₦airaland Forum

A slow-motion war is under way in Africa’s most populous country. It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality. And the world has hardly noticed.

A Nigerian Pentecostal Christian, director of a nongovernmental organization that works for mutual understanding between Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims, alerted me to it. “Have you heard of the Fulani?” he asked at our first meeting, in Paris, speaking the flawless, melodious English of the Nigerian elite. The Fulani are an ethnic group, generally described as shepherds from mostly Muslim Northern Nigeria, forced by climate change to move with their herds toward the more temperate Christian South. They number 14 million to 15 million in a nation of 191 million.


Among them is a violent element. “They are Islamic extremists of a new stripe,” the NGO director said, “more or less linked with Boko Haram,” the sect that became infamous for the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Christian girls in the state of Borno. “I beg you,” he said, “come and see for yourself.” Knowing of Boko Haram but nothing of the Fulani, I accept.

The 2019 Global Terrorism Index estimates that Fulani extremists have become deadlier than Boko Haram and accounted for the majority of the country’s 2,040 documented terrorist fatalities in 2018. To learn more about them, I travel to Godogodo, in the center of the country, where I meet a beautiful woman named Jumai Victor, 28. On July 15, she says, Fulani extremists stormed into her village on long-saddle motorcycles, three to a bike, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” They torched houses and killed her four children before her eyes.

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When her turn came and they noticed she was pregnant, a discussion ensued. Some didn’t want to see her belly slit, so they compromised by cutting up and amputating her left arm with a machete. She speaks quickly and emotionlessly, staring into space as if she lost her face along with her arm. The village chief, translating for her, chokes up. Tears stream down his cheeks when she finishes her account.

I venture north to Adnan, where Lyndia David, 34, tells her story of survival. On the morning of March 15, rumors reached her village that Fulani raiders were nearby. She was dressing for church as her husband prepared to join a group of men who’d stand watch. He urged her to take refuge at her sister’s home in another village.

Her first night there, sentinels woke her with a whistle. She left the house to find flames spreading around her. Fulani surrounded her. Then she heard a voice: “Come this way, you can get through!” She did, and her putative savior leapt out of the underbrush, cut three fingers off her right hand, carved the nape of her neck with his machete, shot her, doused her body with gasoline, and lit it. She somehow survived. A few weeks later she returned to her village and learned that the raiders had leveled it the same night. Her husband was among the 72 they murdered.

The Christian Middle Belt is a land of blooming prairies that once delighted English colonizers. On the outskirts of Jos, capital of Plateau state, I visit the ruins of a burned-down church. I spot another, intact. A man emerges to yell at me in English that I don’t belong there. Stalling, I learn that he is Turkish, a member of a “religious mutual assistance group” that is opening madrassas for the daughters of Fulani.

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That day I crisscross the Middle Belt. Roads are crumbled, bridges collapsed; destroyed houses cast broken shadows over tree stumps and trails of black ash and blood. Maize rots in the abandoned fields. The local Christians have been killed or are too terrorized to come out and harvest it. In the distance are clusters of white smudges—the Fulani herds grazing on the lush grass. When we approach, the armed shepherds wave us off.

The Anglican bishop of Jos, Benjamin Kwashi, has had his livestock stolen three times. During the third raid he was dragged into his room, a gun to his head. He dropped to his knees and prayed at the top of his voice until the thrumming of a helicopter drove his assailants off.

Bishop Kwashi describes the Fulani extremists’ pattern: They usually arrive at night. They are barefoot, so you can’t hear them coming unless they’re on motorcycle. Sometimes a dog sounds the alert, sometimes a sentinel. Then a terrifying stampede, whirling clouds of dust, cries of encouragement from the invaders. Before villagers can take shelter or flee, the invaders are upon them in their houses, swinging machetes, burning, pillaging, raping. They don’t kill everyone. At some point they stop, recite a verse from the Quran, round up the livestock and retreat. They need survivors to spread fear from village to village, to bear witness that the Fulani raiders fear nothing but Allah and are capable of anything.

The heads of 17 Christian communities have come to the outskirts of Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital, to meet me in a nondescript compound. Some have traveled for days in packed buses or minivans. Each arrives accompanied by a victim or two.

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Here they are, an exhausted yet earnestly hopeful group of some 40 women and men, keenly aware of the moment’s gravity. One carries a USB key, another a handwritten account, a third a folder full of photos, captioned and dated. I accept these records, overwhelmed by the weight of the bearers’ hope that the world will recognize the horrors they experienced.

Taking the floor in turn, the survivors confirm the modus operandi Bishop Kwashi described, each adding an awful detail. The mutilated cadavers of women. A mute man commanded to deny his faith, then cut up with a machete until he screams. A girl strangled with the chain of her crucifix.

Westerners here depict the Fulani extremists as an extended, rampant Boko Haram. An American humanitarian says the Fulani recruit volunteers to serve internships in Borno State, where Boko Haram is active. Another says Boko Haram “instructors” have been spotted in Bauchi, another northeastern state, where they are teaching elite Fulani militants to handle more-sophisticated weapons that will replace their machetes. Yet whereas Boko Haram are confined to perhaps 5% of Nigerian territory, the Fulani terrorists operate across the country.

Villagers west of Jos show the weapons they use to defend themselves: bows, slings, daggers, sticks, leather whips, spears. Even these meager arms have to be concealed. When the army comes through after the attacks, soldiers tell the villagers their paltry weapons are illegal and confiscate them.

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Several times I note the proximity of a military base that might have been expected to protect civilians. But the soldiers didn’t come; or, if they did, it was only after the battle; or they claimed not to have received the texted SOS calls in time, or not to have had orders to respond, or to have been delayed on an impassable road.

“What do you expect?” our driver asks as we take off in a convoy for his burned-down church. “The army is in league with the Fulani. They go hand in hand.” After one attack, “we even found a dog tag and a uniform.”

“It’s hardly surprising,” says Dalyop Salomon Mwantiri, one of the few lawyers in the region who dare to represent victims. “The general staff of the Nigerian army is a Fulani. The whole bureaucracy is Fulani.”

So is President Muhammadu Buhari. In April 2016 Mr. Buhari ordered security forces to “secure all communities under attack by herdsmen.” In July 2019 a spokesman for the president said in a statement: “No one has the right to ask anyone or group to depart from any part of the country, whether North, South, East or West.”

Most Christians I meet express disgust at the vague language suggesting culpability on both sides. Their stories tend to validate claims of the government’s complicity. In Riyom district, three displaced Nigerians and a soldier were gunned down this June as they attempted to return home. The villagers know the assailants. Police identified them. Everyone knows they took refuge in a nearby village. But there they are under the protection of the ardos, a local emir. No arrests occurred.

Village chief Sunday Abdu recounts another example, a 2017 attack on Nkiedonwhro. This time the military came to warn villagers of a threat. They ordered the women and children to take shelter in a school. But after the civilians complied, a soldier fired a shot in the air. A second shot sounded in the distance, seemingly in response. Minutes later, after the soldiers had departed, the assailants appeared, went directly to the classroom, and fired into the cowering group, killing 27.

I also meet some Fulani—the first time by chance. Traveling by road near a river bed, we come on a checkpoint consisting of a rope stretched across the road, a hut and two armed men. “No passage,” says one, wearing a jacket on which are sewn badges in Arabic and Turkish. “This is Fulani land, the holy land of Usman dan Fodio, our king—and you whites can’t come in.” The conquests of dan Fodio (1754-1817) led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate over the Fula and Hausa lands.

The second encounter is on the outskirts of Abuja. Driving toward the countryside, we reach a village unlike the others we’ve seen in the Christian zone. There’s a ditch, and behind it a hedge of bushes and pilings. The place seems closed off from the world. From huts emerge a swarm of children and their mothers, the women covered from head to foot.

It’s a village of Fulani nomads who carried out a tiny, localized Fulanization after the Christians cleared out. “What are you doing here?” demands an adolescent boy wearing a T-shirt adorned with a swastika. “Are you taking advantage of the fact that it’s Friday, and we’re in the mosque, to come spy on our women? The Quran forbids that!” When I ask if wearing a swastika isn’t also contrary to the Quran, he looks puzzled, then launches into a feverish tirade. He says he knows he’s wearing “a German insignia,” but he believes that “all men are brothers,” except for the “bad souls” who “hate Muslims.”

Later I encounter Fulani near Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, which is in the south on the Gulf of Guinea. North of the city is an open-air market where Fulani sell their livestock. I am with three young Christians, survivors of a Middle Belt massacre who live in a camp for displaced persons. They pretend to be cousins buying an animal for a family feast. As they negotiate over a white-horned pygmy goat, I look for Fulani willing to talk.

Most have come from Jigawa state, on the border with Niger, crossing the country south in trucks to bring their stock here. Although I learn little about their trip, they eagerly express their joy in being here, on the border of this contemptible promised land, where they expect to “dip the Quran in the sea.”

There are “too many Christians in Lagos,” says Abadallah, who looks to be in his 40s. “The Christians are dogs and children of dogs. You say Christians. To us they are traitors. They adopted the religion of the whites. There is no place here for friends of the whites, who are impure.” A postcard vendor joins the group and offers me portraits of Osama bin Laden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He agrees the Christians will eventually leave and Nigeria will be “free.”

Some professional disinformers will try to reduce the violence here to one of the “interethnic wars” that inflame Africa. They’ll likely find, here and there, acts of reprisal against the Fula and Hausa. But as my trip concludes, I have the terrible feeling of being carried back to Rwanda in the 1990s, to Darfur and South Sudan in the 2000s.

Will the West let history repeat itself in Nigeria? Will we wait, as usual, until the disaster is done before taking notice? Will we stand by as international Islamic extremism opens a new front across this vast land, where the children of Abraham have coexisted for so long?

Mr. Lévy is author of “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World” (Henry Holt, 2019). This article was translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy.


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-new-war-against-africas-christians-11576880200

Lalasticlala

Later I encounter Fulani near Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, which is in the south on the Gulf of Guinea. North of the city is an open-air market where Fulani sell their livestock. I am with three young Christians, survivors of a Middle Belt massacre who live in a camp for displaced persons. They pretend to be cousins buying an animal for a family feast. As they negotiate over a white-horned pygmy goat, I look for Fulani willing to talk.


Most have come from Jigawa state, on the border with Niger, crossing the country south in trucks to bring their stock here. Although I learn little about their trip, they eagerly express their joy in being here, on the border of this contemptible promised land, where they expect to “dip the Quran in the sea.”

There are “too many Christians in Lagos,” says Abadallah, who looks to be in his 40s. “The Christians are dogs and children of dogs. You say Christians. To us they are traitors. They adopted the religion of the whites. There is no place here for friends of the whites, who are impure.” A postcard vendor joins the group and offers me portraits of Osama bin Laden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He agrees the Christians will eventually leave and Nigeria will be “free.”


We had better start using our brain in Lagos. All these northerners trooping in is going to cause trouble in the future...

We need to partner with the South East, the entire South and North central and gtfo of this country. Amotekun wouldn't solve this issue on ground.

See how a foreigner entered Nigeria and did thorough investigative journalism. Nigerian media would only sit at Lagos - Ibadan expressway and be imagining who embassy gave visa or not. Unfortunate!

na wa ooo

lalasticlala

And we have a President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces who couldn't disguised his cluelessness and helplessness by openly admitting to be taken unawares by rising insecurity ...

HigherEd:
See how a foreigner entered Nigeria and did thorough investigative journalism. Nigerian media would only sit at Lagos - Ibadan expressway and be imagining who embassy gave visa or not. Unfortunate!

Lalasticlala, pls don't post to front page o. I don't want FTC kids to corrupt this beautiful piece with their intellectual toys.

@Topic, When I speak on Nairaland at times and people tag me a religious and emotional bigot, I just pity them inside.
The uproar against Amotekun alone is a clear signal that there is an islamist conspiracy going on. Why are only cattle rearing muslims pained by an operation targeted at criminals? Their noise is even more worrisome given the fact that the Presidency has always tagged the frequent massacres as works of "criminals".

Why is the reaction of Nigerian govt always different to that of all neighboring countries facing such insecurity challenges?
How come there are no prosecution of offenders yet?
Why is FG silent about Hisbah police to the point that they can arrest a police officer of the official NPF?
Why can muslims block roads paid for by taxpayers every Friday and Buratai has never clashed with them unlike Shiites? Could that be an attempt at harmonizing the Islamic cult before launching their war(on behalf of a handicapped God)? Why are BH terrorist being reabsorbed back into the society they want to break from and yet army officers found wanting in their discharge of 'duty' are prosecuted to the last?
Why are states diverting funds meant for development toward phantom religious development or mosques?

Truth is after the civil war was 'won', the victors needed to move their loot which is oil, but the oil was just too much and voluminous, One Nigeria is the conduit for the transfer of that loot. The religious angle to it only makes it sickening the more.

New War Against Africa's Christians

What does that mean??

mmn

helinues:

Nigeria have not seen anything yet. Fulani's from other countries will soon start coming to Nigeria to help Nigerian Fulani's achieve their agenda, that is if the are not here already

nabiz:
Nigeria have not seen anything yet. Fulani's from other countries will soon start coming to Nigeria to help Nigerian Fulani's achieve their agenda, that is if the are not here already

Are Fulani not African?

This is a very interesting and eye opening article. Nigerians need to wake up. There is a religious war brewing and as usual our people are acting non chalant until things get out of control and the entire nation is engulfed in war based on differences in religious beliefs. I don't even know the way forward at this point. I never in my life thought that Nigeria will one day degenerate to what we have today.

@codetemplar the truth is after years of reflecting about Nigeria I have come to the conclusion that it is best to let go of this country.

You see Northern Muslims would never allow Nigeria to be great. They are poor, carry religion on their head and would continue to use their wrong priorities to send terrible politicians to the seat of power. Reason why you would have a certificate less president buoyed by a Professor. A terrible anomaly.

When you read Lee Kuan Yew's memoir you would see the 'battle' he had with Singapore's Muslim population. They were failing mathematics while others were soaring. He forcefully ensured they came up to standard. He knew Muslims underperforming would create dangerous ripple effect in the future of Singapore. But he could only do that because they were minorities.

Islam is a liability you handle when the population is less than 30% and cannot drive full social and cultural change. At 50% your country would be filled with tussle.

helinues:
Are Fulani not African?

Is Nigeria a public toilet where any shitty African can be dumped?

CodeTemplar:
Is Nigeria a public toilet where any shitty African can be dumped?

Are Nigerians shit for dumping shitty in everywhere dey go?

HigherEd:
@codetemplar the truth is after years of reflecting about Nigeria I have come to the conclusion that it is best to let go of this country.

You see Northern Muslims would never allow Nigeria to be great. They are poor, carry religion on their head and would continue to use their wrong priorities to send terrible politicians to the seat of power. Reason why you would have a certificate less president buoyed by a Professor. A terrible anomaly.

When you read Lee Kuan Yew's memoir you would see the 'battle' he had with Singapore's Muslim population. They were failing mathematics while others were soaring. He forcefully ensured they came up to standard. But he could only do that because they were minorities.

These people are just something else. Man with a degenerated mind is worse than an animal and thats the case of these muslims folks.

Please don't make racist and tribalistic comments on this section

A Very Opposing Minority View!

I do not believe Nigerians will ever not have our chains yanked by the description of any difference amongst us being religious or ethnic or tribal, even when or if those differences are due to economics. That's not to say religion or ethnicity has nothing to do with our differences, mind, but it definitely is not as described here unless one wants to claim the persecuted Christians are fools. I mean, if you believe Muslims do want to overrun Nigeria, why is it that the only retaliatory sacking of mosques I see on the whole of Nairaland is one dated back to 2017? Are Christians so tolerant of being killed that they truly do turn the other cheek? Or is there a realisation amongst us that terrorists do not care for anyone's religion or tribe, and that so long as you don't accept their ignorant version of what they insist you must believe they'd kill Muslim and Christian alike?

I can't help my skeptism I guess, and I know it is not shared: and that I am in the minority here: and that some will come and accuse me of being a Fulani and a Muslim and paid and a bastard, despite my afonjas clearly lining my face as the Ọmọluabi that I am, but there's not many places one can be in our country where one would be solely amongst those who believe as one does and I can only be delighted that the hatred this sort of false and hate inciting so-called journalism evokes does not sway many.

To start with, a certain level of stupidity would have to be required to think those who wish to Islamise me would not poison the cow meat, which afonja me likes so much, with Islam! No, please do not snigger, I know it sounds absurd, but if I believe boko haram and Fulani herdsmen are one and the same people, my Owambẹ will be turkey and chicken and not cow meat unless my belly is bigger than the brain that ought to be in my head and I'm stupid enough to fund my own killers! If for nothing else, my fight back should be the removal of cow meat from my menu, then shall we see where any Islamising terrorists, if that's truly what they are, will find the money to buy an AK47 to terrorise me!

In the East, where Islam has formerly been near non-existent, I hear there are mosques today. Am I to believe the Easterners are so accepting of Islamisation that they allow supposed Islamising temples to be built amongst them with speakers blasting "Islamise" five times a day? Can Easterners really be that naive and stupid, or is it the case that they are much wiser and see that terorism is not the Islam in the mosques. And then you have states like mine, the State of Osun, as our former Muslim Governor renamed us, dominated by Muslims, some would claim, but who make no attempt to Islamise anyone, which, if they were, would evoke an uproar from the Christians and worshippers of our indigenous gods alike. Or does anyone think Christians in Osun State will turn the other cheek to Islamsation? Will Sangoists and Ogunist too turn the other cheek, or is it assumed that Sango and Ogun are so dead that we would not oppose with our Ayilala any Allah claiming to be the only God that we must worship or be killed? I personally do not think people are that docile. I mean, we Afonjas might be, but the Ajokutamamomis in the East too?

Perhaps I am missing that some might be opposing Islamisation by prayers and night vigils, though the level of ignorance required for me to think that is the only opposition posed is way beyond me. And while some might wish to point me to amotekunisation as their opposition, I'm sure I need not point them back to the fact that they themselves claim their amotekunising is not opposition to Islam but opposition to terror itself. And if that is true, then surely, amotekun along ethnic lines should not be our response, but the atekunisation of all Nigerians, regardless of tribe and religion, standing united against this evil terrorising that is being disguised as a religion!

There is indeed gain in destabilising Nigeria, and our religions will be the chains that would be used to achieve it, as these terrorist are clearly doing. But one just need see the rewards of our last war to know that any gains will not be for those who buy into this chain yanking emotional rhetoric disguised as journalism, which it isn't, by irresponsible Bernard-Henri Lévy and the Wall Street Journal. I can assure you that when similar chains were yanked in Rwanda, it was the Tutsis and the Hutus who lost millions of people as we also see in war torn Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan that had and continue to have their chains yanked while their assets are being ravaged and stripped by ........!

Christianity is a fake Hellenistic religion that was manufactured by first century Romans.

Christianity is an adopted malicious ideology that originated out of an aggressive invasion and occupation.

HigherEd:
See how a foreigner entered Nigeria and did thorough investigative journalism.

"Thorough investigative journalism" my ass!

This chain yanking emotional rhetoric disguised as journalism by irresponsible Bernard-Henri Lévy and the Wall Street Journal is what, in the field, is called a hack job, which is the reason it is just an opinion!

Intelligent people would look beneath the veil.

I thought I read something like this lately last year

Fulani constituting nuisance since 530 BC

The Christian Middle Belt is a land of blooming prairies that once delighted English colonizers. On the outskirts of Jos, capital of Plateau state, I visit the ruins of a burned-down church. I spot another, intact. A man emerges to yell at me in English that I don’t belong there. Stalling, I learn that he is Turkish, a member of a “religious mutual assistance group” that is opening madrassas for the daughters of Fulani.

Blue3k,

HigherEd:
Later I encounter Fulani near Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, which is in the south on the Gulf of Guinea. North of the city is an open-air market where Fulani sell their livestock. I am with three young Christians, survivors of a Middle Belt massacre who live in a camp for displaced persons. They pretend to be cousins buying an animal for a family feast. As they negotiate over a white-horned pygmy goat, I look for Fulani willing to talk.


Most have come from Jigawa state, on the border with Niger, crossing the country south in trucks to bring their stock here. Although I learn little about their trip, they eagerly express their joy in being here, on the border of this contemptible promised land, where they expect to “dip the Quran in the sea.”

There are “too many Christians in Lagos,” says Abadallah, who looks to be in his 40s. “The Christians are dogs and children of dogs. You say Christians. To us they are traitors. They adopted the religion of the whites. There is no place here for friends of the whites, who are impure.” A postcard vendor joins the group and offers me portraits of Osama bin Laden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He agrees the Christians will eventually leave and Nigeria will be “free.”


We had better start using our brain in Lagos. All these northerners trooping in is going to cause trouble in the future...

We need to partner with the South East, the entire South and North central and gtfo of this country. Amotekun wouldn't solve this issue on ground.

That is why LASG banned Okada.

Amujale:
Christianity is a fake Hellenistic religion that was manufactured by first century Romans.

Christianity is an adopted malicious ideology that originated out of an aggressive invasion and occupation.

If truly you guys believe Christianity is a fake religion, when Christians pray to the God you implied doesn't exist, why are you guys always jittery?
You believe in God but you belly has derailed your beliefs.

CodeTemplar:
If truly you guys believe Christianity is a fake religion...

Christianity is a fake Hellenistic religion that was manufactured by first century Romans.

CodeTemplar:
You believe in God.

The concept of God is African.

God is real.

All the gods of Christianity and Islam are fake.

Lalasticlala!
Lalasticlala!!
Lalasticlala!!!
Lalasticlala!!!!

Front page please, this is very serious.

HigherEd:
@codetemplar the truth is after years of reflecting about Nigeria I have come to the conclusion that it is best to let go of this country.

You see Northern Muslims would never allow Nigeria to be great. They are poor, carry religion on their head and would continue to use their wrong priorities to send terrible politicians to the seat of power. Reason why you would have a certificate less president buoyed by a Professor. A terrible anomaly.

When you read Lee Kuan Yew's memoir you would see the 'battle' he had with Singapore's Muslim population. They were failing mathematics while others were soaring. He forcefully ensured they came up to standard. He knew Muslims underperforming would create dangerous ripple effect in the future of Singapore. But he could only do that because they were minorities.

Islam is a liability you handle when the population is less than 30% and cannot drive full social and cultural change. At 50% your country would be filled with tussle.

Continue blaming the North for your failures
Last I checked only the SS and SE didn't vote for buhari enmass.
According to you,some people not passing maths is Islam's fault,lol.You guys are ready to blame a Muslim farting on Islam.By the way are the Chinese not known to do better than most other cultures? What then should be so surprising if Singaporean malays once performed less than their Chinese counterparts in mathematics.

I think what he was trying to say was why quota system don't work ..
When they say the north the only thing people think of s Islam

Remove the north and the remaining Nigeria would be cool with Islam

Look let's tell us ourselves the truth this system is not working, let's go back to the way the British left Nigeria and there would be peace or we break up

One region cannot hold the country to ransom for more than 56 years of this country history

Are Yorubas not Muslims too have not heard in Nigeria history ,Yoruba Muslims going on jihadist movement thats because Yoruba Muslims are enlightened.. I wish to say today Islam was in Yoruba land before Christianity and there has been no record of religious war in Yoruba land