The kidnapping of 300 schoolgirls is just one in a long history of violent attacks in northern Nigeria .
AP Photo/ Sunday Alamba
ABUJA, Nigeria — When Boko Haram kidnapped 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria a month ago, it grabbed international attention. But the Islamist separatist group has been carrying out this kind of violence in Nigeria's north for five years. Now, a new initiative called the Testimonial Archive Project aims to capture the voices of its victims.
Most of the coverage of the group has been about "the amount of people who died, and here's what the politicians think of it," says Saratu, a young Nigerian who prefers to go by only her first name, who began the project in February. "No one is listening to the voices of the people affected."
For the project, Saratu networks with people in Abuja, where she lives, and connects with residents of the northeast on the telephone. She records interviews and uses interpreters when needed. And she is no nonsense about security: She publishes only the first names of those she speaks to, and in some cases has disguised voices at the request of her interviewees.
It's been one month since the girls were kidnapped from their school dormitory in Chibok, a village about 80 miles from the Borno State capital of Maiduguri. But these were hardly the first assaults on schoolchildren by Boko Haram, let alone its first attacks on villages.
Here, Saratu shares some excerpts from the Testimonial Archive Project's first three months of interviews with survivors of past Boko Haram violence.
"There were two of my younger ones that we went home to pay for their school fees. At the end of the day, they went to register when those guys struck and killed the two of them and that's one bitter experience. Some military men were pursuing one of the guys and was holding gun. We entered into one corner. The people of that area, they are the one who took the guy, brought one of the guys into their home and hid him, instead of releasing the guy to the military to arrest him and then maybe persecute. They said that the man is working for them. With the way things are happening in my place before, we thought these guys were out for something like maybe religion, but from what we are seeing it's like it is beyond religion. We cannot know what exactly is happening in my area. Everyone is being attacked. There's no discrimination against religion, sex, or any other thing. They just attack at random.
"...In May last year, they went and burnt our house down. So these guys burnt our house down, but we give God glory, no life was lost in my family, but the house was razed down completely. Up until now, nothing has been done about the house, and the state government… but I don't want to speak much about that, because it's like there's a lot of politics about what is going on. I don't want to speak much about that. I just hope that God would give us the strength to get our house back...."
AP Photo
