A new book, Bring Back Our Girls, by journalists Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw, is based on hundreds of interviews with the students kidnapped in northern Nigeria in April 2014. In the following extracts, a little of how the faith of some of the girls enabled them to resist pressure to convert to Islam – even under the threat of death – is revealed. But we begin as the kidnappings themselves are taking place…
PROLOGUE – 2014
Michelle Obama was upstairs in the White House residential quarters, watching the morning news report a story of suffering and social media and wondering whether to Tweet. It was 7 May 2014, an overcast Wednesday in Washington, and all the major breakfast shows were leading with the same harrowing tale. Thousands of miles away, in a remote Nigerian town called Chibok, 276 schoolgirls had been kidnapped from their dormitory on the night before their final exams. They’d been dozing on bunk beds, studying notes, or reading the Bible by torch. They were high-school seniors, a few hours of test questions from graduating as some of the only educated young women in an impoverished region where most girls never learned to read. Then a group of militants barged in, bundled them onto trucks, and sped into the forest. The students had become captives of a little-known terrorist group called Boko Haram, which filled its ranks by abducting children. Now these girls were trapped in a ghastly, faintly understood conflict far away, hostage to unambiguous evil.
