Exactly ten years ago Mary Yaga’s life changed for ever.
The teenager from a poor farming family in northeastern Nigeria was among 276 girls abducted by armed men from the Boko Haram terrorist group who broke into their school dormitory in the middle of the night and carried them off into the Sambisa Forest at gunpoint.
What she could not have known then was that the kidnapping in the small town of Chibok on April 14, 2014 would — strangely — alter her prospects for the better, as it did for many of the other girls. In December Yaga, now 27, graduated with a law degree from a Nigerian university. On Friday she started work as an intern at a law firm in Abuja, the capital.
“Most girls in Chibok, when there’s no money to continue your education, they start pushing you to get married,” she said. “I look back at the abduction and, even though I regret all the bad things that happened, I tell myself that this is God, so that He can lift me and I can lift others.”
The raid on the Government Girls’ Secondary School in Chibok, in Borno state near the border with Cameroon, was part of an armed rebellion by Boko Haram. The group sought to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria and was already well known for its hostility to non-Islamic education. Its name roughly translates as “western education is forbidden”.
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Earlier Boko Haram attacks had led to widespread closures of schools in the region but the horror of the mass abduction ignited global outrage. On social media the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, calling for their rescue, caught the attention of the Michelle Obama, the US first lady at the time, David Cameron, who was the prime minister, and Hollywood celebrities including Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey and Harrison Ford.
The insurgency in northern Nigeria has not been defeated, however. The United Nations Development Programme estimated that 35,000 people were killed in fighting between 2009 and 2020. A further 315,000 were believed to have died due to a lack of food and resources because of the conflict. Violence against schools has intensified too, although raids are now mostly carried out for ransom. More than 1,500 Nigerian girls and boys have been kidnapped since the Chibok raid, according to Save the Children, and at least 180 have been killed.
The “Chibok girls” were already outliers before the raid, which came the night before the final school exam that many of them were due to take. That made them — at 17 or 18 — some of the most educated women in a conservative, impoverished part of Nigeria where families typically favour the schooling of sons over daughters. Across the north, 78 per cent of girls marry before the age of 18, often without their consent, as parents commit them to family friends or business partners. The vast majority of girls have no prospect of a university education.
The abductions changed that trajectory.
Fifty-seven students escaped in the hours and days following the kidnapping, either by jumping from the trucks ferrying them away or by navigating their way out of the dense woods where they were taken. Various individuals and charitable organisations offered scholarships to these resilient “escaped Chibok girls”, enabling them to continue their education either abroad or at the American University of Nigeria (AUN) in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, which borders Borno in the northeast of the country.
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Between 2016 and 2018 another 107 Chibok captives were either rescued by the Nigerian military or released through negotiations between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram. Some of them spoke of beatings and constant hunger in captivity. They received government-sponsored education, also at the AUN.
In the past three years the Nigerian military has located or rescued 20 more of the kidnapped schoolgirls, along with 31 babies born to Boko Haram fighters. Because media attention had diminished, these young women were left without the support received by previous freed captives. The Borno state government stepped in and took over their welfare. Instead of traditional education, the women opted for vocational training in practical skills such as tailoring and computer literacy. Some have also chosen to remain in romantic unions with their former captors. The militants are allowed to reintegrate into society under a government amnesty programme that provides rehabilitation to repentant members of Boko Haram who surrender.
Ninety-two Chibok girls remain unaccounted for, with about 20 reported to have died in captivity from snakebites, illness, childbirth or military airstrikes that were targeting militants. Their families remain profoundly frustrated that the Nigerian government has not done more for their children.
Yaga was one of the luckiest ones. She and her cousins, Mary Katambi and Grace Thlawur, were among those that escaped right at the start. In Yaga’s case she pretended to need a bathroom break, then discreetly made her way out of the militants’ forest hideout on the outskirts of Borno.
She was then one of 24 girls admitted to the AUN, all of whom were sponsored by Robert F Smith, a black American billionaire and the chief executive of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm. Today, not only has Yaga graduated in law but Katambi has earned an accountancy degree, also from AUN, and Thlawur, supported by a Christian charity, studied in America to gain a cybersecurity degree from Liberty University in Virginia.
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These three young women proudly stand as the first people in their entire extended family to attend university. “My brothers finished secondary school but there was no money to sponsor their education further, so they’ve gone to Lagos to see if they can hustle,” Yaga said.
Like Yaga, Grace Dauda, now 26, believes that her abduction ultimately led to positive changes in her life. She broke her leg when it got caught on a low-hanging branch while the girls were being transported from their school in open trucks.
She spent three years in captivity without proper medical care, enduring constant pain. To walk she had to rely on a stick or on support from others. Even after her release in 2017, inadequate medical treatment in Nigeria left her in agony, with one leg shorter than the other. Then in 2019 the Andrew and Ann Tisch Foundation, a grant-making US charity, paid for some freed girls to get comprehensive medical care in America.
Dauda underwent treatment and surgery at the New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell. She is now pain-free with fully restored mobility. She enrolled at Bronx Community College (BCC) in New York to study biology, pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor. “If it wasn’t because of the kidnapping, I wouldn’t have travelled to the US and I wouldn’t have met some of the people that have helped me, the kind of financial support I am getting,” Dauda said.
Other success stories include Patience Bulus, who is majoring in psychology and educational studies at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and Mercy Ali Paul, pursuing an associate degree in social science at Northern Virginia Community College. Both women area sponsored by a Nigerian charity, the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, and on course to graduate in May.
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Despite their progress, all of these women’s stories illustrate how the broader crisis in female education in Nigeria is about not only access but the quality of schooling.
The Chibok girls had had six years of secondary education and examinations before their abduction yet many of them could barely read or write in English, in Hausa, spoken widely in northern Nigeria, or in their local Kibaku. The AUN tailored a unique educational programme for them called the New Foundation School which built their academic skills from the ground up, starting with elementary literacy and numeracy, to prepare them for university-level education.
“They started teaching us afresh, to write ‘ABC’, read two-letter words, doing math from one plus one,” Yaga said. “It was like going to primary school again.” Without that support, she added, “I don’t think I would have been able to attend university”. On arriving in America Dauda was assessed at a fourth-grade academic level (equivalent to year 5 in a UK primary school, where children are nine or ten). Only through intensive private tutoring was she able to eventually pass the exams that enabled her gain admission to BCC.
These girls were victims of a phenomenon described in a UN report as “schooling but not learning”. An alarming 88 per cent of children and adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa are projected to reach adulthood without mastering basic reading.
After beginning her internship at Ivy Crest Solicitors, Yaga hopes to earn enough to ensure that her younger sister can pursue higher education and enjoy some of the advantages she has had. Reflecting on how much her life improved because of the abductions, Yaga compares herself with her contemporaries back in Chibok. “The way I think, the way I reason, the way I see things, is not the way they do,” she said. “Our mindsets are different. They focus only on marriage. When we go out, when we talk, the difference is clear. Only market, farm, that’s all they know. But I can reason. I can say, ‘I don’t like the way this thing is and I have to change it’.”
