A story about a mother who has been frustrated by Boko Haram for nine months claiming to be crazy

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Here are stories about a woman who has fought against extremism with her extreme measures.

Hassana was only 12 years old when her mother had gently pushed her into a deep pit in the yard one morning in August 2014.

The goal was not to kill her, but to save her from becoming a child with Boko Haram, who just attacked his Madagascar town in Adamawa, Northeast Nigeria.

Since 2009, when the death of its founder Mohammed Yusuf triggered riots, hundreds of women and girls were kidnapped, r**ped or s**xually dead, even when the sect continues to lead the war against Western ideals as Hassan.

In April 2014, more than 250 students from Chibok village were abducted in the neighboring state of Borno. The capture of many other girls remains under the radar; some of the liberated ones admitted suicidal thoughts because of the trauma of life - physical and s**xual abuse and - in the terrorist camps of the Sambisa forest.

Girls aged 15 and less used to commit suicide bombings in the toughest states of Borno and Adamawa.

Knowing all this, Hasan's mother, 47-year-old Zainab Hamayaji, planned to plan terrorist terror and save four children. Her instinct warned that Boko Haram would consider Hassan, her eldest daughter, married and killed her husband. It's done fast.

“They killed my husband and many of the men here”, she tells this reporter in a school-turned-camp in the mountainous town of Gwoza, declared by the insurgents as the seat of their caliphate in August 2014. “Some of my children ran off but the rest of us could not leave the house because they were killing people running out of town. So many people were dying and couldn’t escape.”

Hamayaji opened his hair to look mentally unstable and began to roll on the ground for several hours a day outside our home and in various parts of the city. She was drunk on herself. She refused her in clothes. Then they rubbed their bodies together. His neighbors avoided him when his flies hit him.

Boko Haram extremists were initially skeptical. They broke down the door after the villagers mentioned that Hamayaji had a pretty old girl to be captured. She refused, and so they beat him relentlessly, swung their rifles with a rifle and dropped the tooth off.

“They didn’t believe me so they came every day.
continued to strip myself naked, unplait my hair, roll in trash, put shit on my hair to make it seem like I was really mad.”

However, she adhered to the script she wrote - and her two children.

“They asked my two children if I was okay because they kept doubting me”, Hamayaji reminisces. Both kids – aged seven and ten – swore that their mother’s insanity had begun a while ago and that she used to frequent a psychiatric hospital in Maiduguri, the state capital.
“My children would cry as they were talking and the terrorists became afraid of hurting a mad woman so they don’t have a curse on their heads.”

Encouraged by the fear of the "foretold", rebels issued a warning in the house to deter their comrades from Boko Haram who later could visit Hamayajad.

“They believed that if they killed a madwoman or took her child, their military operations would fail. One of them reminded the others about how their people killed a mad woman on another raid and her curse affected them badly.”

Many other women have given their daughter to the rebels in exchange for food and goods stolen from other villages to care for the remaining children - some reluctant and the other happy.

But Hamayaji was relentless in his resolution and methodical in his madness.

While in the dusk, Hassan cooked the food her mother had grown up with a few water wells and a box of herbs to cook and survive. She went into the nylon bags that poked her.

Outside the compound, her mother continued her journey for nine months until the Nigerian soldiers returned to the city in March 2015 and helped take the girl out of the pit. 

“The soldiers asked if I was a wife of Boko Haram and I said no”, she recalls. “They didn’t believe my story until we went to the ditch.”

Hassana, now 14, was grateful for the depth of her mother's love, even if the older woman did not believe her actions were extraordinary.

“She told me, Mama na gode (Hausa for ‘thank you’). You saved me. Thanks for your wise choices or I’d have been dead.”

The soldiers put us in a car that took them to Gwoz camp. This is where Hamayaji tells his story without falling in a smile.

As usual, it periodically surveys large wall holes on the wall to look at the open playground where children play, including theirs.

Young Hassan is walking somewhere in the camp, celebrating the Eid festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. 

“We are safe now”, she says, even though her worry is still clear to see. “We are safe.”

This story was supported by the 2017 BudgET Civic Media Fellowship

Guardian

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