Boko Haram (5 page)

He eventually saw two people he knew and they agreed to follow him, along with a third ‘Good Samaritan' he was not familiar with. The four of them went back into the building, squeezing past the ATM, but saw fire burning on the ground floor with flames Alkari said looked to be five feet high. They decided to push on towards the third floor anyway, Alkari reasoning that the blaze would not spread quickly because the water sprinklers were on, the building's electricity was off and the first floor was reasonably high up from the ground. As they reached the third floor, they joined one of the UNODC staffers and, finally, lifted the collapsed part of the wall. One of the two women who had been trapped had no injuries, but she seemed to be in shock, shaking and crying. Debris was cleared from a sofa so she could sit and Alkari ran to his office to grab tissues and water. The woman drank and began to calm down, but they realised she had somehow lost her shoes – a problem since broken glass covered the stairs. ‘I suggest to Shalini that she clean up every step for the rescued lady to put her foot. A laborious task, but Shalini is up to it', Alkari wrote.

The condition of the second trapped woman was the complete inverse. She was calm, so much so that she was able to warn her rescuers before they moved her that her leg was broken. There was also another problem: a second piece of the wall was in situ and had to be moved to get her out, but it was too heavy even for the five people who remained. Finding help proved to be far
less complicated this time. Alkari turned to look around and immediately saw two UNDP staffers who had come up from the second floor. They instantly agreed to assist, but even with seven people, it was a struggle to move the wall. They worked together with ‘one, two, three – heave', and eventually succeeded. They lifted the woman out carefully, keeping in mind her broken leg, and carried her over to the sofa, allowing the team to catch their breath before bringing her downstairs. Alkari and one of the UNDP staffers decided to climb to the fourth floor to check if anyone else was there. They called out, but heard nothing in response, then headed back down to inspect other areas of the third floor. It was there that they would see Ingrid Midtgaard, a 30-year-old Norwegian lawyer who had been working for the UNODC, and Alkari described a heartbreaking scene, with the young woman ‘sitting lifeless in a chair'.

‘Her face is calm', Alkari wrote. ‘The Good Samaritan climbs back and checks her pulse [...] She was gone. We are not sure if we should move her to the ground floor. We decide not to move her because by then we had seen several ambulances ferrying people to hospital. Paramedics had arrived. With heavy hearts we leave her behind. If you believe in God, then the God had taken her to be with him.'

Returning to the task of evacuating the woman with the broken leg, they began the journey downstairs. Arriving on the bottom floor, they were greeted by two inches of water, with the sprinklers still working, but no fire. They could not squeeze past the ATM while carrying the woman to use the same exit, so they decided to manoeuvre her through a broken window, rescue workers on the other side helping to make sure she was not cut on the remaining jagged glass. She was put in an ambulance and taken to a hospital, and Alkari then told a doctor on the scene about Midtgaard on the third floor.

As the day wore on, rescue workers pulled people out from the damaged front of the building with stretchers. The damaged front
gate that the bomber drove through sat on the ground. At least 23 people were killed, including 13 UN staffers. Immediately, suspicion fell on the Islamist extremist group that had become known by the name Boko Haram, which would later claim responsibility for the attack in the suicide bomber video and through a spokesman. It was the first time the group had struck at a foreign or international target, setting off a scramble to determine who or what could be hit next. There was a problem, however: apart from the tense, bearded face of Abubakar Shekau, the group's new leader, who had appeared in videos with an AK-47, few knew what Boko Haram was.

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One of history's most successful armed jihads occurred in what is today northern Nigeria. It was more than two centuries ago, when a revered Islamic cleric, the son of a learned preacher who had built a fast-expanding following, found himself on a collision course with the kings who ruled at the time. One of the many tales and legends surrounding his life describes a meeting at the palace of the sultan of Gobir, a former student of the cleric who now feared his authority was threatened by his growing influence. The cleric, an ethnic Fulani named Usman Dan Fodio, along with a group of other Muslim leaders, visited the palace after being summoned by the sultan, Yunfa, who had sent signals that he was interested in making peace with them. He had apparently changed his mind. Once there, the Shehu, or Sheikh, as the preacher would later be known, found himself confronted with a musket cradled by the sultan himself, apparently prepared to kill the man who had caused so much trouble for him and his court. As he pulled the trigger, however, the musket misfired and burnt Yunfa, though not fatally.
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He lived long enough to see the tables turned, when the Shehu's army, after having routed their Hausa opponents in key battles, collecting their horses and weaponry, marched into the Gobir capital of Alkalawa. Yunfa and his men put up a final fight, but by then there was little hope for him and his court. The Muslim fighters killed him, and the Shehu and his allies across a wide expanse of what had been known
as Hausaland were on their way to forging an Islamic empire. It would come to be known as the Sokoto Caliphate.

The Shehu would turn out to be one of Islam's greatest messengers in what we now call Nigeria, leaving a legacy of Muslim practice, thought and law still very much alive today, but he was by no means the first. Long before that, in the centuries after the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Prophet Muhammad in a cave near Mecca and revealed to him words of the Qur'an, the Islamic faith had begun to filter across into sub-Saharan Africa. It would be a gradual process, sometimes involving conquest, though it was mainly the result of trade and the innumerable aspects of society that interact with and depend upon it. As camels began to replace donkeys for journeys in the Sahara from around the second century, making it easier to traverse the desert and its forbidding conditions, fleets of caravans began plying its routes, trading gold and salt, among other items, and, of course, slaves. A new world would slowly trudge across it, and the societies it came into contact with would be changed for ever.
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Many of those societies were prepared to profit from the opportunities the increasingly busy trans-Saharan trade routes offered. In today's northern Nigeria, they included two separate regions in particular: one the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the other a collection of states led by kings in Hausaland.

Bornu would come to be centred mainly in today's north-eastern Nigeria near Lake Chad. It was not founded until the fourteenth century, but its roots lie much further back in Kanem, near Lake Chad's north-east. The Sefawa dynasty came to power there possibly as early as the ninth century or perhaps later, towards the end of the eleventh century, enduring war, societal upheaval and religious change, its power and influence at one point extending, as one historian wrote, from ‘the Niger to the Nile'.
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The dynasty would last until the nineteenth century.

It is difficult to pinpoint when Islam first arrived in Kanem, though some of the religion's initial messengers seemed to have been Ibadi gold traders.
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Travelling Muslim scholars who sought
lucrative jobs in the royal courts of the day would also play an important role in sub-Saharan Africa, with their advanced knowledge and literacy seen as particularly impressive. The kings of West Africa, including in Kanem, would have seen great benefits in cultivating links with their Muslim visitors as well as the states from where they came. Trade relationships with the Arab world and northern Africa brought considerable wealth and knowledge, not to mention useful allies.
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It was through these initial contacts that the long, slow journey toward Islam began.

Islam's influence became official in Kanem by the late eleventh century, possibly in 1085, under a king, or mai, known as Hummay, who went on pilgrimage to Mecca perhaps twice or even more.
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While Kanem was officially Muslim by then, much of the population remained pagan or animistic and would have known little about Islam. The new religion had been mainly confined to the elite, and even among those who did convert, a hybrid version of the faith developed, mixing Muslim and ancestral beliefs, as was the case throughout West Africa.
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It was in the thirteenth century that Kanem would rise to become the most powerful state in the region and see its influence extend into the Arab world.

Civil wars would gradually intrude on Kanem's prosperity and force the Sefawa dynasty to flee. They moved south-west of Lake Chad and established a new capital at Ngazargamu in an area known as Bornu
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– where Boko Haram would wreak havoc centuries later. The Kanuri people had come to dominate, and they are still the largest ethnic group in the area today. Both Muhammad Yusuf, the first Boko Haram leader, and Abubakar Shekau, his successor, are considered Kanuri. Bornu would establish a reputation by the eighteenth century as an important centre of Islamic learning.
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Some 300 years later, Boko Haram would take root amid the remnants of that former empire, by then part of the nation of Nigeria.

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The tale begins with the son of a king of Baghdad, or so one of the many different versions of the legend goes, who fought with
his father and fled to Bornu before later arriving in Daura, located in today's north-central Nigeria. When a villager there told him he could only draw water from the well on Fridays because it was guarded by a snake, this wandering prince, named Bayajida, refused to listen. He went to the well anyway, and when the snake appeared, he cut off his head with his sword, freeing the people from the serpent's tyranny. The queen of Daura – it was ruled by a matriarchy at the time – was naturally impressed with this man's skill and bravery, and she decided to marry him. The queen and Bayajida had a boy, named Bawo, whose own sons would go on to found the seven states of Hausaland, which took shape west of Bornu. Another seven states, known as the Banza Bakwai, or Bastard Seven, would also be founded.
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The story is obviously a myth, rich in symbolism – a heroic man from Arab royal stock freeing Daura from its older, traditional ways. Some have pointed to the similarities with Islamic traditional stories and suggest it may have been a useful way of describing the arrival of North African newcomers, who mixed with the local residents and formed what we now call the Hausa people.
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The Hausa were not a distinct ethnic group, with the label given to the combination of people who spoke the language and who gradually coalesced.
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Today, Hausa is the lingua franca of northern Nigeria.

It seems Islam began to make headway in Hausaland around the time Wangara gold traders and Muslim missionaries from other parts of West Africa flowed into the area in the 1300s. The first state to have a Muslim king was Kano, when Yaji dan Tsamiya ruled from 1349 to 1385. Other Hausa states would eventually move toward Islam as well, and the kingdoms' wealth and trading power grew strong. They were blessed with natural resources, trading nuts and other produce as well as ivory and gold. Slave trading was also practised. Hausaland became known for its leather and textile production; by one account it was considered the workshop of West Africa for a time. Its reputation spread to such a degree that Italian-speaking merchants arrived in Kano likely via
Tripoli as early as the sixteenth century. Islamic learning deepened among the elites and literacy spread. Kano and Katsina battled it out – sometimes literally, as they were frequently at war – for the title of the most important trading centre in the region during the eighteenth century.
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Today, Kano remains northern Nigeria's largest city, a bustling, crowded commercial centre. Its ‘workshop of West Africa' glory faded, however, as the country's attention turned to oil. Some of the city's centuries-old textile dyeing pits remain in use as a reminder of its prosperous past.

While the Hausa had come to rule the kingdoms in the region, they were by no means the only people inhabiting them. On the margins of the main cities and towns in Hausaland, the Fulani were in certain ways divided between two worlds, living within the kingdom but with their own customs and ways of life, traditions dating back centuries. While certain Fulani clans were nomadic and cattle-herders, others were more stationary, tending to remain in one area for longer periods of time, forming their own communities that included subsistence farming. Some clans, including the Toronkawa, gravitated toward Islamic teaching and their members travelled as itinerant scholars. They were speakers and readers of classical Arabic and were respected for their knowledge. One family that emerged from that clan and eventually settled in the Hausa kingdom of Gobir was that of Usman Dan Fodio.
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The young Dan Fodio showed promise as a scholar and preacher. His father taught him how to read and write in addition to studies of the Qur'an, and the community at Degel, where the family had settled, believed him to have certain powers that allowed him to control supernatural spirits, or djinns, even as a boy. After his father, another of his early teachers was a Tuareg named Sheikh Jibril Umar, a controversial figure at the time thanks to his strict beliefs. Umar had been influenced by the Wahhabi school of Islam, which had begun in part as a reform movement advocating a return to a purer version of the faith. Despite disagreements early on between Umar and Dan Fodio, who was brought up in the
Sufi tradition, the learned and travelled scholar would have an important influence on the Shehu's life.
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