his remarkable and unprecedented, some would say ridiculous call to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. It was - and is - standard human behaviour to love your family and friends. It's more of a stretch to love your neighbours who happen to live next door. It's a whole different ball game to love your enemies. The phrase trips off the tongue as one we know well, yet how could it ever be possible for Israelis to love or pray for Hamas fighters, or the inhabitants of southern Lebanon to love the nation across the border to the south that is shelling them each day?

I cannot even begin to imagine that. Yet closer to home, how does this idea of love for enemies effect our approach to these two stories, held so passionately on both sides of the debate? I first visited Israel/Palestine in 1989, in the middle of the first Palestinian ‘intifada’ or uprising against Israeli occupation. I stayed in east Jerusalem with Christian Palestinians and heard and saw first hand their feeling of resentment at being treated as inferiors in a land which had, they claimed, until the ‘Nakhba’, or ‘Catastrophe’ of 1948, been theirs for centuries. I came back full of righteous zeal for the Palestinian cause and would talk to whoever would listen about the injustice of Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people. I wanted people to imagine what it would feel like to know your family’s ancestral land was taken at gunpoint in 1948, to have to go through humiliating checkpoints to get to work, to have a neighbouring Jewish settlement harass your children and family, trying to get you to leave your home, so they can take the land, with little or no support from your own government or the police. And, in many ways, I still do.

Yet over the years, and on numerous visits back to the Holy Land, I’ve gradually begun to try to see the story from the other perspective as well. Listening to the voices of Jewish people both in Israel and here in the UK, I've tried to imagine what it would feel like to be part of a people that has been hunted down in pogroms stretching back into a shameful past, including the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in the twentieth century and the attempt of a modern European state to exterminate that people entirely. I've tried to understand their hope in the state of Israel as a place of security and their desperate need for it to survive and thrive as a place where Jews can feel safe, even as real antisemitism does from time to time raise its ugly head elsewhere in the world. Alongside Palestinian memoirs such as those from Sari Nusseibeh and Elias Chacour, I read Jewish writers such as Alan Dershowitz and people like Ari Shavit who captures the dilemmas of liberal Israelis caught between lamenting the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948, yet enjoying the fruits of that period in the present.

I still yearn for Palestinian friends to find peace and equality, but realise that like so many enduring issues in world politics – it’s complicated.

To love your enemy does not mean to pretend that your enemy is a friend - at least not yet. Many people reading this will have passionate commitments to one story or the other. Yet surely to love our enemies does mean to try to begin to see the story from another perspective, to try at least to put yourself in the shoes of the other, to entertain for a moment a little bit of doubt about the certainty of your own moral case.

Loving your enemy might well be a ridiculous, impractical idea. Yet the alternative is hardly turning out well.

It is what some within the land of Israel have tried to do. Salim Munayer and Lisa Loden are, respectively, Palestinian and Jewish Christians. Their book Through My Enemy’s Eyes tries to do just that – showing how Palestinian and Jewish Christians read the same Bible through different lens, and beginning to imagine how some form of reconciliation might be possible. Organisations like Musalaha and Telos are trying to buck the trend, helping each side meet the other and begin to imagine what reconciliation might look like.

Loving your enemy might well be a ridiculous, impractical idea. Yet the alternative is hardly turning out well. If Israeli radicals were to succeed in expelling all Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza, or Hamas / Hezbollah were to succeed in expelling the Jews from Israel - Neither is a solution that speaks of justice.

It is hard to imagine any progress towards peace without something of this attempt to try to understand a different perspective. You cannot build peace without being a peacemaker – a figure often misunderstood, but according to Jesus, also strangely blessed. Whatever side you are on, perhaps you have a moral duty to make every effort to understand the other. Unless we do, we cannot begin to help resolve this most intractable and dangerous of global problems.