How to Write about Boko Haram

A political arena plagued by corruption and a crisis of legitimacy; a deepening sense of moral outrage within the populace and, in particular, amongst its youth; a charismatic preacher calling for spiritual cleansing, for social retreat, for the armed overthrow of the powers that be, and for the construction of a new upright society; and a brutal confrontation between the emboldened new movement and the furious authorities. The events that fuelled the meteoric rise of Muhammad Yusuf and the emergence of his Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnah Lidda’awati wal-Jihad—the group that came to be known as Boko Haram—are, by now, fairly well-known.

Yet, if this succession of factors were the harbingers of Boko Haram’s birth in the early 2000s, they are also remarkably similar—if not virtually identical—to the ingredients that catalyzed the growth of several other Islamic revivalist movements that emerged in northern Nigeria in the preceding century. A far from exhaustive list of groups that fit this bill can be culled from the opening chapters of British journalist, Andrew Walker’s recent book, Eat the Heart of the Infidel.

In reverse chronology, we may include: Yan Tatsine, a movement lasting through the early 1980s and remembered for triggering riots and clashes with the authorities in several northern cities; or the late-eighteenth-century Satiru Mahdist, whose revolt ended when Fredrick Lugard, the (in)famous colonial administrator, ordered an intervention that, according to a later inquiry into the ensuing massacre, left in its wake “fields running with blood”; or, indeed, the famed 1804 Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio, which overturned the ruling Hausa states and established the Sokoto Caliphate in the previously ‘disputed territories’ that would later become northern Nigerian.

In the past century, northern Nigeria has proven fertile soil for the repeated emergence of a peculiar kind of social and political turmoil. Beyond a narrow retelling of the major events in the narrative of Boko Haram’s rise, Walker’s Eat the Heart of the Infidel brings to life the realities—both in Nigeria’s northern region and in the broader national political economy—that engendered the northern situation of recurrent upheaval, and, consequently, Boko Haram’s uncommonly brutal campaign. Walker’s detailed historical approach in charting the rise of Boko Haram, ultimately, is one that will elate some readers as much as it will annoy others.