I should warn you now that I'm about to embark on a very heated rant about politics, of all things.
I am a strong believer in the fact that knowledge is central to change. "Innocence is bliss", yes, but bliss never saved the world. You have to know the facts before you can do anything. You need to know the context before you can even think about using your agency (thanks Mr. Burns).
And it is for that reason that I'm writing this post.
Hands up if you don't know what Boko Haram is.
Lets start with some background knowledge. Nigeria is mainly separated into two parts, the north and the south. Actually, fifty years ago, it was literally separated into two parts: Nigeria (the north part) and the Republic of Biafra (the south part with all the oil and doctors and bureaucrats). These two parts, although the "border" is much blurrier today, are still drastically different, which makes Nigeria a very economically, educationally, and medically diverse place.
To put things in perspective, here's a quote from John Green's vlogbrothers video on Boko Haram: "[Nigeria] has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and very little national debt. It's the largest economy in Africa and the 20th largest in the world. Their film industry generates 10 billion dollars in sales a year. But it's also the last nation in Africa that still has polio, which is found only in the north [of Nigeria], and life expectancy in Nigeria is 52. That's lower than it is in Somalia, which doesn't even have a government. In much of Northern Nigeria, fewer than half of kids even go to elementary school. Female literacy is over 50% and while the country's overall economy grows over 8% a year, in the north, absolute poverty is actually increasing... but in the southwest, female literacy is over 90% and the economy is growing really well."
Now let's get back to Boko Haram, which was founded in Northern Nigeria in 2002 by a guy named Mohammed Yusuf. (Fun fact I: the words "Boko Haram" literally mean "Western education is forbidden"). Boko Haram didn't actually start out as a military organization, but when Yusuf was executed in 2009, over a thousand people were killed in the riots following and Boko Haram became increasingly violent and unpredictable. (Fun fact II: The new leader, and current leader, of Boko Haram is Abubakar Shekau.)
Boko Haram gets its funds mainly through drug trafficking and bank robbery. In 2013, a gunman from Boko Haram kidnapped a family of seven French tourists on vacation in Cameroon. Two months later, they released the hostages in exchange for $3.15 million.
So what next? Let's go back to John Green for the stats: "In 2011, Boko Haram was behind Nigeria's first ever suicide bombing. On Christmas of that year, they killed 41 people via bombings and shootings in churches. In 2012, they killed at least 792 people. And in 2013, they murdered nine women who were distributing polio vaccines. Polio vaccines! They also murdered 54 mostly Muslim college students while they were sleeping in their dorms. And then, in 2014, Boko Haram got worldwide attention when they kidnapped 276 girls from inside of classrooms. The attacks since then have only gotten worse. On January 3rd of this year, they seized the town of Baga, burned it to the ground, murdered as many as 2000 people. And now, Boko Haram controls the northeastern corner of Nigeria where they've instituted a version of sharia law so extreme that not only has the likes of it never been seen in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it's, like, too extreme for al-Qaeda [??!]. They regularly massacre people who won't fight for them, and they've begun attacks in Niger and Chad and Cameroon." All in all, the 7000-10000 militants in Boko Haram have killed more than 5000 civilians since July 2009, not to mention the thousands of kidnappings.
But it's also important not to generalize. Boko Haram does not equate to Nigerians, much less all Muslims- in fact, 99.9% of Nigerians do NOT support Boko Haram and just a few months ago, two Muslims sacrificed their lives to keep a Boko Haram *preteen* girl from suicide-bombing a city market, where she would have killed hundreds of people. Most ten year olds are jamming out to One Direction and doing times tables, and these ones are being forced by Boko Haram to commit suicide and murder those around them!
I haven't done a very good job of putting everything into my own words, because John Green's video does such a great job of it. I do think that it's important that we are aware of Boko Haram and realize that the only reason it's been allowed to grow so dramatically in the past 10 years is because we, the global community, haven't been aware enough of it and it's actions. I myself am not sure what I can do to help, but everything adds up in the end and small steps do matter in the long run, despite seeming otherwise.
Thanks for reading. Don't forget to be awesome.
Quibbles
