As Boko Haram's notoriety grew with its spectacular and deadly attacks over the last decade, a sense of urgency shaped our knowledge about it. Inquiries engaged the relationship between poverty and extremism, obsessed over Boko Haram's potential international connections, or placed the insecurity within Nigeria's recurring constitutional struggles. Urgency sacrificed depth as studies converged upon a comfortable narrative featuring ruthless terrorists, clumsy politicians (on both sides of the Atlantic), abusive soldiers and a depressing scale of civilian victims.
Three new books remind us that it takes courage to ask the right questions about Boko Haram, and that many existing answers lack precision, objectivity and the persuasive allure of analytical intimacy. Thurston's Boko Haram: the History of an African Jihadist Movement effectively asks, ‘What does Boko Haram believe and how does that shape its behaviour?’ MacEachern, in Searching for Boko Haram, ponders whether today's jihadists are really that different from ancient peoples who used the same landscapes to practice slave raiding, seek refuge from the state, or ‘dream about creating new worlds’ (p. 175). Focusing on the borderlands of Lake Chad and the Mandara Mountains, where he has conducted archaeological expeditions for three decades, MacEachern argues that banditry, slave raiding and geographic repertoires of survival (and resistance) are continuous features of the region's history. Matfess, in Women and the War on Boko Haram, most explicitly asks about women: how some resist, why some join, and how others are victims first of terrorists and then of the government or well-intentioned humanitarians. ‘The dominant narrative of women being coerced, conscripted and abducted into the sect is an incomplete one’ (p. 64). Ultimately, her answers contribute to much more than a gender analysis as she exposes key misinterpretations and sins of omission.
The shared remedy for the fallacies produced by urgently produced punditry and tropes of the counter-terrorism industry is an unexpected intellectual intimacy. These books yield nuanced and novel insights about theology, insurgent motivations, and the political framework of Boko Haram's rise.
Thurston concisely situates the rise of Boko Haram in the context of ‘cutthroat elections; pervasive corruption; severe inequality and the violence and impunity that surrounds approaches to conflict management’ (p. 27). In the contemporary context of Nigeria's Fourth Republic, which ended a 16-year run of dictatorships and began with the election of Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, the passage of Sharia law by a dozen northern states was a factor in the emergence of Boko Haram – but not for the reasons one might presume. Citing Kendhammer's (Kendhammer Reference Kendhammer2016) recent research on Muslim discourse in northern Nigeria, Matfess notes that many northerners saw Islamic law as a way to reduce corruption and improve social services. ‘The adoption of sharia certainly cannot explain the rise of Boko Haram’ (p. 37).
This may resonate as a familiar story about failed governance creating an enabling environment for extremism. Thurston's and Matfess's analyses move closer to the reality that Nigeria's politicians today would rather forget: Boko Haram's radicalisation took place gradually with escalating state repression and a betrayal by northern politicians. Governor Ali Modu Sheriff of Borno State in particular made a deal with Muhammad Yusuf, Boko Haram's leader, by pledging to implement a more rigorous Sharia. He abandoned these promises after elections – an interpretation shared by former Vice President Atiku Abubkar (LeVan Reference LeVan2018).
Before the current democratic ‘dispensation’, before recurring constitutional squabbles over Sharia, and before colonialism, MacEachern describes five centuries of mountain people resisting centralised Islamic states based on the plains of what is modern northern Nigeria. Kanuri people engaged in slave raiding, often with the cooperation of Wandala people. Smaller populations, such as the Kotoko, were sometimes caught between these interactions. Boko Haram is heavily Kanuri, has some Wandala members, and is likely being harboured by some montagnard peoples. Boko Haram's attacks at Gréa, a Wandala village, thus had deep historical resonance for locals. The mountains have offered a refuge for those opposed to state authority as well as those fleeing horrors like Boko Haram's.
Today's jihadists thus operate in familiar frontier zones, ‘areas of smuggling, banditry, and other forms of violence and wealth extraction’ (p. 86). But just as Scott (Reference Scott2009) points out with regard to the hill dwellers on the frontiers of Southeast Asia, to see such enterprises merely as crimes is to miss their political complexity and social function. The Melgwa people, recent victims of Boko Haram, have a 400 year old ethic of banditry. Like many intentionally living at the fringes of state power, common people sought economic autonomy from extractive states. Smuggling in frontier cultures is arguably ‘a form of democratization, because it allows common people access to markets, work, and the possibility of wealth’ (p. 144). Within these frontiers are deep traditions of ‘religious fervours’, that spread beyond the reach of the authorities. Boko Haram's critique of mainstream Islam, says MacEachern, in many ways imitates West African mythologies of peoples who rebel against the ‘apostate king’ who practices for mere political benefit rather than true faith.
Where margins of power and those who thrive there occupy MacEachern, Thurston calls up an era when authority was ‘sacred’ in northern Nigeria. He weaves together an intricate yet readable story about the religious fragmentation that shaped Muhammad Yusuf, and his successor, Abubakar Shekau. Colonialism had heightened the Muslim emirs’ authority, and the British encouraged the Shehu of Borno to centralise power. After independence he instructed voters who to support, for example. Such hierarchical loyalties decayed with urbanisation and the rise of an alienated working class. Thurston suggests that Yusuf and Shekau both linked the emirates’ decline to a loss of moral authority as religious leaders strayed from orthodox Islam and into politics.
Nigeria has a strong Sufi tradition, and no scholar may be better equipped to explain how in the 1970s and 80s Salafists seized the post-colonial moment to challenge that tradition. With the publication of Abubakar Gumi's attack on Sufism in 1972, Nigeria's modern Izala movement was born. Thurston expertly details divisions among these Salafis after Gumi's death in 1992, including the emergence of Muhammad Marwa, who led a ‘fringe’ movement known as Maitatsine. Due to its violent rebellion, which resulted in at least 6,000 deaths, Maitatsine features prominently in histories of Boko Haram. Thurston reminds us that the former had a luddite-like aversion to technology, differed significantly from Boko Haram in theological terms, and ‘lacked any connection to broader trends in Islamic thought such as Salafism or jihadism’ (p. 63). Matfess, in her discussion of this period, similarly notes that Izala preachers argued that women should vote and learn to read. As in his previous study (Reference Thurston2016), Thurston also draws out distinctions between jihadism and Salafism, noting practical and theological diversity within the latter: ‘most Nigerian Salafis, including Izala and the Medina graduates, bitterly oppose Boko Haram’ (p. 24). Another expression of this religious fragmentation was the emergence of Shiite groups led by students inspired by the Iranian Revolution. The Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), founded by Ibrahim al Zakzaky, is today the target of constant government harassment as well as the inspiration for large protests.
There is little agreement on Yusuf's background, as Thurston notes. Some sources point to his family's ties to Maitatsine, and then his flirtation with IMN before embracing Izala. An intrepid (and therefore unnamed here) Nigerian journalist is working to publish his interviews with Yusuf. Similarly, details about Shekau's background are slowly emerging. His mother recently said he was an almajiri, a wandering poor youth under the tutelage of an imam (Voice of America 2018). Almajiris figure prominently in research on Boko Haram's recruitment. However, Salafism rejects the alamajiri model, and Matfess and Thurston both place the phenomena within contexts of limited socioeconomic opportunities and elitist scapegoating of the poor dating back decades.
Thurston and Matfess further engage the question of recruitment from their respective strengths. The two scholars subtly part ways on a key point though: Matfess, building on research by Mercy Corps and other sources, makes a strong case that Boko Haram generated some popular appeal by providing public goods. The group's commitment to education (outlined below) ‘seems to surpass what would be required for a successful propaganda effort’ (p. 118). ‘Both the marital and the ideological functions of the educational infrastructure, allow Boko Haram to justify its governance patterns and introduce the rule of law under its authority’ (p. 121). For Thurston, faith and politics comingle: doctrinal disagreements, the ideological journeys of charismatic preachers, and the uncertainty of secularised democracy were powerful forces at play. But when Boko Haram actually controlled vast territories briefly in 2014, it showed no evidence of actual state building. ‘It is striking that the group made little effort to institutionalize Islamic courts and schools, or to distribute humanitarian relief’. Instead, it focused on destroying social infrastructure (p. 227). The debate between Matfess and Thurston here is important because providing public goods would categorise Boko Haram as a conventional insurgency. The regional militaries of the Multinational Joint Task Force will struggle to stabilise the Lake Chad region if Boko Haram's institutions are invisible and the social fabric of subversive sympathy remains unnoticed – or ignored.
There is broader agreement about the reasons for Boko Haram's radicalisation, its turn to violence, and then the embrace of terrorism. The extrajudicial killing of Yusuf by police in 2009, during a sprawling conflict that killed an estimated 800 people, transformed the group during a time when it was suffering from internal rivalries. At that point, ‘Shekau fit Yusuf's death neatly into Boko Haram's presentation of itself as the victim of state violence, rather than as the aggressor’ (p. 142). Both Matfess and Thurston remind readers that Boko Haram had engaged in assassinations (of Salafist rivals and also politicians) before then, marking the turn to violence prior to 2009. While the escalating tensions with police are well known, Thurston argues that Boko Haram prepared for the clash of 2009, imagining them as an uprising of the faithful. Immediately after Yusuf's death, Shekau also exploited the new opening by working to align with al Qaeda and later the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL). Based on the best examination to date of primary sources and circumstantial evidence, Thurston argues that Shekau generally failed to establish a meaningful external alliance with these networks. Matfess shares her scepticism about deep ties with ISIL first by citing conclusions of US intelligence agencies. Then she describes how interviewees displaced from Dikwa said Boko Haram's first order of business when it entered the city was to kill anyone who worked for the government. As the New York Times recently discovered, this is precisely the opposite of ISIL's strategy in Iraq, where they systematically kept bureaucrats in place (Callimachi Reference Callimachi2018).
The point is not merely academic, since the portrait of a global jihadist conspiracy has been a boon to the American and Nigerian militaries and shaped research on Boko Haram. Jacob Zenn, a prolific writer and influential American voice among policymakers, has propagated the notion that Boko Haram was born of such a conspiracy. Thurston and four colleagues recently published a critique of his work, questioning his motives, challenging his methods and debunking his key claims (Higazi et al. Reference Higazi, Kendhammer, Mohammed, Perouse de Montclos and Thurston2018). MacEachern separately subverts claims of Boko Haram's internationalism by using his forensic skills to examine an unexploded suicide bomb, built from French cluster bomb pieces. How in the world did it get there? More explicitly, he says the linkages to al Qaeda and ISIS ‘seem to be primarily rhetorical’ (p. 187).
Matfess's gender analysis is a welcome addition to the research agenda on Boko Haram. Her central premise is that we have primarily seen women as victims. This captures some of the everyday ardour of being female in Nigeria, she argues, but it has misinformed our understanding of Boko Haram. ‘[I]nsurgent abuse against women is ultimately an extension of the patterns of neglect and abuse that women have suffered for decades’ (p. 45). Thus we learn that in 2012, nearly 12% of Nigerians aged 15–24 in a nationwide survey said, ‘wife beating is completely justified’, with over 21% saying so in the north-east. ‘Bride price’, an emerging new line in Matfess's research, ‘is both a tradition of marriage and a way of commodifying women’ (p. 51). And purdah, the Islamic practice of ‘wife seclusion’, presents obvious barriers to public engagement and women's economic autonomy. Such facts fit within the conventional narrative of what Donald Trump described as ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ in his rambling rant before the United Nations in 2017. But they account for neither Boko Haram's emergence nor its persistence.
Better than any other study thus far, Matfess elucidates how the Chibok kidnappings manufactured misunderstandings of Boko Haram, and in some ways contributed to the abuse of girls. The #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign was largely an authentic grassroots expression of outrage. But the administrations of President Goodluck Jonathan and his successor, Muhammadu Buhari, both treated the girls as characters in a theatrical performance for public relations. Jonathan, with his unhelpful wife, stumbled his way through the crisis while trying to project an aura of effective counter-terrorism during his re-election campaign (the focus of my own work). To score political points, Buhari similarly declared premature victory over Boko Haram, and his administration described daring escapes as heroic military rescues. His government negotiated for the successful release of many Chibok girls. Matfess cautiously wonders whether the government may have paid a ransom for the release – an assertion supported by a source I recently met with who has been involved with negotiations.
Such payments perpetuate a political economy of insurgency, including kidnappings from the town of Dapchi and others. As a tactic, ransom also signalled a departure from petty bank robberies and Boko Haram's earlier revenue strategies. However, the real significance for Matfess is how the government, private actors and Boko Haram itself all exploited the Chibok ‘brand’. The most ardent enforcers in areas under Boko Haram's rule in 2014 began calling themselves the Chibok girls, inverting the very meaning.
Matfess is at her most provocative and makes the most important contributions where she argues that women exercised agency in choosing to affiliate with Boko Haram. As a result, their roles are far more varied than existing research acknowledges. According to her, ‘women ‘bargained with the patriarchy’ to advance their status within the social and legal limitations of their community’ (p. 56). During #BringBackOurGirls, explanations of the group emphasised its apparent opposition to ‘western education’. (Thurston convincingly explains that this superficial translation captures neither Boko Haram's discourse nor the term's literal translations.) However, Matfess points out that this obscures important details about the actual experience of women sympathetic to Boko Haram. For example, Yusuf organised religious sermons for girls, advocated for their Qur'anic education, and facilitated marriages that defied existing, exploitative social structures. Marrying a fighter offered women security because of social demands men faced to act as ‘protectors’. Moreover, women gained economic autonomy through the requirement that bride price be paid directly to the bride, and freedom from labour-intensive agricultural work resented by – and expected of – women throughout the north-east. She also points to the surprising frequency of divorce in Boko Haram, which enforced the expectation that an ex-husband will continue to provide for his wife until she remarries following the traditional period of isolation called iddah (p. 135). In short, Boko Haram sought to fulfil the social and economic needs of women unmet by a negligent state that because of its own gendered lens, failed to see even the worst of their vulnerability. This is the ‘mic drop’ moment in her lectures on the book, and it will be subject to scrutiny. Anticipating this, she cautiously notes, for example, that the Chibok enforcers may not exist within other factions of Boko Haram (p. 123). Some feminists may further wonder whether she was eager to find agency amidst the deep structural violence of the north-east. Matfess is in for the long haul though.
The three books have quite different approaches to evidence but equally strong appeals to interdisciplinary audiences. I confess that Thurston's analysis of Boko Haram's ties to al Qaeda will strain the attention of readers less familiar with religious doctrine. But there is no question that this will emerge the authoritative source on the question, probably alongside The Boko Haram Reader, a new collection of translations from Arabic, Hausa and Kanuri (Kassim and Nwankpa Reference Kassim and Nwankpa2018). Thurston's strength is his ability to parse an astonishing range of material gleaned from jihadi sources, religious texts and declassified documents. Where the evidence is circumstantial, he treats competing hypotheses with objective vigour before assessing their probabilities. For example, though he critiques the military's indiscriminate violence, a counter-factual explains why Boko Haram would have probably continued down the path to terrorism even if the government had successfully prosecuted Yusuf's killers. Without a bit more ‘introspection on the part of Muslim religious leaders’ (p. 152), the administration of justice by itself would not have sufficed. While Thurston rarely draws on interviews, Matfess consistently deploys them to both challenge her own intuitions and polish her prose. Her subjects include governors, displaced persons, Yusuf's former neighbours in Maiduguri, and women loyal to Boko Haram ensconced in a government ‘safe house’. Her elegant organisation of a carefully articulated and delimited argument delivers.
Like Thurston, MacEachern is careful about drifting into under-informed speculation. Ideally, archaeologists prefer to infer from the earliest evidence and think forwards, as they were able to do with the discovery of the Dufuna canoe in Yobe State – 190 miles from today's shrunken waters of Lake Chad (p. 33). More often, they have to ‘infer the processes of first colonization from later traces’ (p. 59). In the Mandara Mountains, only eight miles from Boko Haram strongholds, lay the ‘ruins of chiefly residence’ in the words of the local Mafa people. What may begin as seeming esoterica often concludes with important evidence of cultural continuities linked to today's insurgency. As Islam transformed in the 18th century from an elite tool of state building, argues MacEachern, practitioners controversially incorporated indigenous traditions. ‘The theological disputes between Muslim clerics in modern northern Nigeria … exist within a long and important politico-religious tradition in the region’ (p. 105). Local Boko Haram fighters often wear magical amulets known as gris-gris though the items are considered religiously unorthodox by the group's own leaders. Tracing continuous cultural connections is central to MacEachern's approach to evidence. Notably, he compares Boko Haram's infamous kidnapping of the Chibok girls to nearby slave raids by Hamman Yaji 100 years ago. Yahj diligently recorded his killings of women and children and the capture of over 1,600 slaves roughly 50 miles from Chibok. Yesterday's frontier warlords are today's terrorists.
For somewhat different reasons, each author casts doubt on whether current efforts at disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration can unravel and overcome such histories. ‘DDR’ now operates without any sort of peace agreement, sustainable development plan, or even a truce. Despite the good intentions of many involved with these efforts on the ground, ‘senior politicians and military officers may view the programs primarily as public relations props to placate Western governments’, says Thurston (p. 297). Matfess provides granular detail about the clumsily coordinated and increasingly corrupt government response to one of the biggest and most urgent humanitarian catastrophes in the world, drawing on her deep understanding of IDP communities and contacts in the donor community. The government launched a Victims Support Fund (VSF) that secured 58 billion naira in pledges, but raised less than half of that and has released even less. Like a plan to purchase 2,000 tractors to jump start agricultural production in the north-east, the VSF was one of many ‘half-baked, never enacted schemes’ for redevelopment she says (p. 178). MacEachern is best equipped to see beyond the present politics and policies, and he grimly concludes that like Kanuri slave raiding, 19th century jihads, and the 20th century's Maitatsine uprising, ‘this particular episode of violence is a manifestation of a long-term cultural process that will continue into the future’ (p. 193).
