Scott MacEachern is a professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of the newly published Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa (Oxford University Press, 2018).
More
than 100 teenage girls were seized by Boko Haram last week in Dapchi in
Nigeria, a crime that echoes the notorious kidnapping of 276 young
women in Chibok in April, 2014. There are some differences, especially
in the fact that the girls taken at Dapchi are Muslim, while the Chibok
girls were mostly Christian. But the parallels are more striking: an
assault on a girls' school, confusion about whether the attackers were
soldiers, changing stories by Nigerian government officials. How can we
understand Boko Haram's targeting of girls' schools in these attacks?
Boko
Haram, a brutal Islamist insurgency, kills people all over the region,
in Nigeria but also in Cameroon, Niger and Chad. They kill men and
women, young and old, Muslims and Christians, soldiers and civilians.
However, they frequently target young women for abduction rather than
murder. The young women who are kidnapped are "married" to Boko Haram
insurgents, if we can use that term to describe this kind of sexual
enslavement. "Marriage" involves forced conversion to Islam for
Christians – and also, to some degree, for Muslim women, since Boko
Haram describes Muslims who are not members of the group as
"idol-worshippers."
In
effect, Boko Haram leaders parcel out captured women to their
footsoldiers through "marriage" as rewards for their support. This
parallels the actions of slave-raiders in the region a century ago, who
targeted young women and then similarly distributed them to their
followers. Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, even threatened in
a video to "sell [the Chibok girls] in the marketplace." It is no
wonder that local people often identify Boko Haram as slave raiders.
However,
other women have different stories. Given this horrific history of
forced abduction and sexual enslavement, the notion that some women
marry Boko Haram members willingly and support the insurgency might seem
astonishing. Hilary Matfess details their accounts in her remarkable
book Women and the War on Boko Haram: Women who voluntarily
marry into Boko Haram describe their husbands as well-off, and describe
generous allowances and presents. New brides receive their dowry
payments from their husbands, instead of having them passed on to their
parents.
Boko Haram are led by Abubakar Shekau and have been fighting the government since 2009 (from here)
Perhaps
most importantly, Boko Haram wives are expected to remain in purdah,
seclusion from public contact, where they occupy themselves with
household duties and child care. This frees them from the back-breaking
labour of agricultural work and the fetching of firewood and water that
occupies most women in rural northeast Nigeria. In fact, Boko Haram
camps often do not engage in farming; instead, they raid neighbouring
communities for food.
Purdah has
historical roots in the Lake Chad Basin. In the 19th century and
earlier, upper-class Muslim women in purdah were also excluded from
agricultural labour, with their place in the fields taken by their
husband's slaves. Today, women who have been kidnapped by Boko Haram are
frequently forced to do menial labour, and those who are forcibly
"married" to Boko Haram followers often do not have the same high status
as those who join Boko Haram willingly. The historic distinction
between upper-class "free" Muslim women and "enslaved" women undertaking
physical labour is being reproduced by Boko Haram today, and it is the
young women kidnapped by the terrorists who play the latter role.
This does not mean that Boko Haram simply duplicates social roles that existed a century or more ago.
For
one thing, Boko Haram attacks girls' schools. They attack such places
because young women can be found there, but they also attack Western
systems of education, which Boko Haram describes as deceitful and
useless. This doesn't consider the other ways in which women and girls
are involved in the insurgency, most terribly as suicide bombers. We do
not as yet understand the manipulation that leads women, as well as
girls as young as seven or eight years old, to blow themselves up at
security checkpoints or in mosques or markets. They must be seen as
victims, not perpetrators, of these atrocities.
Rather,
the similarities between women's experiences in the past and with Boko
Haram today illustrate important social continuities in the Lake Chad
Basin: patriarchal gender roles; agriculture and home life that depends
upon the constant labour of women; and a continuing, brutal distinction
between rich and poor.
Some
young women navigate these savage inequalities by becoming willing
members of Boko Haram, and sometimes its strongest adherents. Others,
such as the teenage girls from Dapchi and Chibok, find themselves caught
up unwillingly in these systems of terror.
We
do not know if the Nigerian government's response to the Dapchi
kidnappings will be more effective than was the case at Chibok. We must
hope so: Many of the girls taken at Chibok in 2014 have not yet been
returned to their families.
In the
long run, only systemic change in economic and social systems –
investment in education and job creation, civic engagement – will
improve the lot of young people in northern Nigeria and make such
terrorist movements less likely in future.
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