A Nigeria Thread (Non-Music Division)

gotta admit that post is definitely out of character for you

The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses.

humans are a rotten species

oh my god this guy's lopsided smile is horrifying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sJnldKRg8&feature=player_embedded

truly an evil muslim

well he's certainly not making a kiddush allah

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/the-boko-haram-terrorists-are-not-islamic.html

yeah, i don't know. i think ppl self-identifying as a religion and claiming that their actions are done in the name of that religion's deity is sufficient to label them adherents of that religion. how can we possibly create a higher standard for religious identification than self-confession?

Is it really so straightforward? Is self-identification usually considered to be sufficient? If the vast majority of Muslims condemn their actions and those actions aren't explicitly endorsed by Islamic principles, how representative of Islam can you then say Boko Haram is?

Not necessarily representative but it is insane on multiple to deny that they're Islamic because you feel like they make Islam look bad. First, No True Scotsman fallacy. Second, religion is about self-confession to begin with. Third, the dude literally says 'in the name of Allah' in his speeches. He's not only incidentally a Muslim who is doing things that aren't Islamic. He's grounding his entire ethos in his religion.

on multiple levels*

or at least he's using the religion--or his interpretation thereof--to explain/justify his activities. which is just about what all politicized/militarized religion does.

http://www.listandalucia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/yorrippetsut1607.jpg

famous christian peter sutcliffe

thats an excellent comparison

I'm first in line to condemn Christian extremism, but it's not just a little disingenuous to compare a solitary schizophrenic to a large political group.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/1/21/1358799714811/Idi-Amin-seated-with-mic-008.jpg

a famous scotsman

this is risible special pleading

does the catholic church get to disinherit its patronage of torquemada on the grounds that his actions would no longer be endorsed by most mainstream and media literate catholic theologians

I'm not sure there's much value in arguing over the validity of boko members' Islamic identification. They are Muslims but their actions are condemned by practically all other Muslims (even Al Qaeda bristles at their indiscriminate violence, if news reports are to be trusted). The only thing we get out of this is that Islam is a religion with black sheep like the rest.

it is kinda weird to hear that there's a line AQ won't cross

According to U.S. Army General Carter Ham, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab, and the Nigeria-based Boko Haram were as of June 2012 attempting to synchronize and coordinate their activities in terms of sharing funds, training and explosives.[8] Ham added that he believed that the collaboration presented a threat to both U.S. homeland security and the local authorities.[4

Boko Haram’s funding traced to UK, S/Arabia

INVESTIGATIONS into activities of the dreaded militant Islamic sect, Boko Haram have led operatives of the State Security Service (SSS) and its collaborative local and international agencies into the sources of funding of the dreaded sect.

Information at the disposal of Nigerian Tribune indicates that operatives were told that the group had received funds from some Al-Qaeda-linked organisations based in the middle East.

However, the operatives were said to have made a shocking find, which confirmed that the group actually received funding from a United Kingdom-based (UK) organisation.

It was gathered that leaders of the sect already arrested had opened up by giving some strategic information, especially on the funding of the dreaded organisation.

Sources confirmed that while the organisation relied on donations by its members in its earlier days, its links with Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) opened it to fundings from groups in Saudi Arabia and the UK.

According to the sources, different confirmations coming from sources in Boko Haram had indicated clearly that a group known as Al-Muntada Trust Fund, with headquarters in the United Kingdom, had extended some financial assistance to the sect.

Investigations, so far, revealed that the sect received financial assistance from some Islamic organisations.

“The sect was also said to have received funding from Islamic World Society with headquarters in Saudi Arabia,” one source stated.

It was gathered that while initial funds for the sect came from contributions by members, there were also donations from notable Muslims, especially a businessman, who was once said to have donated a bus and some loud speakers to the organisation and the late Baba Fugu, Mohammed Yusuf’s in-law, who was said to have donated a farmland at Auno village in Konduga Local Government Area of Borno State.

It was also gathered that security agencies have uncovered another sponsor, whose identity was given as a businessman from Bauchi State. He was said to have developed links with Al-Qaeda in Somalia having received some training from one Abu Umar Al-Wadud, the man who leads Al-Qaeda in Somalia.

The danger in funding and empowering radical militant extremist groups like Boko Haram is that ultimately they might end up doing something that even Al-Qaeda finds reprehensible. But at that point they've already become a significant political force that can't just be waved away.

xps and burnt rice

Nobody is denying that they're Islamic and frankly, I'm not all that concerned with how Islam ends up looking in the eyes of people with no sense of scale and context. I've made no universal claims about what a Muslim is supposed to be but we can't pretend that such rhetoric doesn't incite unnecessary Islamophobia and produce narratives that eschew more practical realities in favour of ideological ones.

Religion can be just as much (if not more) about 'the group' as it is self-confession. The reality of what Boko Haram actually does - how and why they do it, are not to be found in the professed ethos of Abubakar Shekau.

tbf, the link I posted was explicitly denying that they were Islamic?

like it's even in the title lol:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/the-boko-haram-terrorists-are-not-islamic.html

And he's well within his rights to do so. If he doesn't interpret their actions to be in line with Islamic principles, then how would you suggest he go about saying so?

maybe there is some extreme form of cargo cult enormity that is simply too remote from any substantial sect of whichever faith, boko haram's methods are perhaps too diffuse, extreme, whatever, for mainstream salafist jihad and anyone with any care for what the west thinks about islam will doubtless disinherit them but to simply remove them from spectrum of islam entirely is wilful delusion

if non-muslims want to invest in intra-islamic realness claims then they will presumably endorse as /properly/ islamic the claims of those quoted grandees who are denouncing boko haram, such as the current saudi grand mufti

In April 2012, he issued a fatwa allowing ten year old girls to marry insisting that girls are ready for marriage by age 10 or 12: "Our mothers and grandmothers got married when they were barely 12. Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age."[9]

Rather than condemn the media for rightfully pointing out that this militant group organizes its ideology around an interpretation of Islam, he could condemn the group for calling themselves Islamic while transgressing tenets of the faith. The former is apologetics, the latter is totally within his rights (and virtuous even maybe). xp

I'd imagine that goes without saying? (though to be sure many people are)

And if his concern is "Islamaphobic" Westerners using this group to tar all Muslim believers, why doesn't he just remind readers that not all Muslims believe the same things, just like all Christians and all Jews don't believe the same things. Why can't he condemn a radical interpretation of Islam without writing it out of the Islamic context entirely? Can the religion not survive being associated in any way w/ Boko Haram? And if it can't, is that because Nigeria is not the only area in the world where violent Islamic fundamentalism is a phenomenon?

Because its quite clear that many Westerners aren't prepared to see things that way.

I'd imagine that as far as he's concerned the only way to divorce radical Islam from broader Islamic contexts is to severely emphasize a divergence between the two.

Well apparently it can

So do you believe that violent fundamentalism and Islam are inevitable bedfellows irrespective of other contextual considerations?

Well, I do believe that there is plenty of scriptural justification for violent fundamentalism in the Quran, but no, I don't think it's inevitable. Lots of religions have violence in their history + sacred texts but aren't damned to participate in it in 2014. I do however think that in 2014 there's a wide enough current of violent fundamentalism that justifies itself within the parameters of Islamic scripture and doctrine that to pretend otherwise is silly.

I should say Quran/Hadith. I'm not trying to make an argument about textual legitimacy in Islam.

the no true scotsman fallacy is interesting but I don't think straightforwardly fallacious as it conflates the formal, concrete sort of scottishness with the ideal sense, which is the more apposite for religion. I think that a pluralist approach to defining religions that prioritizes self-identity is anathema to the way a lot of actually religious ppl conceive of their own faith. There's a sense in which religions are vast, contradictory entities existing across eras that are responsible for countless appalling crimes, but individuals invested in a tradition will inevitably have their own take on its muggy, highly contested borders, something which they can personally reconcile with. everyone is trying to be a better scotsman.

the level of self-identification is trivial. to recognise the boko haram guys' actions as in some interesting sense islamic is to take their conception of islam over that of the vast majority of muslims, and I would wonder why. the chances of a catholic being associated in a negative sense with the inquisition seem slim, it's not part of discourse in the way that salafi-jihadism is, & carries less weight.

during the nairobi mall attack, the al shabab gunmen asked people to name the prophet's mother as a test to mark out who could leave. to stress the arbitrariness of demarcating a religion misses its importance, & using self-identification is as political a way of doing it as any other.

surely catholicism is less associated w/ the inquisition than islam w/ boko haram bc the inquisition was back in the 12th century. it's not like anyone is claiming that the Umayyad conquest of Hispania indicates violent undercurrents in Islam. they're looking at contemporary political movements. also, i'm not even sure about your distinction anyway. at least in the Jewish community there continues to be a historical memory of crimes of the inquisition - not just liturgically (the kol nidre melody was supposedly written by conversos who regretted being forced to hide) but continues to play out in actual communities of crypto-jews, which is enough of a real thing that i know about half a dozen ppl from crypto-jewish families.

like notably recent popes have felt it was necessary to apologize to communities who were affected by the inquisition, suggesting a level of institutional responsibility at the very least. (of course islam does not have an institutional coherency like catholicism does.)

the distinction is just that ilxors aren't shuddering in moral revulsion at the tics of catholic inquisitors

self-identification creates monolithic, incoherent entities that ironically no single believer could ever identify with. it's inherently an outsider's way of looking at a religion & pretty unenlightening in this situation insofar as it groups the boko haram guy with the schoolgirls he has kidnapped

the schoolgirls are christians from what i understand so i'm not sure your point... unless you are considering them (very) recent converts to Islam?

the distinction is just that ilxors aren't shuddering in moral revulsion at the tics of catholic inquisitors

the 800 yr old tics?

i do agree that it doesn't make sense to lump together a fascist radical islamic ideology w/ the forced convert victims of that ideology...

I'd assumed that being from borno/the north in general they were muslim but ok, if not I stand corrected

They were abducted from a mixed school and there are Muslim and Christian girls missing fwiw.

anyway, i'm not sure what it adds to mention that muslims themselves are victims of these radicals (i've seen this article made a lot recently - as tho it somehow absolves Islamic theology of any kind of influence in BH). that's really only an objection if the argument is that this is a holy war between christians and muslims (a claim i've only seen from the political christian right). the real critique is that this radicalism hurts all kinds of people, including muslims.

article argument

like if i argued that a particular religion oppressed women, you wouldn't say that the critique groups the women of that religion w/ its oppressors. that would be weird.

i don't see this debate as anything new, really. al qaeda and other militarized forms of islam have been at the center of debates about islamic identity for decades.

the question is what counts as 'islamic theology', who makes that call & why. the broader your definition of a blanket term the less useful it becomes as an explanation of events&motivations. if you argued that say, islam, oppressed women you would have to exclude certain elements as inessential, despite lots of people explicitly identifying as islamic feminists

no disagreement from me. that a particular ideology emerges from islam means more about the ideology than it does about islam as a whole (which is too complex to reduce to most sociopolitical generalizations)

A pretty good summation of what a lot of Nigerians think is really going on here, albeit with a very strong Jonathan/PDP bent
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/05/season-conspiracies-goodluck-jonathan/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/23/nigerias_house_of_cards_growth_boko_haram_inequality

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/world/africa/nigerian-newspaper-weekly-trust-says-army-blocked-distribution.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/boko-haram-may-have-killed-thousands-attack-say-experts-n283011

Incredible thing is how much further it is to the absolute front.

I mean yeah the scale of the thing is grotesque and the traffic it results in is beyond insane but once you actually go to the camp and see the orphanage, rehab centre, soup kitchen, the schools, banks, the clinic, maternity centre and the jobs the whole outfit generates, Wole Soyinka grumbling about the Ibadan expressway seems somewhat irrelevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/world/africa/niger-nigeria-boko-haram-food-crisis.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

DIFFA, Niger — Only 2 years old, Fatouma Ouseini lay in a hospital room, undernourished and listless from fever.

She is among the nearly half a million children expected to endure the food crisis that has plagued the Lake Chad region in the past year, aid groups say, a disaster brought on by Boko Haram’s relentless campaign of killing, kidnappings and looting of entire villages.

Fatouma and her family fled from just across the border in northeastern Nigeria, the epicenter of the war with Boko Haram, where scattered areas have teetered on the brink of famine for most of this year, according to the United Nations. Now, some aid workers fear that similar conditions could spill over to bordering areas like here in Niger, putting even more children at risk.

More than 70,000 people fled their homes along the border between Niger and Nigeria in the first half of this year after militant attacks increased. Many have resettled in Diffa, living in labyrinth-like neighborhoods of mud-brick homes, competing with longtime residents for food and water.

Will see what the UN and ngos can do...

On the current mass protests against police brutality (that I mentioned in the Wizkid thread):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/world/africa/nigeria-protests-police-sars.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2020/10/14/in-pictures-protests-in-nigeria-2/

Queer activist Amara, one of the protesters profiled in that Al-Jazeera piece, ran into her own problems unfortunately:

A lady brought a 🌈 rainbow flag
and our fellow
protesters turned on us at Berger Roundabout Abuja.
they tore our placards and seized the flag.
I got it back but they refused that we fly it.
I wore it on my neck and they refused.
said we either take it off or leave.
I’m leaving pic.twitter.com/ZyaTzR7TQg

— Amara, the lesbian. (@the_amarion) October 14, 2020

Good thread on the protests:

I’ve been looking for a thread to share with some context to the #EndSarsNow protests for my followers but I haven’t seen one yet – so I’ll do one. Feel free to quote tweet threads in the replies.

— Black as in Revolution. (@annie_etc_) October 11, 2020

that thread provides useful background - meanwhile, the government’s response is becoming increasingly horrifying:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/21/nigeria-president-calls-for-calm-amid-reports-of-protesters-shot-dead-in-lagos

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the protests and the crackdown:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/opinion/chimamanda-adichie-nigeria-protests.html

paywalled, so I’m putting it here:

Opinion

Nigeria Is Murdering Its Citizens

Under President Muhammadu Buhari, there is a sense that the country could burn to the ground.

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Oct. 21, 2020

LAGOS, Nigeria — For years, the name SARS hung in the air here in Nigeria like a putrid fog. SARS, which stood for Special Anti-Robbery Squad, was supposed to be the elite Nigerian police unit dedicated to fighting crime, but it was really a moneymaking terror squad with no accountability. SARS was random, vicious, vilely extortionist. SARS officers would raid bars or stop buses on the road and arbitrarily arrest young men for such crimes as wearing their hair in dreadlocks, having tattoos, holding a nice phone or a laptop, driving a nice car. Then they would demand large amounts of money as “bail.”
SARS officers once arrested my cousin at a beer parlor because he arrived driving a Mercedes. They accused him of being an armed robber, ignored the work ID cards he showed them, took him to a station where they threatened to photograph him next to a gun and claim he was a robber, unless he paid them a large sum of money. My cousin is one of the fortunate few who could pay an amount large enough for SARS, and who was released. He is not one of the many tortured, or the many disappeared, like Chijioke Iloanya.
In 2012 Mr. Iloanya was 20 when SARS officers arrested him at a child dedication ceremony in Anambra State. He had committed no crime. His family tried to pay to have him released but were asked to bring more money than they had. So they sold their property to raise money and went back to the SARS office but Mr. Iloanya was no longer there. They have not seen him since. Photos of him on social media show a young man, still almost a child, with sensitive eyes and a future waiting for him. There are so many families like the Iloanyas who are caught between pain and hope, because their sons and brothers were arrested by SARS and they fear the worst, knowing the reputation of SARS, but still they dare to hope in the desperate way we humans do for those we love.
There have been End SARS protests, since 2016, but October 2020 was different, a tipping point had been reached. The protests signaled the overturning of convention — the protesters insisted on not having a central leadership, it was social rather than traditional media that documented the protests, and, in a country with firm class divisions, the protests cut across class. The protests were peaceful, insistently peaceful, consistently peaceful. They were organized mostly on social media by young Nigerians, born in the 1980s and 1990s, a disaffected generation with the courage to act. Their bravery is inspiring. They speak to hope and to the possibility of what Nigeria could become. Of those involved in the organization, none is more remarkable than a group called Feminist Coalition, set up by Nigerian feminists, who have raised more than $180,000, and have provided legal aid, security and food to protesters.
But the Nigerian government tried to disrupt their fund-raising. The Nigerian government has reportedly accused Flutterwave, the company through which the donation link was created, of accepting funds from terrorists, even though it is clear that Feminist Coalition’s members are not terrorists. Their fund-raising link suddenly stopped working. Still, they persisted, and began to raise money through Bitcoin.

From the capital city of Abuja to the small town of Ogbomosho, state agents attacked and beat up protesters. The police killed a few and detained many others, until social media and video evidence forced them to release some of the detained. Still, the protesters persisted.
The Lagos State government accused protesters of violence, but it defied common sense that a protest so consistently committed to peaceful means would suddenly turn around and become violent. Protesters know they have everything to lose in a country like Nigeria where the mere hint of violence gives free reign to murderous security forces. Nigeria’s political culture is steeped in state-sponsored thuggery. Politicians routinely hire thugs to cause chaos, especially during elections, and many people believed that thugs had been hired to compromise the protests. On social media, videos that attested to this — of thugs getting into SUVs that belonged to the government, of hardened and hungry young men admitting they were paid to join the protests and become violent. Still, the protesters persisted.

At about noon on Oct. 20, 2020, about two weeks into the protests, the Lagos State governor suddenly announced a curfew that would begin at 4 p.m., which gave people in a famously traffic-clogged state only a few hours to get home and hunker down. I feared that a curfew would provide an excuse for state violence, that in the name of restoring order, the army and police would unleash violence. Still, I was unprepared for the carnage that followed at the Lekki Toll Gate, the most prominent in Lagos. Government officials reportedly cut the security cameras, then cut off the bright floodlights, leaving only a darkness heavy with foreboding. The protesters were holding Nigerian flags, sitting on the ground, some kneeling, some singing the national anthem, peaceful and determined.
A blurry video of what happened next has gone viral — soldiers walk toward the protesters with a terrifyingly casual calm, the kind of calm you cannot have if you are under attack, and they shoot, not up in the air, which anyway would still be an atrocity when dealing with peaceful protesters, but with their guns at arm level, shooting into a crowd of people, shooting to kill. Sparks of gunfire taint the air. It is still unclear how many died. Those at the scene say that the Nigerian army took away some bodies, and prevented ambulances from getting in to help the injured, and that there was still shooting going on hours later, in the morning.
The Nigerian state has turned on its people. The only reason to shoot into a crowd of peaceful citizens is to terrorize: to kill some and make the others back down. It is a colossal and unforgivable crime. The brazenness is chilling, that the state would murder its citizens, in such an obviously premeditated way, as though certain of the lack of consequences.
It is anarchy, a friend told me. Nigeria is descending into chaos, another friend said. They may be right, but “anarchy” and “chaos” are different ways of using language to shield what is fundamentally to blame — a failure of leadership. It did not have to be like this. The government of President Muhammadu Buhari has long been ineffectual, with a kind of willful indifference. Under his leadership, insecurity has worsened; there is the sense that Nigeria could very well burn to the ground while the president remains malevolently aloof. The president himself has often telegraphed a contemptuous self-righteousness, as though engaging fully with Nigerians is beneath him. Twelve hours after soldiers shot peaceful protesters, Mr. Buhari still had not addressed the nation.

A movement cannot spread so organically and widely across Nigeria if it does not legitimately reflect the grievances of ordinary people. A democratically elected government that is unable or unwilling to fully address those grievances has failed.
In the first week of the protests, the president sent out a tweet and then gave a flaccid speech about ending SARS. The inspector general of police has announced that SARS has been scrapped, but the government has announced the dissolution of SARS a few times in the past, starting in 2017. Because Nigerians are so accustomed to the two-faced nature of their governments, to promises destroyed even before being made, it is unsurprising that the protesters distrust the government and are demanding clear actions rather than words.
For weeks I have been in my ancestral hometown, where we first buried my beloved father, and then a week later, buried his only sister, my Aunt Rebecca. Immersed in my own raw grief, the frequent moments of stunned sorrow, thinking of my father’s casket being lowered into the rain-softened earth, wondering if it might still all be a bad dream, I think with a new kind of poignancy about those who have been killed. I think of their families brutally plunged into the terrible abyss of grief, made more terrible by the knowledge that their loved ones were killed by their country. And for what? Because they peacefully asked to be allowed to live.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a novelist and the author, most recently, of “Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.”

If anyone wants to keep up to date, Al Jazeera’s reporting seems quite on the ball. Not sure what’s the most reliable Nigerian news site, but The Guardian (guardian.ng) appears not to be in bed with the Buhari government at least (it does have other issues tho, if Wikipedia is to be believed). Music/culture website Native (thenativemag.com) is good for its reporting and opinionating from a pro-youth, pro-feminist, pro-lgbtq+ perspective.

I can't get al-jazeera america. Don't have cable. But ty for posting that article.

I meant aljazeera.com, their news site, sorry if that was unclear.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/19/nigeria-battling-worst-floods-in-a-decade-with-more-than-300-people-killed-in-2022