Suleiman Nasiro, a soft-spoken West African pastor, tells the story of three friends who are kidnapped by an Islamist gang. Two of them, a church elder and a university professor, were released after paying a large ransom. A third friend, an ordinary Christian from the countryside, paid a ransom to free him. The kidnappers took the money and killed him anyway. “We feel very vulnerable because of this,” Pastor Nasiro says. “This is very close. Am I next?”
That’s a realistic question. “What if one of us is taken” is a topic that every parent in Nigeria talks to their children. The spread of the kidnapping network and the apparent incompetence of the police have changed family life forever. A difficult choice must be made: Should I risk visiting my elderly relative’s bedside? Should children go to school at all? School laptops, college funds, and family homes have been given up and sold in the desperate hope of raising a ransom to see their loved ones again, and generations of families are now being pushed into poverty every day. Masu.
A large terrorist group may abduct hundreds of people, while a suburban gang may kidnap one or two people. But the terrorist goals of closing schools, fleeing Christians, and paralyzing the state are all being achieved.
Religious violence has been on the rise in Nigeria for more than 20 years. Christians, especially those in central and northern Nigeria, understand this very well. The Boxing Day attack by Fulani Islamic militants on farmers, killing about 200 Christians in 26 villages in Plateau State, is just the latest mass killing of thousands of people. .
The story of this conflict is rarely told in the West. In recent months, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have captured our attention, and several miles of columns have been devoted to analyzing the development and causes of these conflicts. But long before these wars began, this deadly struggle was growing across West Africa and could become even more significant in the long run.
Pastor Suleiman explains how Sharia law was introduced in 12 states in northern Nigeria in 2000. In Kaduna State, Christians gathered to protest the implementation of Islamic law and its impact on their communities. A group of Muslim youths attacked, killing more than 5,000 people. It was the beginning of a wave of attacks against Christians.
Around that time, Salafist clerics began preaching jihad against Christians, and by 2009 the rise of the notorious Islamist group Boko Haram was not surprising. At the time, Muslim youth were becoming increasingly radicalized and militant.
Over the past decade, creeping violence has taken on new forms, with regular attacks on Christian farmers by Muslim Fulani herdsmen. The Western version of this story is that the Fulani people’s traditional lands could no longer support their herds, forcing them to migrate to land owned by Christian farmers, and that the conflict was blamed on climate change. It is said that Suleiman has none of that. “If they want land, why not buy it in the normal way allowed by Nigerian law?” he asks. In any case, the Fulani who attacked Christians on Christmas Day could not even speak the local language, Hausa. asks Bishop Kukah, the local Catholic bishop. where do they come from? Who is sponsoring them? What are their grouse and against whom? what do they want? who do they want? Who are they working for? When will it all be over? ”
“Over time, Nigerians are gradually losing hope that their government can protect them and keep them safe.” The Nigerian government appears powerless to stop the violence. Or, as Pastor Suleiman suggests, turn a blind eye.
For Christians, there seems to be nowhere else to turn but God. “I don’t have any weapons in my house,” says Pastor Nashiro. “We ask our children to watch over each other. If someone hears a noise or sees something unusual, they alert us all. We are committed to maintaining close relationships with our neighbors. Above all, we pray.”
The number of Christians murdered is staggering. According to the Open Doors World Watch List*, 4,118 Christians will be murdered for their faith in Nigeria in 2023. The number of murders recorded in 2022 was 5,014, up from 4,650 the previous year. In the Middle Belt, Christians dispersed from the countryside are finding refuge in cities like Jos, where Muslims and Christians once coexisted as neighbors. Community cohesion is now crumbling. Increasingly, Muslims and Christians live in separate parts of town and view each other with suspicion.
Fear and distrust caused by religious extremism are eroding social bonds. Suleiman’s older brother Umara was a soldier in the Nigerian army and faced religious hostility from Muslim soldiers. Soldiers killed Humala by running him over with a military vehicle. Suleiman denied the accusations, but said he received treatment for his trauma and “God healed me so I could forgive him.”
It’s not just Nigeria. The same pattern recurs in large parts of West Africa, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The war in Ukraine has raised concerns that other countries will be drawn into the conflict, as has Israel’s war in Gaza, raising concerns that it could lead to a broader war in the Middle East. Conflicts caused by religious extremism across sub-Saharan Africa have the potential to cause greater violence and chaos, and potentially destabilize the entire continent.
For Pastor Suleiman, the memory of the Christian woman from Burkina Faso is inescapable. She came to one of the trauma centers he and his friends had established in Nigeria. A married Christian with children, she was kidnapped, raped, and held captive for three years in a terrorist camp, where she gave birth to her rapist’s child. “When I looked into her eyes, I saw indescribable pain in her,” he says.
We often hear stories about the gradual disappearance of the Christian faith from the Middle East. We may be witnessing the same thing now in West Africa, one of the world’s least known but most dangerous conflicts. The removal of Christians from this region is unfolding with consequences that we cannot predict. Christianity has a habit of surviving and even thriving under persecution. After all, it springs from the empty tomb of the resurrection. When persecuted, it tends to spring up in unexpected places. Still, it is uncertain whether Christianity will survive in West Africa.
Graham Tomlin is director of the Center for Cultural Witness and editor-in-chief of Seen and Unseen magazine. He served as Bishop of Kensington from 2015 until 2022, taught theology at the University of Oxford, and is also the founder of St. Meritus College.
*Figures compiled by Open Doors World Watch List. Open Doors’ ranking of countries where Christians are most persecuted. The figures, compiled from extensive national research by the Opendoor research team, are considered conservative by experts.