 Hello everybody. Thank you all for coming today to the Chabok Girls, the Boko Haram Kinepings in the Islamist Militancy in Nigeria. My name is Matt Davis and I'm an Eric and Wendy Schmidt fellow this year at New America. In addition to being a fellow at New America, I'm also the founding director of the Alan Choo's International Writers Center at George Mason University. We're happy to be co-sponsoring this event today. We launched the Choo Center this past July and we are a cultural diplomatic institution that celebrates the art of creative writing as a means of international dialogue, exchange, and understanding. We facilitate the exchange of international creative writers in order to help foster tolerance and empathy through literature, story, and art. And we are committed to infusing the policy discussions that happen in this city with writers and literature. If you're interested in learning a bit more about us, you can pick up a flyer outside the door over there. Talk to me or go to ChooCenter.gmu.edu. And we're really happy to be co-sponsoring this for a lot of reasons. One of them is that Halan is an associate professor of creative writing at George Mason and a friend of both mine and the Choo Center. Halan was born in Nigeria, grew up in Gombe, and moved to Lagos in 1999 to begin work as a journalist. Since then, he has had an exceptional literary career. He's the author of one book of short stories and three novels, and is the editor of three anthologies of African literature and writing. He's also won numerous awards, perhaps the two most prestigious being the Cain Prize in 2001 for best original short story written by an African writer, and the Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize for fiction, a prize given by Yale to writers across the world writing in English. His latest book, The Chibok Girls, is somewhat of a departure for Halan. It's a mixture of journalism, history, and personal narrative that creates an almost essayistic impression of Boko Haram and the Nigeria from where they originated. A discussion in his book will be moderated by Karen Atia, who is Global Opinions Editor for the Washington Post Opinion section. She writes frequently in Africa for the editorial page of the post, and we are glad to have her here. Please welcome Karen and Halan. Thank you so much for inviting me here and giving me the opportunity to be introduced to this wonderful book. Halan, and I wanted to echo what we've already said about about your book, The Chibok Girls. I found it to be incredible, and it's such a short amount of space and a short book. You were able to make a tremendous impact on me, and I've been writing about and covering the Boko Haram insurgency since 2010 as a writer and as a blogger. So what you're able to do in capturing the present crisis, but to put it in a, not only a historical context, but to give us characters with which to connect with the story, I found to be quite, quite powerful. So I guess perhaps the best way to get started, if you would like to, so that we can dive into this, if maybe you could read a passage just to give us a sense and to drop us into into this world and to start off the conversation from there. Okay, thank you. I like reading stand-in. Okay, can I do that? Perfect. Dynamic. I'm going to read from the first chapter, and I'm going to read this about the checkpoint that I had to pass through when I was going to visit Chibok. There are always, there have always been checkpoints in Nigeria, but after the insurgency, there are even more checkpoints. So almost every two miles you go, you see a checkpoint and anyway, you see what I mean when I read the passage. Checkpoints or roadblocks as they are commonly called are a regular feature of road travel in Nigeria. Nigerians have become resigned to them the way they are resigned to the lack of reliable electricity or running water. Ostensibly, the roadblocks are therefore enforcing traffic laws and ensuring traveler's safety, but in reality they are nothing but extortion points. They have become a place where you pay your taxes at gunpoint, fully knowing the taxes would not get to the state coffers but into private pockets. Since the Nigerian government placed most of the Northeast region of the country on the emergency rule in 2013, the roadblocks have proliferated. In some places they have become almost like settlements, humming with beggars, idlers, and boys and girls out of school due to the insurgency, selling water and food to travelers. In Borno and Yobes states, the epicenter of the Boko Haram insurgency, there were roadblocks at about every two miles interval. Before the insurgency, the blocks were manned by policemen who'd chat with you about the weather or about the traffic as you handed them their bribe. They would even give you change if you had no small notes. All very civilized. Now the checkpoints were guarded by sculling, uncommunicative soldiers in full war gear. I almost laughed when I saw a sign warning drivers that it is illegal to give bribes at checkpoints. With a phone number to call if a soldier solicited a bribe. This was the face of the new government of Muhammadu Buhari who was elected in May 2015 on the promise to wipe out corruption and Boko Haram. Abbas told me he had tried the numbers and they didn't work. At the checkpoints, passengers in private cars were sometimes allowed to remain in their vehicle, while passengers in commercial vehicles had to get out and approach the soldiers on foot. Often, male passengers had to take off their shirts and raise their hands as they passed the soldiers. Boko Haram insurgents sometimes detonated suicide vests at checkpoints. As the passengers passed, they presented their ID cards to the soldiers who compared them to pictures of the 100 most wanted Boko Haram members prominently displayed at every checkpoint. Abu Bakr Shekau, the Boko Haram leader, was ranked number 100. His enlarged face with his signature layer occupied the center of the poster. A few faces on the list had already been captured. Recently, Khalid Al-Barnawi, the head of Ansaru, a Boko Haram splinter group responsible for the kidnapping and killing of many foreigners had been caught in a hideout in Lokoja, Kodi State. One other reason ID cards were checked was because Boko Haram members never carried them. To them, they are a Western invention and therefore haram or forbidden. I ask Abbas, would anyone without ID be arrested for a Boko Haram member? No, not always. It mostly depended on the discretion of the soldiers, on the answers the defaulter gave. Usually, the punishment was a fine of anything between 200 Naira to 500 Naira. I had Abbas was the last checkpoint before Chibok. This was the most important checkpoint of all. The soldiers here would determine whether I got to enter Chibok or not. Vehicles coming in or going out were given a special pass, which they must present to the soldiers. Traders bringing supplies from neighboring towns must have an inventory listing every single item they carried. Since the kidnapping of over 276 schoolgirls in April 2014 and the subsequent media focus on the families of the kidnapped girls, the government had placed the town on lockdown. Journalists in particular were Pasoene and Ongrata. I was told of a British reporter who came as a guest of a wife of a local pastor and was turned back at this checkpoint. The Chibok native, Reverend Titus Pona, chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Borno State Chapter, had promised that a local pastor would wait for me at the checkpoint and take me in as his guest. When I got the pastor on the phone, he made excuses and said he couldn't meet me. Now my fate rested on the mood of the soldiers. Abbas, whose hometown, Lhasa, was only about 30 minutes from Chibok, said he had lots of friends here and concocted a new story. Who are coming from Lhasa to visit his friends, one of whom had just gotten married and there was the taciturn marker of the JTF as back up if the new story failed. And so, once more, we got out of the car and approached the soldiers who were seated under a giant tamarin tree by the roadside. With them were three civilian JTF members with their dain guns and knives tied on ropes around their waists. Michael identified himself and handed over his ID card. Next, Abbas handed over his driver's license and mentioned the name of his friend who we were ostensibly visiting. The soldier gave a non-committal nod and turned to me. I handed over my state of Virginia driver's license. America, he said. I'm Nigerian, I said, but I live in America. Mr. Americana, he said. Actually, it's more like Nigeriana, I said. Not sure where this was going. But he seemed suddenly to relax. The other soldiers were laughing and echoing Americana. Now I notice how young they were. None of them could have been over 25. They were just kids sent here to fight a brutal enemy who relished capturing soldiers alive and slaughtering them like rams for propaganda videos. They were clustered around the one holding my driver's license, taking turns looking at it. The mood had lifted. So what do you do in America? I teach, I said, I'm a professor. Ah, Professor Americana. I laugh with them. Professor Americana, why not? He returned my license and waved us through. Thank you. So glad you started out with the passage about checkpoints because this is one of the parts of the book that actually really struck me. So I will come back to that. But to broaden it out, you're a novelist and you've decided to, you know, write a nonfiction account about the Boko Haram insurgency, about the Chibok girls, which internationally, you know, you can argue really brought attention to the horrific Boko Haram crisis. What made you decide to do that? Yeah, what there are different factors that kind of decided me towards writing nonfiction. I felt that, you know, writing a work of fiction would take a long time. Usually it takes about two years or more, sometimes 10 years to write a novel. And I felt I wanted to say something immediately, quickly to address, you know, what was going on, especially after the kidnapping in 2014. That was when I heard the news and that was when I made it my mind. It was going to be a work of nonfiction. And, you know, a work of art is sometimes for posterity, you write a novel and that novel might not really come into its own. Its full meaning, its full significance wouldn't sometimes come into its own till much later, maybe after the author is dead. And I really wanted this to make an impact immediately and to address the situation that's going on. And I didn't want it to be, you know, a metaphor for anything. I wanted it to be literal. This is about these girls that were taken on April 2014. And really that's why I decided it has to be a work of nonfiction. So in April 2014, even then, the Boko Haram crisis, I mean, really 2009 was really the point where the terrorism and the violence began to really escalate. What was it about the kidnapping for you as a Nigerian, as a Northern Nigerian that really gripped you to do this? Yeah, it goes back to about 2009. This was when the founder of the group, Mohammed Yusuf, this was when he was killed by the Nigerian military. And most people, you know, agree that this is like the decisive moment when Boko Haram became really militant, you know, radical or always radical, but this is the moment when they decided they had an excuse to fight the Nigerian government. And everything started escalating from then. They started attacking the police stations, attacking schools, burning down schools, kidnapping people for ransom. And then in 2014, they went to, well, two months before April when they kidnapped the girls, two months before then, they went to secondary school and they killed about 49 or 59 boys in their dorms. They just slaughtered them, butchered them. They didn't kidnap the girls in that school. But two months later, they went to Chibok and took 276 girls. I remember I was living in Germany at that time, I was hearing the news from Nigeria. And to me, this was not just, you know, Nigeria in general, this is part of Nigeria where I came from. And this part I know very well. And it was so shocking for me to see all these things happening. I have lived outside Nigeria for about 15 years now. So in Nigeria, I knew, you know, it was a very peaceful place, relatively quiet. And this part of the country was kind of semi-rural, you know, almost idyllic if you like. And then you get this news of suicide bombers driving cars into buildings and exploding them. And then the girls taken. I felt kind of, I felt impacted, you know, I felt, I said it was something that touched me personally. Because these girls could be my sisters, they could be my neighbors from that part of the country. So that was really when I, you know, I really realized what was going on. This is like, this is the point of no return. You know, Nigeria has reached a point across the line and we can never go back to how Nigeria used to be. So one has to say something about it. One has to make a comment about it. And going back to your point about the checkpoints, actually, in talking about the story of Chibok and the story of the girls. You know, you mentioned in the beginning chapters how difficult it is to get around and to get people to talk. And you say that checkpoints weren't only for regulating traffic, they also controlled the flow of the narrative around the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. Can you talk more about that? I was fortunate enough to even go to Nigeria, Northern Nigeria last year, and you had people who were even denying that it happened. Exactly. Of course it happened during a heightened political time with the former president, Good luck, Jonathan. His supporters claiming that his opponents were using this as a cheap point. So yeah, can you just talk about more about the controlling of the narrative? Yeah, the narrative, there are kind of contending sides to the narrative. And I see the checkpoints as very symbolic. They represent that desire to control the narrative that's coming out of Chibok, out of Nigeria itself. So you have the two sides, you have Boko Haram with their own narrative. They actually make propaganda videos when they kidnapped the girls. They will show them in videos, trying to direct the narrative towards what they want people to hear, what they want people to believe. Then you have the government also trying to claim that they are degrading Boko Haram and kind of gaining and winning the war. So there's all these contending narratives. And Chibok became like the center where every reporter wants to go to talk to the parents of the girls, to see where these things happen. So the government is still very careful who they allow in to Chibok. It's not easy. I guess I was a bit lucky to get in there. Like I mentioned in the book, many reporters were turned back. And this after a journey, after it takes you many days to get to Chibok because of the roadblocks and the details and some parts of the area are still in the hands of the terrorists. So it's a long journey. Imagine getting there and then being turned back. It's kind of crushing, I can imagine. So I was lucky to get in there. But to go back to the issue of the control of narrative, at first when the things started, the government didn't believe that it was happening. The president would look Jonathan, the president who lost the election in 2015, his wife actually went on air and said that this is something that was cooked up by her husband's openings, especially the northern political class, because they want him to lose the elections. This is in 2014 and there was going to be elections in 2015. So it was a very important moment for the president. So everybody was careful what they said, what they allowed to get on air, what they allowed people to say. So there was all this frenzy and anxiety to control the narrative. Reporters were particularly victims of that. A lot of them were stopped from reporting. What happened when it was a kind of accidental thing that happened when the girls were kidnapped? This was when the Nigerian government was organizing the economic forum, this international economic forum. The Nigerian government was hosting this international economic forum. What the government was trying to do was to showcase Nigeria's economic achievements and the president was trying to use that to kind of start paving way for his election in 2015. The whole world was hosted by Nigeria. You had the Chinese president was there, foreign ministers were there, so Nigeria was the focus of the whole world. International media organizations were there, and then the girls were kidnapped that very moment when the whole world was there. So this was a bit of luck that everybody was there, CNN was there, and then the whole attention turned away from the president's economic forum and focus on the girls. So this was why you had the bring back our girls movement, why you had people like Michelle Obama, David Cameron in England, or with the hashtag bring back our girls, because of the focus of the whole media at that time. So there's all these interesting developments around the media and the kidnapping of the girls. I remember, so I was at the post at the time, there was a lot of sort of commentary about, you know, not only are the girls being kidnapped, and that this is terrible, but also, who is Boko Haram? What is Boko Haram? Five facts we need to know about Boko Haram in Nigeria. And there's a lot of sort of, in a sense, kind of pushback against the Western media, because you got a lot of commenters saying, you know, well, if this had happened in the West, we would have been faster to report on it. We would have reported on it differently. But I think one thing that does come through in your book is how difficult it was to access barring, you know, even the government, you know, trying to, trying to restrict the narrative, but just how incredibly difficult it was to get information, credible information, even from the government. And exactly, exactly. And to kind of I mentioned something in my book about the very weak that the girls were taken. The government, the military, the Nigerian military spokesperson went on air to say that the girls had been rescued. And they weren't rescued. And he didn't even know how many girls were taken. He said about 26 girls, that all the 26 girls were rescued. And they were 276 girls taken. So you see how all the, you know, the misinformation, the lack of accurate information. And it has a lot to do with the terrain, you know, with Borno State. This is, like I said, a very rural area. And the roads are very bad. So for people to even go there, is very difficult. And Boko Haram was attacking the communication centers, newspaper offices, the satellite masts for, you know, phone companies. And people had no telephone communication in almost all of Borno State around that time. People had to travel to neighboring state just to make a phone call for about four months. So this made it really difficult. And if you realize how Nigeria is, the media is situated in Nigeria, they are mostly situated in the southern part of the country. The north is, it's not as well covered when it comes to news and the media as the south is. The south you have Lagos and Ibadan, and most of the newspaper offices are situated there. So it makes it really hard to get news out of the north. As a, as a northerner, as a, as a writer, how do you, because one element that came out of the, out of the story was a bit of a divide between the south and the north. In the sense that I had even met, you know, journalists who were from media houses in Lagos or Abuja who had never traveled to the north to even be able to cover the story. So, you know, as a, as a northerner, were you also perhaps upset or dismayed or disappointed in how the Nigerian media even covered not only the Chewbacca girls, but Boko Haram's ascendancy. Yeah, exactly. And it's one of the reasons why I decided to write the book, you know, to kind of go behind the, you know, the general coverage and to be more in-depth. It's, it's unfortunate, you know, most of the focus, the south is more developed than the north. So you find, educationally, the north is a bit backwards. And now they are even more backwards because of the Boko Haram insurgency and the attack on education and on schools. So you find most reporters haven't even been to the north. All they hear is kind of from second hand information about the north. And that kind of added to all the misinformation, you know, and the confusion. So there's a lot of confusion surrounding the coverage of Boko Haram. Some people even deny that it actually happened, you know, up to now. Some people will tell you that, you know, it's not something like that. It never happened. It's just stories. Yeah. So in the book, you kind of telescope out and you give amazing history of Nigeria back to the Sakoto Caliphate, to the colonial times. And you can't, you situate, you know, the current situation in, in Nigeria's, Nigeria's history. I think in one part you, you mentioned that Nigeria's political history of violence is something like I, Claudius. And, you know, while the book, you know, while the book focuses, obviously, on Boko Haram, you do make an important point that there was a time when Islam was tolerant and was accommodating of diversity. And you write, if one were to point to a single event in Nigeria's history that marked the rise of the age of intolerance, it would be the Mitatsine, Mitatsine uprising of the 1980s. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. If you want to understand, you know, Boko Haram, I think very well, you have to go back to Nigeria's history, to the pre-colonial history of Nigeria and the jihad that happened in the late 19th century, you know, middle to late 19th century, when most of Northern Nigeria was, there was a jihad by Othman, this is the, you know, seen as the preeminent figure when it comes to the Islamization of Northern Nigeria. And so this, most of Northern Nigeria was Islamized because of the jihads of the Fulani and Othman and Fodio. So you have that period, then you have the colonial government, the British government coming to Nigeria. And the, so Nigeria, you have the south, where most of the colonial government was situated and the British were there, they opened their missions and schools. And there was a lot of missionary activities where people were, you know, Christianized, if you like. But the north resisted the encroachment of the British. They actually struck a deal with the British that they shouldn't open schools in the north. They shouldn't send missionaries to the north. And that's why the north has always remained Muslim. But there are some parts of the north where you have what they call pagans who weren't Muslim and who were not Christians. So you had that, that buffer zone, if you like. But these people started turning to Christianity as a way of, as a reaction to the Northern Islamic hegemony that existed before colonialism. And so there's always been tension, there's always been that conflict. Even though the north is predominantly Muslim, you have these pockets of Christians. So it's always been like that between the Christians in the north and the Muslims in the north. And that had kind of led to occasional flare-ups of violence. And I mentioned 1985, when you had the first large-scale conflict of that kind. It's called the Mettuccine uprising. And it's very similar to Boko Haram because you had this charismatic figure who was very, very radical. And he went not against Christian, but against the mainstream moderate Muslims. And his followers were not just attacking only Christians, they were also attacking other Muslims. And then you come to Boko Haram. So most of the traditional Muslim synergies are Sufi Muslims. This is called the Sufi Brotherhood. You have two sects, the Qadiriya and the Tijaniya Muslims. But they're all Sufi, and they're very moderate Sufis. So you have the rise of the Salafis. These are the Boko Haram and the Izala. And they're really, really extreme and very radical. And they see the Sufis, they call them infidels. And they actually attack them, run down their mosques, kill their Imams. So it's, that's the history of Nigerian religion in Nigeria and the history of violence when it comes to religion. It's always been there. But this is unprecedented. Boko Haram is unprecedented in the sense that about two million people, getting to three million people have been displaced by this insurgency in this period of about six, seven years. About two million people are living in their own country as refugees. Their houses have been burnt down. The schoolgirls have been taken. About 20,000 people have been killed because of the insurgency. And like I said, you have all these crazy suicide bombings and just uncertainty in Nigeria. So it's it's like scale, you know, violence. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the two million who've been displaced and you visit IDP camps in your book. You know, the situation for refugees and displaced people is actually one of the worst in the world in the Lake Chad basin region. Yet global attention rarely focuses on that. But you do mention if there is any sliver of hope, you do mention in the book how local organizations, religious organizations do try to help. Do try to help the IDPs and refugees. Yeah, I went to the camps in January and in December last year and this year in January when I went there, the camps are usually under the control of the military commanders. And one of them took me around and went to the camps. But even before you go into the camps, what you notice on the streets in Medugri is just this, you know, hundreds of women just sitting by the roadside. And I asked him, I said, what are they doing? I said, they're waiting for food. And they're waiting for food. Because the urgency had been going on for five, six years. Most of them couldn't work their farms. Their husbands have been either conscripted or killed. So the women are just there and they have no support. There's nothing, you know, they can do. They just have to wait for food from, you know, these aid organizations. And you see them, you know, huge number of women just lined up waiting for this food from these people. Then you go into the camps, the IDP camps. And it's, it's, you could see that even then that it was not really well organized. You know, these refugees were just coming in and the military were, you know, just putting them in these camps. And there were no plans, you know, for their feeding. And he told me that his biggest headache now was how to feed these people. I said, but you're a military commander, your job is to fight Boko Haram not to feed these people. There should be provisions for this. He said, no, he has to do everything. You know, he has to do everything. He has to feed them. I said, I did not allow it to go out and work, you know, to feed themselves to say no, because they don't want them to go back to some of them are really on that threat, you know, for their lives. Some of them who are still sympathetic to Boko Haram, you know, want to go back to rejoin Boko Haram. So they have to really keep them in these camps. And between that January and now, the camps have really grown and grown because the government is, you know, kind of winning the war, taking back territory from Boko Haram. So most of the freed people keep trooping to the camps. And that's why you have this over two million people there. And the plans for feeding them is still not as good as it should be. You say the government is kind of winning the war. What do you mean by the quotations and also is war the way to think about defeating Boko Haram? There is a lot in the news about, you know, the Buhari demanding more fighter jets from the US, more weapons, more sort of traditional military approaches. But as a, as a creative, as a novelist, as someone who's looking at history is our conventional approach of war, really the right way to, to address the Boko Haram. But yeah, that's a very good question. Because if you look at where we are now, how Boko Haram started, I didn't mention how the leader of Boko Haram was killed, summarily killed by the military. He and his followers where, you know, in this mosque and the military just came and shelled the mosque and they gunned them down with their wives and their kids. And that gave them the excuse, you know, to start the war against the government. Could the government have approached it differently? Yeah, why not? They could have dialogue with them, you know, they could have arrested them, you know, and tried to, because this is, this is, when you look at the, even though they are radicals, they have ideology and all that. But some of their claims, you know, about not being, not having any stake in the government, in the country, and they felt neglected. They felt that, you know, the government is not really attending to their needs and to their concerns. They are genuine claims, I think. So some of their claims are genuine. The government could have found a way to address these claims and to kind of dialogue with them, because they are Nigerians. But the Nigerian government has always been heavy handed in its approach to this kind of uprisings and dissent and anything that, you know, that is seen as being, you know, not towing the line. So there is that. And the fight, Boko Haram took a huge chunk of the North Eastern region. About 70% of Buenos Aires was under the control of Boko Haram. I think that Boko Haram wasn't going to give up, you know, this land area that they took without a fight, because it reached that level. Things that escalated. And you had to have that fight with them to take back the land area. But that shouldn't be the only approach. There should be other approaches. And the government has been trying to use that soft approach to ask them to voluntarily surrender and they would not be killed or persecuted. So they have had some success with that, you know, some of them have started to surrender a few hundreds here and there, especially the young people who were conscripted without knowing why, what they were doing, taking into these ranks of Boko Haram. So there has been that. But the government, Nigerian government is always going to be very, very military in its approach to such things, because traditionally that's what they've always done. I'm curious about particularly here, you're living here, teaching here in the US. There's such a large Nigerian diaspora all over the world here in the UK. And I was wondering, you know, of course, you know, as a member of the diaspora in a sense, this is your contribution to awareness about about the situation. And you mentioned in the end is Emmanuel Obede. Yeah, you know, a Nigerian human rights lawyer who lends a hand to try to help the Chewbacca girls who ended up here. Do you think there's more of a role for Nigerians in the diaspora to play in the fight in contributing perhaps to the humanitarian relief efforts? Are we, and I say this as somewhat part of the Nigerian diaspora, my mother's Yoruba, are we doing enough? We'll be doing more to help. It's not for me to say, you know, it's not for me to tell people what to do. But there are channels for people to contribute if they want to contribute. I think people should keep talking about it, especially also the media. Right about it, you know, create awareness about this because most people there are, you know, well educated people in the West who have never heard of Boko Haram. My editor was telling me that her mother, well educated woman, you know, and her cycle of friends, they were surprised when she showed them the book. Who is, what's Boko Haram? Who is Chewbacca? Really, in 2015? Yep, yeah, here in America. So it's not, because people, if they don't have a reason to know things, they don't really care about things, you know. So, you know, I think people have to keep talking about it. And I think they bring back our girls movement have done a lot towards raising that awareness. They have branches in different countries, in different cities all over the world, and they have websites. So if you really want to contribute, if you want to lend your voice or anything, you can always just go online and Google, bring back our girls or Chewbacca girls, you see all these organizations that are there. And there are also kind of older, more established traditional organizations like the Red Cross, the USAID, Medicine Sound Frontier. They're all there, they're working in Nigeria with refugees. They can always find a way. You know, Amnesty International can always contact them and they will tell you what to do. Speaking of bring back our girls, and then I think I'll open it up to questions if there are any. There has been, there is criticism. Of course, there's initial criticism of bring back our girls. People said it was just slacktivism, social hashtag activism. And then, you know, if you really wanted to make change, you would, I don't really know, most of the time they didn't quite have a prescription for what exactly to do if you were in the US. But, you know, criticism at that point of bring back our girls is being ineffectual. But then also, you know, some would say that it focused too heavily just on the Chewbacca girls at the expense of perhaps, you know, one could ask, why was there such a global campaign for 270 or so girls? And not for, I think the UN is estimating that something like, you know, 75,000 children in the Northeast are at risk of starvation next year due to, you know, near famine conditions in the north. And where's the global hashtag for those children, right? So it's still, the success of bring back our girls is undeniable, but it still some kind of leads itself to still kind of a selection bias, right? Yeah, yeah, there is that, there is that. And you can do, you can take care of everything. You know, you just have to focus on what you can do. And the bring back our girls are focused on the Chewbacca girls and it's become their, you know, their mantra, their rallying cry. But I think when they talk about the Chewbacca girls, they're also talking about the other, you know, girls and women and, you know, boys. Who have been taken by Boko Haram and there are tens of thousands of them, you know, still under the control of Boko Haram and the Nigerian Senate recently approached the Nigerian president and told him that, you know, we shouldn't just be talking about the Chewbacca girls, we should also talk about all the other people who are in captivity, who are in slavery on the Boko Haram. So and here I am writing about the Chewbacca girls. But I, like I mentioned, when you talk about the Chewbacca girls, you are also making a case against Boko Haram. You're making a case for all the others. And that's my understanding of it. That's the way I see it. To address the issue of, you know, who bring back girls and if they are, you know, what they're trying to do and how, you know, the politics around all that, you know, it's been there, going back to the time of Gulag Jonathan, who saw them as his opponents, as if they were trying to, by insisting on him to do something about the Chewbacca girls, he saw them as attacking him. You know, that's the kind of president he was. That's the kind of things can pass and he was. And you're assessing the Buhari. Yeah. So he, there was actually a counter movement, you know, to bring back our girls who went and attacked them when they were having some of their meetings and tried to discredit them online. And what they've, you know, they've prevailed. They're still there. I went to their meeting in Abuja, I think last year, they still meet every day. One hour they will sit in the public square, wearing their red dresses and, you know, red colors, you know, as a comment, you know, as a statement, you know, for the girls against Boko Haram. And, you know, if what they're doing is, what they're doing is good, you know, this, you know, it's admirable. Okay. I think I have about 10, 15 minutes. People in the audience have questions. I think there's a mic. If not, then I'll just keep firing away my questions. One of the haunting things towards the end of the book, I don't want to give too much away, but when you talk about what happened in just sort of the repetitive kind of, people describe it the exact same way. And it's almost somewhat, I hate to say this word, almost like bland. This happened, this happened, this happened. And I wonder how that struck you, because that just struck me as terrifying. And what, you know, people in the town sort of how they approached what actually happened, the process by which these 276 girls were taken. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, one thing with violence and, you know, in terms of volume and quantity. And it's not just, you know, with actual real life, it's also the same with literature. When you have a literature that, you know, has this almost excessive sense of violence, the reader, you know, becomes kind of from desensitized to that. You don't feel the impact of it because it's just so random, it's so prevalent, it's everywhere. And that's how I felt when I went there and saw these people and heard their stories. They become so used to violence. It's like, I couldn't live in this place. Why don't you guys just live here and just pack your bags and leave? You know, they say, this is their home. They can't go. They've become so, you know, if they come tomorrow, they will kill us. If they don't come, you know, be here, you know, they've become so used to it. If you can ever get used to that kind of thing. But that's what I saw. And the stories, they keep just telling you the stories, or they came and invaded this place or they killed this person. They took my nieces, they took my uncle. And they have become used to the part of violence. That's what happens to people when there are no options, I guess. But because it's become so, it becomes a part of their, of their life. And there's something they can do about it. Yeah. Hi. My question is, is it known how the group, Boko Haram, is being financed? It's got to take a lot of money. There's weapons. There's just feeding all of the soldiers. Any idea about where that money is coming from? Yeah. What did the the early when they started attacking the military, they also went to banks and they were robbing banks, you know, in the early days, they took a lot of money from banks. They will go from town to town in the villages and rural areas and attack banks and took money from, from the banks. And then in the early days to the hard affiliations with Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, not Northern, Northern Africa, they had contact with them. And it's believed that they had lots of help in terms of weaponry and money from, from Al-Qaeda. And then in 2015, they, they, they, they, they saw allegiance to ISIS. So I think ISIS is also hooking out in terms of money and training and other things. They also take hostages and demand ransom money, millions, millions of Naira from, from families of, you know, their hostages. And they, if you understand where Borno State is, it's kind of situated next to two countries. There's Cameroon on the west and there's Niger up north. So this is a very traditionally, it's been a very, very relatively affluent part of the country because there's trade, you know, international trade across the borders. In terms of cattle, I transported, you know, between these countries. So Boko Haramon, they took over this area. They control all the economy of that area, you know, the, the traders, the farmers, the cattle, everything, they kind of took it. And that's a lot of money for them. So it's a huge economy that they control in the northeast part of Nigeria. Going back to the historical context that you mentioned in the tensions between Muslims and Christians. Has there been a push for any type of interfaith dialogue to try to develop amicable relations there? Yes, there has been, there has been. You have the Christian Association of Nigeria. It's called CAHN, C-A-N. And you have the Islamic organizations, two different organizations. They've tried, they've tried. It's not always easy to get these groups to come together. One, because the politicians are always trying to manipulate these groups for their own end, they're trying to get them not to unify because it's easier to control, you know, these united people than to control the united people. So it's also an aspect of the corruption that we're talking about. They just kind of get the people divided so that you continue the legacy of the divided rule, you know, that they inherited from the colonial government. It's always been the system of government in Nigeria to divide, not just amongst religious ranks, but also ethnic groups, to get them always bickering and competing with each other. It's been a tool of governance in Nigeria, division. So it's not been easy, but there are people trying all the time. To ask, I'm going back to the fact you're from Gombe state and reporting this book and then traveling back to the north. And you also you still have family. Yeah, my mother is still in Gombe. How did this, you know, how did this impact you, you know, to go and see your, the north you once knew transformed into a place where violence is now so normal? Yeah, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. I wrote an article for the UK Guardian, I think last year, two years ago, about taking my children to Nigeria for the first time and then seeing the country through their eyes and how shocking, you know, it was for me to just see, I knew how this place that, like I mentioned, was relatively a very peaceful rural part of the country has, you know, become a veritable war zone. You find the checkpoint and you find the soldiers, you know, with their guns just standing there. I couldn't, I could hardly recognize it. You know, it's changed. And there's all the violence, you hear the stories of explosions. People don't even hang out like they used to because of the fear of Boko Haram, because what they were doing was they will go to crowded places like markets, shops and just detonate explosives and kill people. People used to, you know, go to bars and nightclubs at night. Now you go out at night, it's empty. There are no people. People don't, people go home. I'm sure their wives are happy that they come home but it's sad to see. Do you plan more reporting trips? Do you plan to continue? Continue in, or do you plan to write a novel about this? You said it at the beginning that it could take two years, ten years. Is a novel still an approach that you want to take in telling the story about Boko Haram in Nigeria? Yeah. I'm thinking about it. You know, I haven't, I don't have a story yet, but, you know, something like that. I feel that I haven't exhausted all the things I want to say about this thing. So who knows in the future I might do something, you know, in the lives of fiction. Any other questions? Does this put you in danger writing about this? It seems like they wouldn't, Boko Haram would not want you to share this side before the government. Or the government. Yeah. I mean, one doesn't even think about that. You know, you just, you just want to do what to, you just do what you have to do. If you think too much about the danger, you know, you wouldn't do anything. So I just focus on what I have to do, you know, what's in front of me. I just take it a step at a time. But sometimes you have this compelling need to do something, to say something especially, regardless of the danger, keeping quiet, you know, becomes even more, I don't know, dishonorable. You just feel like you cannot keep quiet. You have to just say something about it. How do the governments in Niger and Cameroon deal with Boko Haram? And we really don't hear much reporting at all about Boko Haram outside Nigeria. Oh, yeah, they have been impacted a lot. They have been, you know, incursions by Boko Haram into Niger, into Cameroon, kidnappings and killings, government officials, just like they do in Nigeria. But, you know, Boko Haram is a Nigerian terrorist group. So they are mostly indigenous to Nigeria, but they do have, you know, they cross the borders, especially when the government is fighting them, they run across the border into Niger and Cameroon. So there has been multinational task force of by the three countries where the militaries, the three militaries came together to fight Boko Haram. And they've been doing a lot, especially the Niger military. Sometimes they would chase Boko Haram into Nigeria and they've been responsible for freeing lots of villages in the Nigerian part of the border by Niger military. Yeah, they've been really active. If you have time for maybe one more question, if there are any. I have my final question. Was there one experience or one encounter that kind of at least gave you a bit of hope for the situation? Hope, yeah. Well, last month, 21 girls were released by Boko Haram. This was the first time that Boko Haram was negotiating with the government. It's been almost three years now since the girls were taken, 276 girls. Two girls were discovered just kind of wandering in the forest by the Nigerian government. This was in May this year and in August, I think, but then in October for the first time, Boko Haram willingly negotiated with the government and they agreed to let 21 girls go free and they were returned to their families. So this is a sign of hope, I think. It's also a sign that Boko Haram is weakening because they wouldn't ordinarily negotiate. They can only negotiate from a position of weakness, not from a position of strength. So I think they are feeling the pressure, the government is really pushing them. So this is a good sign that in the future they might be willing to negotiate and release more girls. So that is a ray of hope. All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have for today. Helen, thank you so much for sharing your work with us. This book is amazing and you were brave and even just taking on such a complex topic in such a complex country and doing it in such a way that is extremely accessible and extremely readable. You can read it in just an evening, really. So it's a really valuable contribution to that. Thank you guys, New America for inviting me here and I'm really glad we were able to have this discussion. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you guys.