Enemies of the Public
Aisha was abducted by the extremist group Boko Haram in 2014 and was held in captivity for nearly two years. Photograph by Chika Oduah.
Aisha
Aisha could hardly tell right from left. Sambisa, the bush land that sprawled across northeastern Nigeria, confused her sense of direction. She couldn’t trace the route the men took when dragging her through Sambisa’s dry paths of shrubs and sand. Either the elephants’ feet were breaking the earth nearby or she was going mad. When soldiers dropped balls of fire from the sky, her captors made her run with them to hide. She was sure she was going to die.
I am sitting on a wooden stool next to Aisha, in the entryway of her home. She lives in Moranty, a compact neighborhood of tiny tin-roofed homes and pebbled streets on the outskirts of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State in the upper right corner of Nigeria. Rainy season is on its way. I can smell it. They say the rain brings new beginnings, so the air is hot and heavy with expectations. The day’s heat was brutal, but night is coming fast, so I need to wrap things up with Aisha. I continue with my questions. Aisha is patient with me, as I am with her.
I am on assignment to gather stories of women who have lived in close proximity to people who use a particular Arabic phrase to identity themselves and their mission: Jamāʿat Ahl al-Sunnah li-l-Daʿawah wa al-Jihād. It means “People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad.” The Nigerian media first tagged the armed rebel group Boko Haram. The name stuck.
I first met Aisha at the end of 2017. I am back to see her again. I want more details about what it was like for her in the forest, where she lived as one of Boko Haram’s captives for almost two years after her 2014 kidnapping.
“We were always running helter-skelter in the forest because soldiers would make us change routes. So it is hard to tell what is what,” Aisha tells me.
I hear the urgency in her voice, the plea to make me understand the chaos in the militants’ camp. She pauses, then slowly enters the past again. I try my best to keep up.
Aisha watched the girls walking out of the forest, their hijabs hiding the sacks that hung from belts around their waists. They were supposed to press a button or pull a string, and they were supposed to die and go to paradise. It was supposed to be God’s work, what these girls would do with their small bodies, and they were supposed to be the real Muslims because everyone else was fake Muslims: kafirai, “infidels.”
“There was one
