Mass Killings in 2015

The Germanwings Flight 9525 crash in France begins to appear more and more like a mass killing by a deranged co-pilot. To get some perspective on the sudden deaths of yet another 150 innocents by violent means, I looked for and found Wikipedia’s site titled “Mass Murder in 2015” (link). Some 28 cases are listed there, not including the Germanwings crash. Total deaths reported thus far in 2015 have been 944. The largest number is associated with Boko Haram taking place in Nigeria or in neighboring regions of Niger and Cameroon (370 or 39%); Yemen comes next (180, 19%); and Pakistan is third (104, 11%). If we count the Germanwings case, France would displace Pakistan—or Germany would if we assign the deaths to origin of the perpetrator.

Nine hundred and forty-four—and today 1,094 innocents killed. May they all rest in peace….

A Note on Damasak, Nigeria

A sub-theme of my posts on Boko Haram is to show how little we know about places like Nigeria—particularly its fringes where insurrectionary forces reside. Today’s New York Times carries a story reporting that army elements from Chad and Niger captured the town of Damasak from Boko Haram. One sentence immediately raised red flags:

The other unmistakable sign of the Islamist militants’ recent presence is that very few residents remain in a once thriving  town of 200,000.

What? Damasak is located right on the border with Niger (the country). The ordinary Google map does not show it at all. You can search for it by name in Google maps. Doing so identifies its location; using the satellite mode and enlarging the spot maximally shows what might be a small village. Indeed, looking at lists of cities in Nigeria, Damasak does not show up in the list of those 100,000 or greater in population. Hard work using a site called Falling Grain (link) eventually finds it about four different levels from the top. The place has a population of 1,108. That’s quite a distance from 200K. And the satellite image suggests that even that last number is exaggerated.

This is a desert landscape with trees here and there. A cluster of them at the indicated point suggest something like fifty huts. Damasak is 113 miles NNW of Borno State’s capital Maiduguri—where those “200,000” most likely fled—according to the NYT. The map shows both places, the red A indicating the location of Damasak. Caution is clearly indicated when reading modern media about very distant, obscure places.  Back before the Internet came into being, one could not check such things in, say, 15 minutes—15 minutes that our reporter clearly did not have.

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Posts in this series:

Dipping a Toe in Lake Chad

Nigeria’s North-South Divide

From Palm Oil to Crude Oil

Nigeria’s North-South Divide

This is the second post on Boko Haram; the first is here.

The seventh largest country in the world is Nigeria, with 183.5 million people. That is not a secret, of course, but not exactly the impression one has from news reports—especially when the issue triggering coverage is a renegade band of terrorist insurgents, like Boko Haram. Appropriate images for that context in the media are desert landscapes or tribal people in traditional dress. (An analogous pictorial representation of the United States would be to show pictures of Navajo festivals in Arizona.) Here we’re likely to see men in robes drumming or landscapes—like the following photo; it shows the north-east of Nigeria where Boko Haram originated…

…rather than cityscapes like the second image, which shows Lagos, a city of 17.5 million people, located kitty-corner, you might say, from Boko Haram, thus in the extreme south east corner of the country.

To give that huge population some dimension, I repeat, from the last post, that Nigeria is only about a third larger than Texas. Its population per square mile is 515, that of Texas 100 (the United States has 91 people per square mile).

The country—measured in area—is roughly split in half between a more or less secularized southern and a predominantly Muslim northern half. The two major parties of the country, however, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP, with its base in the south) and the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC, with its base in the north) both hold secularist ideologies. PDP is the dominant party; it has won every presidential election and therefore rules the country. The two maps above tell the story; the first shows areas where Sharia law is being actively followed; the second shows areas controlled by the PDP (which has ruled the country under democratic arrangements since 1999, and its opposition, the CPC. The Islamic culture, with a decided disinclination to participate in democracy, has no meaningful representation at all. Yet all the news that really reaches us here is focused on a tiny third element, Boko Haram. Tiny? Yes. Its core is a mere 10,000 people. They are attempting to implement the Islamic conception of politics, thus central religious rule from the top by a caliphate. 

The time-line that I show here, extending from Nigeria’s independence to the current time, illustrates how the Muslim insurgency arose just three years after a difficult time of succeeding military dictatorships and civil conflicts—thus as soon as a Western type democracy began to take hold. Great powers participated in the Civil War, with Britain and the Soviet Union backing the Nigerians, France aiding the Biafran regime.

That regime, shown to the left, lasted a mere three years, but while it existed it occupied almost exactly the same territory as Nigeria’s earliest-known kingdom, the Kingdom of Nri, founded in 1000 AD. The area of Biafra corresponds in our time with the oil-rich region of the Niger river’s delta.

Soon after 1999—and Nigeria’s embrace of western-style democracy—a northern Sunni fundamentalist and preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, founded Boko Haram in 2002. His aim was to impose Sharia law over the entire region, including but not limited to Nigeria. He lasted seven years and was then arrested and killed. His deputy, one Abubaka Shekau took over and continues in his place, as best we know, although reports of his death keep surfacing in Nigeria at intervals. Most of Boko Haram’s more major activities have been largely confined to the Borno State at the tip of Nigeria’s north-east corner.
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Image credits:

Borno landscape: Wikipedia, "Boko Haram" (link).
Lagos: Wikipedia, "Lagos" (link).
Political Map: Nigerian Muse (link).
Map of Sharia Law: Wikipedia, "Boko Haram" (link).
Biafra: Wikipedia, "Nigeria" (link).

Dipping a Toe into Lake Chad

A thought I’ve had over the years is that today—and presumably fated to last for a few centuries more—a process will be unfolding right under our eyes much resembling what “went down” in Europe during the last centuries of Roman rule and continued long thereafter. That process is the transformation of Africa.

A current phenomenon that can lend some anchorage for investigating how good that thought of mine may be are the troubles assigned these days to the Boko Haram insurgency in and around Nigeria. Even a cursory look immediately reveals an extraordinary complexity not made even faintly visible by current news coverage. If I take myself as an ordinary modern, I know virtually nothing about Nigeria, never mind the regions immediately touching Lake Chad on its eastern edge—which is the current center of the insurgency; in fact today is the first I’ve ever even heard of Lake Chad. To correct that I present a map of Nigeria and point to the upper right corner where Lake Chad colors the screen blue. As you can see, a part of the lake is in Nigeria, specifically in the Borno region which has its capital in Maiduguri.

The entire northern territory of Nigeria, reaching down to below where the name of the country is actually printed, is populated by Islamics. They constitute just a shade over 50 percent of total Nigerian population; Christians are 48 percent, the rest adhere to what we might call pagan-style beliefs.

The first kingdom known to history in this territory, named after the Niger River (see inset), was the Kingdom of Nri, located just to the east of the Niger’s delta. It was founded by the Igbo people who, today, represent the second largest ethnic grouping in the country. The year was 1000. At is farthest extension north, the kingdom reached to about Enugu, thus a small part of today’s Nigeria. A century later the Kanem-Bornu Empire, which became Islamic around 1068, covered large parts of Chad and part of today’s Nigeria; the Nigerian portion corresponded directly with the Borno region—and the Islamic influence expanded from there west and to the south—but not very much south.

Those earliest developments in effect set up the conflict which today’s events still echo as the conflict between Boko Haram and the Nigerian central government. There has always been a north-south tension within this realm, the North always more populous and poorer, the south always richer.

To underline the complexity here, be it noted that Nigeria has 250 ethnic groupings—the largest of which are the Yoruba (west), the Igbo (east), and the Hausa (northern Islamics). These and other groupings speak 512 different languages—and it is therefore not surprising that English is the country’s official language. English. Not French. And that is because Nigeria figures in colonial history as first governed by the Royal Niger Company (1886), then by the British Government (1900), and finally—until the United Kingdom granted the country its independence in 1960—becoming in 1901 a British Protectorate and thus joining the British Empire.

I began by referring to the Roman Empire—the fall of which then set in motion a vast Medieval process of nation building, also building nations out of countless tribes and ethnicities, all of which strenuously fought the process. The role of the Romans in today’s process was played by the British Empire. After it withdrew in 1960, the process began in earnest. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Boko Haram, the name of the insurgency, translates as Forbidden Teaching (haram being forbidden, boko meaning culture, teaching, heritage—the word thought by some to have been derived from the English word “book”). Here we have a situation of a younger culture actively resisting the decadent overhang of an older one—while pursuing with the brutal energy of youth something of a biological imperative to multiply and to cover the earth.

For those who like to have some size comparisons, Nigeria (with 366,000 square miles) is significantly larger, but in the same ballpark, as Texas (with 269,000). Lake Chad (with 521 square miles of area) is greater than Lake Saint Clair in Michigan (430) and smaller than Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana (with 631 square miles).

This, so far, a small toe dipped into Lake Chad. I may return to enlarge upon this at a future time.