Between the lines – Bring Back Our Girls by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw
On Monday 14 April 2014, 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from their dormitories in Chibok, a remote village in Nigeria, the night before their final exams. The girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, then a little-known terrorist group that filled its ranks by abducting children.
The terrorist group, who oppose the “westernization” of Nigeria and want to “purify” the country through the establishment of an Islamic State, has been led by Abubakar Shekau since 2009 and is responsible for the deaths of over ten thousand people and the displacement of over two million Nigerians. Yet, the insurgency rarely made western news.
That is, until 2014, when the story propelled the Chibok girls’ plight into the world of social media, celebrity, US politics and Western news cycles, through the hashtag #bringbackourgirls. From Michelle Obama to Mary J. Blige and David Cameron, the world began virtually campaigning for the girls’ freedom. But unbeknownst to them, in doing so, this complicated the peace brokering in Nigeria and endangered the girls by giving Boko Haram exactly what they wanted; a global presence.
Joe Parkinson, the Africa Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal and Drew Hinshaw, a senior reporter for the Wall Street Journal, began reporting the Chibok Girls kidnapping in 2014. The journalists’ watched as the fate of a group of innocent young girls snowballed into a means to open discourse about feminism, racism, education, imperialism and celebrity activism before being swallowed up by the rapid tide of the internet. All the while, in Sambisa Forest, the girls faced physical and psychological hardships at the hands of one of the most brutal gangs in the world.
Exactly 1,118 days later, 82 of the schoolgirls returned to their families. Naomi Adamu, one of the eldest of the girls, returned with a secret. For over three years, she had kept a diary bound tightly to her leg, filled with details from their tortuous experience at the hands of Boko Haram.
And so, with the help of Parkinson and Hinshaw, a 17 letter hashtag became a 10,285 word Wall Street Journal article and a 409-page book. The book tells the story not just of social media’s complicated relationship with activism and the difficulties in negotiating hostage freedom, but of unimaginable resilience and fortitude demonstrated by a group of young schoolgirls.
On the day after the US launch of Bring Back Our Girls, Reaction spoke to Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson about the research and reporting behind their highly anticipated book.
Alice Crossley: Bring Back Our Girls covers a complex and devastating scenario with the pace and engagement of a work of fiction. How did you go about putting a news story into narrative?
Joe Parkinson: To begin with we took a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) approach and followed the money, looking at the ransom payments. But then we started to look at these characters who were in some ways the faces of the war and the more we learnt about the girls and their incredible struggle and survival story, the more cinematic and compelling the whole story became. Then we followed the hashtag which took us to The White House, the Swiss Alps, Sudan, Niger, and it became this fascinating global story that was very difficult to structure narratively. But once we had it, we ended up with a kind of ticking clock. On the inside, the girls were trying to survive against these terrible odds, and on the outside you had all of these actors, for good and for ill, racing against time to free them. I have never seen a story like it. At each stage, we met the most incredible characters and got introduced to entirely new worlds; whether it was social media and its impacts on parts of the world that don’t have access to the same technology, or the secret world of hostage negotiations and the role of the Swiss government. Or, most importantly, what happened to the girls inside Sambisa forest and the story that so far, they had never told. It has been humbling to be a part of it. It’s a journalist’s dream to write this story.
AC: Your Wall Street Journal article covering the Chibok girls’ kidnapping was already 10,285 words and the longest in the newspaper’s 130-year history. What made you realise there was still so much more to say?
Drew Hinshaw: I have been covering Boko Haram since 2009, writing 800-word news stories about tragedy after tragedy. When this kidnapping happened, within hours I was talking to parents and they were describing their daughters and all of a sudden we were writing about people’s lives. That was gratifying as a reporter, to not just write about conflict in these abstract terms but to get to know these young women, their parents, their neighbours and start to write about that. And more importantly, we met Naomi and some of her friends towards the end of writing that article and it was like a lightbulb for us. We wanted to answer the question, “what did it take to bring home these students?” and it should have been obvious from the start, but in meeting them we realised the answer was that it took for them to survive, resist and hang onto their identity.
AC: Throughout the book, the girls are dehumanised; they’re a bargaining chip, political ploy, a symbol of racism in America, a metaphor for war, a blockage in progress brokering peace and a route to heroism. Was it important to you to give them a voice through the inclusion of their diaries?
JP: So much of the coverage of conflict inevitably dehumanises and it is so easy, especially with newspaper coverage, to fall into conventions that talk about suffering or violence more than they do about the individuals. This is particularly true of Boko Haram which is one of the world’s worst insurgencies by almost every criteria, but also one of the world’s least understood. It was really important to us throughout the whole project to try and understand who these schoolgirls were and how they survived, not just what happened to them. And we did this not by just spending years talking to them but also by talking to their families and understanding who they were through other relationships. Drew and I kind of had a saying as we were writing the book: the story was so compelling and jaw-dropping in itself that we just needed to get out of the way of the story. We needed to let it breathe and tell itself without too much editorialising.
AC: The book provides acute detail and immense amounts of research to include the small but significant moments and characters that led to this unique situation. How did you track down Ibrahim Abdullahi as the creator of the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls and Oby Ezekwesili as the inspiration behind it?
DH: In 2014, there was a news story that said that a filmmaker in California had created the hashtag. But I was in Nigeria and I knew that wasn’t what happened at all, so we did a story back then saying, this person in California didn’t create the hashtag, and went back to Twitter and saw that it was a lawyer, Ibrahim Abdullahi, who did.
JP: Abdullahi had been working as a barrister on a case in Port Harcourt and was staying in the hotel where a book festival was going on. Also at the festival was former education minister Oby Ezekwesili, leading a session titled ‘Bring Back the Books’. Ezekwesili was leading the protests for the girls’ return and in her speech said, “we call together: bring back our daughters!” Abdullahi had 23 followers, misheard what Oby Ezekwesili said, and tweeted #BringBackOurGirls. It probably never would have left Nigeria if it hadn’t been for Russel Simmons, co-founder of the hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, checking Twitter on his phone on a yacht and again, tweeted the wrong thing. Russel Simmons tweeted and within six days of his tweet, American drones were flying over Nigeria. It is the most chaotic twenty-first-century story that you can imagine. It couldn’t have happened at any other time. These drones and the internet sensation created completely new dynamics for a community that wasn’t even connected to the internet. There’s something quite profound about that and says something about how difficult it is to control technology and politics in our world.
AC: Twitter was the Chibok girls’ double-edged sword – the reputation the hashtag provided protected them, then endangered them and eventually prolonged their captivation significantly. How do we leverage the good of social media in raising awareness with its ability to endanger precarious political and social situations and give terrorists the attention they crave?
DH: It is so hard to know and we have wrestled with this. When this hashtag first started some people said, “this is good, it is positive moral energy” and there were other people who said, “this is just lazy slacktivism that will make no difference in the real world”. We found that the truth is so much stranger. This hashtag had a million unintended consequences and we felt our job as reporters is to take the facts and present them to the public; it is up to readers to say whether this hashtag is good or bad. What we can say authoritatively, I think, is that the hashtag mattered. When millions of people with the tap of a screen advocate for a cause on the other side of the world, it can change hundreds of lives. What is important for us is not to render a judgement over should we be tweeting, should we not, what is the best way to be tweeting – but just to be aware of the power that we have and to be a little bit humble when we weigh into these things.
AC: You explain the situation as a kind of “reverse identifiable-victim effect” – while Anne Frank helps young readers connect to the Holocaust, “the missing schoolgirls had become more important than the war”. Does social media fulfil a sort of white-saviour complex when it comes to global aid?
DH: Definitely. That is another reason we felt there should be some kind of accountability. Millions of us tweeted and it changed people’s lives. And we did it either because we genuinely felt these girls should come back and go back to school or because there was some kind of intoxicating saviour and/or messiah complex – or some mix that is very hard to disentangle. We felt that millions of us in the UK or US should at least be presented with the facts of what our tweets caused – for good or ill.
JP: I would agree. There is a paradox here; on one hand, this social media sensation that ignited a military intervention is something fundamentally new that we had never seen before. Yet, you can also see it following a pattern from the 1960s up to the 1980s (e.g. Heal The World) a sort of fusion of activism and pop culture that was well-intentioned but also fell into these tropes of white saviorism and simplified incredibly complicated regional dynamics. One thing with #BringBackOurGirls was the lens of the camera got twisted in Western coverage. In the beginning, it was about these girls, then it started to become about us and our values and projecting our values onto what was happening in Northern Nigeria. At that time, there was a big debate in America about girls education that was easy to slot #BringBackOurGirls into. But as the book reveals, the girls weren’t actually kidnapped to stop them from going to school, they were kidnapped because Boko Haram was looking to steal a brickmaker at that school and the girls happened to be there – it was opportunistic. So the way that the story was characterised early on about the girls wanting to be doctors and professionals ‘just like us’ was a sort of projection to make people care and relate more perhaps than they normally would.
AC: You describe the #BringBackOurGirls social media activism as an extension of the “modern aid industry, complete with its uneasy codependency on rock-star activism”. In this scenario, it was Michelle Obama and Mary J. Blige, among others, who escalated global attention to the Chibok girls’ kidnapping. What is the danger of Western celebrity endorsement of activism or social cause?
JP: There is a risk that it can give people the impression that there are quite simple solutions to very complex and intricate problems. The conflict in Northern Nigeria is incredibly complicated and becoming more complicated all the time, as the recent kidnapping in the north-west, which hasn’t had security problems for years, shows. Twitter is a compression mechanism that relies on simplification to transmit messages and can give people the notion that something can be resolved very quickly with blunt instruments. What the Swiss showed with their Nigerian team is that there is a place for people working quietly and calmly to try and unpick knots to get somewhere that is sustainable. That is one thing we were impressed by when we got access to this effort; the amount of work it took to get to that place. It is so complicated and all about creating trust, I don’t think it is so easy for celebrity-backed campaigns to achieve the same results.
AC: The story started with the slip of a tongue when a Nigerian cabinet minister admitted “we gave them millions of euros for the Chibok girls” – something that has been disputed despite first-hand witness accounts of money being traded for the girls. In the last few weeks, more reports of schoolchildren being kidnapped have been reported across Nigeria. Are you worried your book and the implication that money was traded for the Chibok Girls might continue to fuel this psychological warfare?
DH: It is an interesting question. We reported that the ransom was paid years ago and I think it is sort of a fact in Nigeria that kidnapping for ransom is a business that you can sadly get away with. It is heartbreaking and Joe and I debated the questions: Are ransom payments the right way to go? Is this something we can ethically condone? And where I land on the question is – by the time you’re debating whether a ransom should be paid, it’s too late. Either the state can bring justice against people who take a hundred kids or it doesn’t. And as long as there aren’t consequences for the people who do this, it will continue to be a lucrative business because anybody would pay any amount of money to get their kids back.
AC: Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau is still prolific. At one point you write, “Nigeria’s intelligence analysts couldn’t decide whether he was insane or a strategic genius, or both.” Did your research and reporting give you an insight into the leader?
DH: I think he is a really bad person. I don’t think Boko Haram would be what it is if it wasn’t for him, he took this movement and turned it into the worst possible thing you could imagine. Having said that there is also a kind of logic to what he is doing. He told the Chibok students that he just pretends to be insane.
JP: I agree. Drew touched on this idea of mad man theory, where people often pretend to be a more cartoonish version of themselves because it fits their agenda at a certain time. Shekau, almost more so than any of the other big terrorist leaders that have risen to have a global profile, is misunderstood and probably underestimated because the Boko Haram conflict has been reduced to this caricature. There is no way, without being a kind of twisted and evil genius, that he would have been able to survive as long as he has survived. He is one of the last remaining terrorist leaders of that profile and he is still committing mass murder across North-eastern Nigeria regularly.
AC: What is the lasting impact you hope this book will have?
DH: I want people to recognise what these girls did to go free. Joe and I did our best to disentangle what the world did to free them, but I would love it if people just took a second to know that Naomi kept a secret diary and bible tied to her leg for three years; Naomi and her friends went hungry for years, went on hunger strikes and stood up to the most murderous group you could imagine. These young women resisted at every turn, they fought for themselves long after the world had moved onto the next cause. These young women are not just passive recipients of our rescue efforts. They themselves did, by far, the hardest effort to achieve their freedom, in odds that I think ordinary people would find terrifying.
JP: Their ordeal is unimaginable. Naomi and the group that she was the leader of played a role in not only saving themselves but also fortifying the others through their rebellion and expressions of faith, identity and solidarity. At one point, Naomi and her group were about to be freed and had access to food, when they realised some of their sisters had been separated and were being starved. They created a breadline to make sure that their friends could survive. That is why Boko Haram called Naomi ‘the chief infidel’; they knew that she was dangerous. I have never heard a story of heroism like it. She is such an unlikely hero, life had been so hard for her physically and academically but she had this inner concrete. And thank God, for everyone, that she did.
Bring Back Our Girls by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw (Swift Press) is available now. RRP. £14.99.