THE boy whose life is beginning wheezed in his sleep. He babbled in a language no school could teach. His mother, Adijatu, leaned over, her lips pursed as if to bestow a kiss. She would not kiss him. She stayed suspended above his wiry frame, staring at him the way a child bride views dead foetus extracted from her womb. There was no love lost in the teenager’s intent gaze at her son. But the child did not know that. He snuggled beside his mother on the mat, like a stray pup nestling beneath the tits of a bewildered heifer.
It’s two months since their arrival in Sabo, Ogun State, and the neighbourhood is rife with rumours about mother and child. Somehow, everybody got to know their story. Thus Habibi, one, and Adijatu, 17, may have to relocate where no one knows their story, again.
“I am leaving for Lagos with my child,” said Adijatu in the tenor that hope makes while fading to doubt.
Thirteen months after they were rescued from Boko Haram’s terror cells, they have become social outcasts. Habibi remains a sad living proof of his mother’s shame. And the latter remains the victim of terror and rape everybody calls “Annoba” (epidemic).
Following her one-year ordeal as a captive sex slave and child bride of the Boko Haram terrorist sect, Adijatu believed her travails were over immediately she was rescued and returned to her Bama hometown in Borno, by the military Joint Task Force (JTF). Unknown to her, her nightmare was just beginning.
The teenager was forced to flee her home and relocate to Sabo in Abeokuta, Ogun State, when her best friend’s aunt and guardian tried to bash in the skull of her infant son, Habibi, because she conceived of him by a Boko Haram fighter.
“Aunty Rita tried to kill my child. I caught her in the act. She stole into the room I shared with Rama, her niece…Rama let her inside after she threatened to throw her out of the house. They took my baby to the backyard. He was sleeping. They placed him on the floor behind the drum that served as a waste bin. I caught her (Rama’s aunt) trying to bash my son’s head with a mortar. I screamed and called neighbours to help me…Our landlady, a widow, begged them to give me my child. But she told me to leave her house. She said if I didn’t, they would come for me and my son at midnight. She said she would not be there to protect me,” disclosed Adijatu.
The Nation findings revealed that her assailant watched helplessly as a Boko Haram death squad shot her husband, mother-in-law and two sons. She was one of many people in Bama who made it clear to Adijatu that she and her son were not welcome in the community since their return home.
At the advice of a neighbour, Adijatu relocated to the southwest. She boarded an Ibadan, Oyo State-bound bus in the company of a local midwife in her neighbourhood. The latter parted ways with her in Ibadan after seeing her off to the park and paying her fare to Abeokuta, Ogun State, where she intended to stay with a distant relative in Sabo. Adijatu expected to find peace in her new abode but to her dismay, her hostess and her husband divulged too much about her past to the neighbours. Consequently, the teenager and her kid suffered a relapse to hostile community. No sooner did her secret become public knowledge than mother and child became suburban legend. Suddenly, Adijatu, the angelic beauty from Bama became Annoba (epidemic) and her lovable son, Habibi, became the carrier of ‘bad blood.’
Far from the ugliness of their world, a different kind of cruelty is meted out to an eight-month-old and his mom. His name is Abuya. This minute, Abuya grows into a boy. The eight-month old is different from what he looked like when the midwife took delivery of him from Ba Amsa, his mother, on Dalora refugee camp. Ba Amsa, 18, welcomed him with mixed feelings. Every day unfurled as a fresh struggle to accept Abuya. She is learning to love him, even as you read.
She dreads the day he will begin to ask why the neighbours call him ‘Bad blood.’ She is terrified of the moment that Abuya would ask why they call his mother ‘vampire’ and “Annoba,” (epidemic).
Ba Amsa will respond in pain. She will couch the sordid details of his conception and birth in a clutter of woe and earnest tears. Despite her anguish, she would tell her son to ignore the neighbours’ hatred and unkind words. She would tell him that there is a garden in his face where roses and white lilies grow. She would never call him the living proof of her shame.
“This child does not even know of its own existence…so he has no blame. All the bad things that happened to me are because of his father, not him. This child is innocent,” said Ba Amsa.
But until she put to bed, she dreamt of ripping her belly open to rid it of Abuya, whose immense bulk tilted her tiny frame forward as if she would keel over. But she couldn’t. She silently bore the pains of rape and demands of pregnancy on her lean body. At full term, her unborn child jutted from her belly, like a vulgar cyst weighing on her limbs, impeding her teenage strides.
On Ba Amsa’s due date, she went into labour with hostile feelings, in a hostile environment. Abuya emerged from her belly the way the tsetse fly seeking to know its true nature, follows faeces into the latrine. Before she put to bed, Ba Amsa dreaded that her child would become a burden to her. Now that she has put to bed, the 18-year-old regrets that her beautiful child is born to strife and ugliness.
“Children are like flowers. They are like roses. Roses are poisoned with ugliness. The situation in the northeast is too ugly to raise a child. Life here is very ugly. Very, very ugly for the Nigerian child,” lamented Halima Sule, a Borno-based social health worker.
Indeed, no child should be born into ugliness. Not Abuya, Habibi or any other child. But the eight-month old was sired in pain and utmost cruelty. Ask his teenage mom. Due to a limp she suffered as a result of childhood polio, she couldn’t run fast enough to escape when dreaded terrorist sect, Boko Haram, stormed her neighbourhood in Bama, in September 2014.
They abducted her and her sister and took them to an improvised women’s prison for three months. “They would tell us, ‘Men are coming to look at you,’ and told us to stand up and show our breasts, then they would pick five or 10 of us,” she said. The man who picked her was someone she knew from Bama and they stayed in a house in the village. “He was under 30 and didn’t seem to know anything about religion…I couldn’t resist him, he was armed,” said Ba Amsa.
When the Nigerian Army recaptured Bama, Ba Amsa was pregnant. This time she managed to get away. Her son, Abuya, now eight months old, was born in the camp and she was reunited with her parents. Her four siblings – three brothers and a sister – are still missing. Ba Amsa said she is lucky because her family still supports her but she would give anything to change the tide of public opinion about her and her infant son, Abuya.
There is no gainsaying she nurses her baby in hostile environment – both mother and child endure each day on the Dalori refugee camp. The centre for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) fleeing Boko Haram terrorism is located outside the Borno state capital of Maiduguri, and it is home to over 21,000 refugees from Bama. There, rather than the safety she sought, she is facing a new nightmare: fellow IDPs on the camp do not think too highly of former Boko Haram sex slaves like Ba Amsa and the products of their unfortunate relations with members of the terrorist sect.
Life as social pariah
The Nation investigations revealed that communities are wary of accepting children sired by Boko Haram fighters. They are scared of reintegrating with their teenage mothers and women too – it doesn’t matter that they were abducted, forcefully married and serially raped by members of the terrorist sect. Nobody wants to be seen with offspring and ex-wives of the dreaded terror sect. Thus infant children of Boko Haram fighters and their mothers arriving on IDP camps from newly liberated areas in the northeast face extreme stigmatisation.
Popular cultural beliefs about ‘bad blood’ and witchcraft, as well as the extent of the violence experienced by people at the hands of the terrorist sect form the basis of this fear. This general perception has been exacerbated by stories of women and girls returning from captivity and murdering their parents. Such accounts give rise to the fear that “If we accept sons and daughters of Boko Haram, they (the mothers) may come back to kill us.”
Women and girls who spent time in captivity are often referred to by communities as “Boko Haram wives,” “Sambisa women,” “Boko Haram blood” and “Annoba” (which means epidemics). The description of these girls and women as an ‘epidemic’ reveals fears that their exposure to the terrorist group could spread to others. This infers that these girls and women were radicalised while in captivity, and if allowed to reintegrate into their communities, they might recruit others. However, excluding some cases in IDP camps, communities expressed the belief that over time relations could be rebuilt and that the women and girls could gradually be accepted and trusted by the displaced community.
However, acute fear and suspicion persist of children born of sexual violence, whose fathers are believed to be Boko Haram fighters. It is unlikely that such fears and suspicion will decrease, according to Dr. Abubakar Monguno of the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID). Monguno, working with a team including Dr. Yagana Imam, Yagana Bukar and Bilkisu Lawan Gana from UNIMAID, and in collaboration with the International Organisation on Migration (IOM), the Borno State Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development, International Alert and UNICEF, authored a report on the crisis. Findings revealed that hostile perceptions place children conceived of rape and violence on Boko Haram terror camps “at risk of rejection, abandonment, discrimination and potential violence.”
‘Hyenas among dogs’
Further findings revealed that the children are called “hyenas among dogs,” as one community leader described them. Entrenched hostilities fuelled by bias among communities in the country’s northeast refer to “bad blood” transmitted to children by their biological father – “a child of a snake is a snake” is a common saying.
There is a belief that, like their fathers, the children will inevitably do what hyenas do and ‘eat’ the innocent dogs around them. “In addition to the immediate risks to these children, it is likely that they will be stigmatised throughout their life, thus increasing their vulnerability to abuse and exploitation. Moreover, the fears that these children may have the blood of their fathers in their veins and will therefore be a risk to communities may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as communities reject and discriminate against them, in turn increasing their vulnerability to radicalisation in the future,” noted Monguno and company.
The abortion and ‘poison’ alternatives
Indeed, perceptions about the rescued girls and the children they conceived while living as forced brides of Boko Haram fighters gravitate from the hostile to the frivolous.
Idrissu who lost his two wives and three daughters to a Boko Haram terror squad insisted that he would personally “kill any child of Boko Haram and chase away the mother,” wherever he finds them in his neighbourhood. According to him, the mothers had been brainwashed and trained to see Nigerians as enemies and their infant children “are polluted by the bad blood of their fathers in Boko Haram.”
“People advised me to abort the pregnancy but I didn’t want to because I was afraid,” said 25-year-old Gloria, another victim of Boko Haram abduction and sex slavery. Gloria’s children will probably never meet their father: a Boko Haram militant who abducted Gloria and her sister from the town of Dikwa, Borno State, nine months ago and raped her over a period of several days before she escaped.
The terrorist sect allegedly took Gloria, barefoot, through several towns. She escaped when the militants journeyed to another village to fight. A trip to the local hospital confirmed Gloria was pregnant — something that irrevocably brands her as a Boko Haram “bride.” Gloria’s social worker, Aisha Shettima, advised women who have been captured by Boko Haram to stick together.
The burden of scorn
Some husbands are not willing to take their wives back and have divorced their wives on their return. However, other husbands have accepted their wives back into their lives. Husbands who had been married for longer than five years, and who had children with their wives before they were taken, tend to welcome their wives back. Interestingly, in these cases, children born as a result of sexual violence are also accepted by husbands and are integrated into the family. However, as most families in Borno are extended families all living in the same house, all family members’ opinions and perceptions matter regarding the reintegration of women, girls and their children back into the communities. In polygamous families, the other wives are more negative, expressing fears that the returning wife or daughter will have been radicalised and will spread their ideas to others.
Some religious and traditional leaders however, nurture the most open-minded approach to the problem. They noted that, given the Quran’s position on husbands being able to accept other men’s children, rescued victims with children born of sexual violence could be reintegrated.
“At least, the kid will not be considered a bastard since the Quran sanctions the original husband to accept the child as his own,” argued a Muslim cleric.
‘He’s my destiny’…A mother’s perception of her child born of sexual violence
“People can think the worst of me, I do not care,” said Hannatu Ahmedu, 16, who has a 10-month-old baby by her Boko Haram husband. “I have this child now and I can only love him and care for him. People want me to dump him. My childhood friend wants me to kill him. If I didn’t abandon him while running in the forest, why should I abandon him now? I can only love him. He’s my destiny,” she said.
Even though girls and women face rejection by their families and communities as well as the trauma of the sexual violence they have experienced, many of them expressed a willingness to keep their children. The majority of the mothers, many of whom are barely teenagers, are displaying natural affection for their children. However, not all of the mothers are willing or able to care for the children, and some of those interviewed had tried to abort the pregnancy. For instance, Nimat Abdullahi, 15, allegedly tried to abort her pregnancy and almost died of complications arising from her attempts.
The Global Terrorism Index ranks Boko Haram as the world’s deadliest terrorist group. In its ever more violent quest to create an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria, the group has killed about 20, 000 people, razed villages and forced more than two million people to flee their homes over the past seven years. Living up to its name, which translates as “western education is forbidden,” it has also forced more than one million children from school, according to UNICEF.
While the Chibok case raised awareness about Boko Haram’s kidnapping spree, it was one of hundreds of such raids across the region. Amnesty International estimates that at least at least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted since 2014, along with many more men and boys.
In his first presidential media chat in December 2015, following his electoral victory on March 28, 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari told the world that he had no credible intelligence on the girls’ location. The statement was his response to questions about why the girls hadn’t been rescued despite promises made by Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) during the campaigns that culminated presidential elections. The APC promised to ensure speedy release of the girls if voted into power. That promise started materialising by May 10 when soldiers working with local vigilante members, spotted and rescued Amina Nkeki with Safiya, her four-month-old baby—evidence of sexual assault on her person by Boko Haram soldiers.
Nkeki was discovered wandering with her baby on the edge of the Sambisa Forest, one of the last strongholds of Boko Haram. It is believed that she spent two years in the custody of her captives. The teenager, according to her family, is “traumatised” by her time with the deadly terror group.
She told her rescuers that six of the 219 girls still thought to be held by the group had died, and others were being held “under heavy terrorist captivity” in the vast forest 40 miles south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State which has been at the centre of Boko Haram’s operations.
More than 50 girls escaped during the Boko Haram raid on their boarding school on the night of April 14, but Amina is the first to be freed since that day.
Natives of Chibok thronged its dusty streets to cheer the military convoy that brought Nkeki into town. Aboku Gaji, the leader of Chibok’s vigilante brigade, recounted her mother’s ecstasy as he escorted her home. The moment the teenager’s mother saw her, she reportedly shouted: ‘Amina, Amina!’ and crushed the returnee in a warm embrace. Her was good news to the woman who allegedly tried to commit suicide few months after her daughter’s abduction with the other Chibok girls. Now, neighbours believe Nkeki’s mother dwells in heaven on earth.
But that is as good as the story gets, the rescued girl and her child, Safiya, has to overcome the misery of trauma and social stigma. This harsh reality has been known to punctuate the feelings of joy and fulfillment felt by the girls and their families with narratives of pain and unprecedented hate.
Expert psychological opinion suggested that it’s about time the government and other humanitarian actors enhanced service provision and access to services for women and girls who are survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. They should ensure that the services are survivor-centred. In particular, they should integrate support for children born of sexual violence and their mothers into existing programmes on gender-based violence (GBV), child protection and women’s empowerment.
The support efforts should also integrate social workers into health clinics (including at the point of registration) to provide a comprehensive assessment and response for women, girls and children born of sexual violence. And where families are identified as being at risk of breakdown, social workers should ensure that follow-up home visits are conducted together with religious officials to provide guidance to husbands and family members and that family mediation is carried out, according to Dr. Monguno and his team.
But that is in the long run. In the short run, urgent steps need be taken to assist victims like Adijatu, Nkeki and Ba Amsa to pick the broken pieces of their lives. To many, their struggles blend into the hobbling steps of the northeast’s brutal ethno-religious re-awakening, as the country limps towards some vague promise of a better future. The fates of Habibi, Abuya and Safiya however, resonate a tragedy so overpowering that it becomes a torrent of feelings.
Beyond that there is guilt – that our desire for them is so strong that it sets the society, like a bird of prey, to stalk them, stigmatise them and reignite their buried narratives. In their sad, sorry world, every muted spasm and tragic elocution of pain pricks their hide and sink like claws. There is no clear significance. There is only loss.
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