When, after final exams, his sister burnt her high-school diploma and her books, Alkasim Abdulkadir realised his world was changing drastically. It was the mid-90s and Minna, his place of birth in central Nigeria, had seen a score of Islamic evangelists visiting, resulting in a religious reawakening of the formerly moderate Muslim population. “Suddenly the hijab became en vogue. My parents started praying five times a day and people no longer had beer in the fridge,” remembers Abdulkadir.
At that time, nobody in Nigeria had heard of Boko Haram, but the north was rife with Muslim groups peacefully calling for a more stringent compliance with the Qur’an. They preached about the corrupting influence of Western culture and advocated a return to Islamic values. That message was well received by the destitute population in the north, the poorest region of Africa’s most populous country. Abdulkadir: “The suggestion was that because they had left God, prosperity had left them, and that a stricter surveillance of the Qur’an would end their poverty.”
The Muslim ideologues also criticised the balance of power in intensely corrupt Nigeria, where a small elite enriches itself at the expense of the masses. This critique was already expressed in colonial times by Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, one of the most influential Nigerian Muslim scholars, who died in 1992. Almost all Nigerian Muslim fundamentalists nowadays -- including Boko Haram -- trace their roots to his ideology.
Moderate message
After independence in 1960 Gumi remained an outspoken critic of the establishment, much to the dismay of his ruling countrymen. At the time, a lot of Egyptian expats were staying in the city of Kaduna, Gumi’s base. The loss of political support in his own country drove him closer to the ideas of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and towards Salafism, which advocates a return to the early Islam of the Qur’an. Gumi’s message however remained moderate: He pleaded for women’s suffrage and preached peaceful coexistence of religions. After his death, Sheikh Gumi’s mildness became overshadowed by the Salafism of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Nigerian branch of the Brotherhood gained popularity. One Islamic scholar who had been a member from an early age was Mohammed Yusuf. He was the leader of the “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad,” the movement we would later come to know as Boko Haram. In the early 2000s a religious sect had put up camp in a northern Nigerian village near the border with Niger, where its members led a spartan existence on a diet of dates and rice. With this hegira, they hoped to escape the corruption in society. Their plans were however foiled when disagreements with the locals over the use of fishing grounds caused the sect to be driven away in 2003.
In that year, Christopher Kwajaffa heard about the sect for the very first time, because the members had relocated to the city of Maiduguri where he lived. Mohammed Yusuf had established a mosque in this capital of the north-eastern state of Borno. “I often saw Yusuf pass by in the street, and I had friends who attended the same mosque,” Kwajaffa says. “They said he was an erudite man, who knew the Qur’an well.”
Harassing people
In Maiduguri, the following of the sect grew and changed in character. The early members were mostly discontented children of the elite, but now more and more underprivileged youth, many of them almajiris, joined the movement. These almajiris are boys sent by their impoverished parents to imams for an education. In practice they don’t learn much more than reciting the Qur’an in Arabic without understanding the words. And after classes, they’re turned out into the streets to work as beggars.
It was around that time that Kwajaffa, a Christian, started avoiding the area around the mosque on Fridays. “Boys were walking around in boots, with red or black bands tied around their heads, calling themselves security. They went around harassing people who weren’t dressed like proper Muslims.” From that era stems the Hausa nickname Boko Haram. Often wrongly translated as “Western education is a sin,” it rather means that fraud or corruption is sinful.
Yusuf’s support did not remain unnoticed by politicians, who tried to win him over to their side. They disregarded warnings about the growing militant character of the movement, even though there were increasing confrontations between Boko Haram and the police. Things flared up in 2009 when the authorities tried to enforce a new law against riding a motorbike without a helmet on a funeral cortège of Boko Haram members. In the violence that followed many of the sect members were killed and hundreds were arrested, including their leader Mohammed Yusuf. His mysterious death in captivity is widely seen as the juncture of Boko Haram’s complete radicalisation.
Path of violence
Yusuf’s successor was his right-hand man Abubakar Shekau, the individual we now know of from the YouTube videos the sect has published. Inspired by al-Qaeda, he decided to restructure Boko Haram into cells and also set the sect firmly on the path of violence. At the outset the movement mainly targeted the authorities, the police, and corrupt rulers. The northern population often had more to fear from the Nigerian army -- notorious for its human rights violations -- than from Boko Haram, and was still supportive of the Muslim insurgents. That changed when their suicide bombers started targeting churches, schools, mosques, and markets.
Boko Haram considers everybody who does not want to join them as an apostate who deserves to be killed. According to Human Rights Watch, since 2009 the sect has murdered over 6,000 people, a body count that is increasing at an ever faster rate. In 2014 alone, Human Rights Watch recorded 2,563 deaths, and 2015 appears to become a tragic record. Last year, Boko Haram managed to capture many local government areas in the three north-eastern states most affected by the sectarian violence; according to Nigerian media, at some point they had established control over 20,000sq-km of territory in the region. International organisations estimate that more than one and a half million Nigerians have fled their homes because of the sect’s terrorising rampages.
For six years, the Nigerian government did not seem to take Boko Haram seriously. The badly trained and underequipped army was not able to curb the advancement of the insurgents, and President Goodluck Jonathan was widely criticised for his failure to stop the violence. But in February, six weeks before the presidential elections, the Nigerian military announced a large-scale offensive. With military support from neighbouring countries Cameroon and Chad, and also with the help of South African mercenaries, the Nigerian troops managed to recapture several cities and villages in the northeast.
Presidential campaign
The military has already claimed victory over Boko Haram, but locals in the violence-struck region are more sceptical. Mary Emmanuel is from Michika, but has lived in an internally displaced persons’ camp in Yola, over 200 kilometres southwards, since Boko Haram seized her town. She’s heard that Michika was recently liberated, but fears the military offensive is just a campaign move of a president desperate for re-election. “So many people died and now they come save us from Boko Haram? If politicians only did this for elections and forget about us afterwards, Boko Haram will return.” The same fear was expressed by the neighbouring countries involved in the fight against Boko Haram, who lamented the unwillingness of the Nigerian army to occupy the areas the foreign armies had recaptured.
Whether the military offensive was a campaign move or not, in the end it did not help Goodluck Jonathan. This week, in the most contested presidential elections in Nigerian history, the Nigerian voters sent him and his People’s Democratic Party -- a party in power since 1999 -- out. On May 29, former major-general Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress, will take over. The new president, whose party ran with the slogan “We will defeat Boko Haram,” and who was himself a target of a suicide bombing last year, has his work cut out for him.