Bride of the Infidels
Day of Terror
THE day they took us was like watching a bad film. We heard gunshots in the distance. We did not know what it was or who was shooting. But there were so many guns firing. We were used to hunters shooting games in the open grassland, but it was never so many shots at once. This time it was different. Tatatatatata ratatatatatata ratatatatatatata, the shots rang on and on; they seemed to go on forever. We were scared; I was really very scared. We were in the living room studying the bible that Sunday afternoon long after church service, as was our custom at home, when the gunshots began to sing. Father quickly finished the portion he was reading and Mother said a short prayer for the safety of us all and we hurriedly said ‘Amen.’
Father went outside to see what was happening; he joined other men in the neighbourhood. We could hear them talking in low tones, wondering who could be shooting. Mother told my brother and I to go into our rooms and remain still. We went inside and closed the door.
Whatever it was, we knew it was not good. We had been hearing stories of killings and destruction in neighouring villages. Damboa, which was not too far from us, had been completely destroyed and its emir killed. From what we heard, no house was still standing; their roofs had all burnt. No one was living in Damboa anymore since the killers started their madness many months ago. Boko Haram, haters of western education, is what they called them. We dared not say the name aloud; we whispered it instead. We used the name to scare children into obedience. It was such a dreaded name. Mentioning it alone brought shivers to the bones. So, we just said ‘killers for an impure god.’
We are Christians and know how wrong it is to take another person’s life. But these people fear no God or man. For them killing is a sport. It did not matter whether you offended them or not, whether you were right or wrong.
I was thinking these sad thoughts and speaking in whispers with my brother, John, when we heard gunfire spitting outside our house. Then a loud explosion followed and we found ourselves covered in dust and rubble. For a long time, I lay still. I did not know where I was. After some time, I began to hear voices faintly shouting orders in a mixture of Kanuri and Hausa for someone to search everywhere. I listened hard; the loud noise from the explosion made it difficult for me to hear well. Many whistling noises filled my ears. Everything came to me like an echo at first, as if I was in a long tunnel.
Then I began to regain my senses and it became clear that there were people around me. When my vision cleared and I could see properly, I saw that our beautiful house was gone. The open sky was the first thing that greeted my gaze. The roof was gone. My brother lay in a pile not far from where I was. I crawled to him and touched him; I tried to rouse him. He stirred briefly and groaned. Then the killers saw us. One of them came to us. When he saw that my brother was still alive, he aimed his gun at him and shot him in the head. My brother stretched and lay flat, dead, his blood splattering all over my body. I screamed and rose on shaky legs and flew at the killer and both of us crashed into the dusty pile.
One of the men came and dragged me away from him and held me tightly. My brother’s killer got up and I could see fire in his eyes. Why did he have to kill my brother? John was only 11 years old. How had he offended him? And now, a mere woman had felled him. He came at me and dragged me out of the rubble of our house. And then I saw Mother. She lay in a heap and I flew from my captor and went to her. I knelt beside her and held her to myself. She was still breathing. I cleaned the dust from her body and she slowly stood up with me and we waded through the rubble and went outside.
That was when we saw Father and the other men in the neighbourhood. They were stretched out in our house front, all bloody and dead, shot and killed by the killers for an impure god! Women in the neighbourhood and girls like me had gathered and were wailing uncontrollably. All the boys in the neighbourhod also lay dead beside their fathers. It was like the end of the world. We had heard about these evil people and their wicked acts in other villages. But never would we have believed they were capable of this sort of evil. In just a few moments, they had wiped out almost all the men in our town, except those who were lucky to escape to the hills beyond and out of their reach.
They did not allow us to mourn our dead. They lined us up, the widowed women and bereaved girls, and asked us to march in the direction they pointed to us. As we marched on to where we did not know, we kept looking back at our dead, who lay in the pool of their own blood, sprawled on the dust. Our pain was worsened by the fact that there would be no one to give them decent burials. The thought of allowing our fathers, husbands, brothers and sons to rot away in the bleaching sun sickened us. But we were women facing a powerful enemy; those of us who tried to break away and run toward the dead were forcibly brought back into line to continue the march.
Then we got to a point where they parked their vehicles; they herded us into them like sheep and drove off. We stared at the hazy dust the vehicles raised in their wake and soon lost sight of our ancestral homestead, lost sight of the things that gave us life and sustenance. In short, we lost sight of who we were, as the demons drove us to whatever unknown hell they had prepared for us.
The Long Journey
IT was late afternoon when the murderers pushed us into their trucks and drove off into the dusty road that led to their den. We had no idea where they were taking us. But we had heard of Sambisa Forest as their hideout. It seemed such a distant place. I had never been there before. No one I knew had. With our hearts filled with pain at the death of our loved ones, we were ready for the worst. What could be worse than my beloved Father’s death in the hands of these ruffians or that of my young brother?
We looked at them closely now, these demons who had just rendered our mothers widows and the children fatherless. Ruffians! They were just ruffians. They held their guns over their shoulders carelessly. Their clothes were plastered to their bodies with blood and sweat; they needed a bath. They smelled of dirt, blood and sweat. They looked horrible. Well, it was no surprise they could only inflict horrible things on other people. It did not seem as though they were capable of love. Only loveless people hurt other people the way these killers did for an impure god.
In our town, we had lived together peacefully with Muslims as long as I could remember in my 13 years of life. We did not know them to carry guns to kill other people. The Allah of these ruffians must be different from the one that other Muslims we knew worshiped. At both Muslim and Christian festivals, we would exchange food, visits and gifts and wish each other well. Nobody fought anybody; nobody killed anybody. In my school, we sat and played together. We quarreled only because we were children and we made up soon after. We did not quarrel because we were Christians and they were Muslims.
The journey before us stretched on and on. At a point I thought it would never come to an end. The terrain was mostly grassland. But at intervals, hillocks dotted the plains; at other times, it would be sheer rocks rising from the ground like ugly giants. This was dry season, although it was mostly dry up here even in rainy season. The grass and vegetation looked mostly burnt like a bad cook’s pot, with only a small window of greenery from August to October. Otherwise, it was mostly dry with oppressive heat and dust and sand.
That was how the savannah plain stretched on before our eyes. I had never travelled that far from our town before and it seemed such a strange country before me. Although mostly flat plane, the few dips and rise of valleys and rock hills and bridges would have made it a fascinating view. But our situation was not that of tourists out to enjoy the countryside. We were prisoners of a terrible enemy. We had our many dead behind us that we could not bury or do anything about. In light of this, the scenery presented an unpleasant background to our suffering. We saw it, but we did not notice it. It merely added to our misery as a people being taken into slavery by an enemy ready to wipe us out of existence.
So that when the formidable Sambisa Forest came into view it was as though our fate had finally been sealed. We had heard how difficult it was for soldiers to venture into it to deal with these killers for an impure god. If the Nigerian army could not get past this forest to fight these ruffians, what would become of our fate in their hands? What did they want to do with us? Why take us, ordinary women, prisoners? It was hard for me to understand what their aim was towards us, all helpless women. But these were bad times for everyone, except these ruffians. From the look of it, there was nothing you could put past them; they had proved that they were capable of the worst form of evil. We just have to wait to see what they had in store for us.
