Escape From Sambisa Forest

One

Four Hilux double-cabin trucks followed by a battered army truck rolled into the small town of Chibok, north-eastern Nigeria, close to the border with Niger Republic. They didn’t enter the town quietly, but noisily, with bold, dare-devil bravely, on the chained wheels of an armored tank coated with Nigerian army colors. They came shooting sporadically into the air, scaring the poor, harmless natives who quickly abandoned their homes and went scurrying for safety in the woods nearby.

             The pseudo-military convoy headed with deliberate ease to the community secondary school where two hundred and nineteen school girls mostly in their teens, were poring over their final exams.

             Dazed and shocked, the school teachers were ordered to vacate the premises. They were told that all the girls would be conveyed to a safe place in anticipation of an impending invasion by the Boko Haram sect. No one argued. Of course you don’t argue with a dangerous weapon wavering in your face. Whether the teachers believed the bogus tale or not, they were forced to flee the premises with guns pointing at their heads.

             All the girls were hurriedly evacuated, loaded up in the battered army truck and the convoy headed straight for the dreaded Sambisa Forest, headquarters of the fearsome Boko Haram. 

*

Hafsat Danba, seventeen, was seated at her favorite front desk closest to the window as usual, intent on her response to the first question in Mathematics, one of her favorites, when she heard the first gunshot in the air…thau!

             But she ignored it. Since the advent of the notorious Boko Haram, the sound of a gun going off in the distance was not uncommon. Then she heard it again, and again, and getting closer…thau-thau! Thau! Thau-thau!

             Hafsatu placed her hands over both her ears and shut her eyes momentarily as images from memory suddenly flooded her consciousness, almost as if in slow-motion…

She saw her mother, Hadiza, running forward and mouthing words that Hafsat could neither hear nor comprehend…and seeing the profound fear in her mother’s wide eyes as she ran, arms outstretched…and just as Hafsat turned to look over her shoulder, it was too late…her mother whisked her away bodily as Hafsat let out a yell…but not before she had seen someone that looked like her father falling to the ground…

             “A stray bullet,” a shaken, broken Hadiza, later told her daughter.

             A stray bullet was what had killed her father, as the Boko Haram over-zealous soldiers, with itchy fingers overshot their orders into the village periphery. They had shot and killed her father, among many other fleeing peasants from a neighboring community that had been marked for looting and extinction.

             A few years later Hadiza and her in-laws relocated to the Chibok community where they had enjoyed a semblance of peace, due to the presence of the Nigerian Army post. But even that no longer seemed to be of any consequence, seeing that the terrorists had finally come calling.

             While all the other girls were being herded off into the truck as they scampered around the remises in outright fright, Hafsat sat rock still at her desk, reflecting her brief agonizing experience, and watching all proceedings with pure hate in her eyes. One thing was clear to her. She wasn’t scared of these rag-tag gang of gun-toting militiamen. She counted four Hilux vans, armored tank and a big truck. She was counting the militiamen when on her count of nine, the ninth militia saw her for the first time.