Passage
The Boko Haram Girls
In Hausa, the dominant language in northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram means Western education is a sin.
It is also the name of a jihadist group of radical Islamist terrorists who took captive more than 250 girls from a government girls’ secondary school in the town of Chibok into the Sambisa Forest — to be used as sex slaves, human bombs, or radical converts. The girls were reportedly kidnapped because they were attempting to get a high school education, and the terrorist leader posted a video saying, Women, go back to your homes!
(Diep, 2019). A global social media campaign began, using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, that raised the profile of their plight but had no immediate effect on finding the girls. Boko Haram eventually traded 103 girls for the group’s own captured soldiers; ninety of the returned girls are in a school in northeastern Nigeria, continuing their education despite their fears and experiences at the hands of Boko Haram.
Beneath the Tamarind Tree (Sesay 2019) is a book that tells the story of the girls’ courage and resiliency.