-Daniel Yohanna

The night came without warning, thick, breathless, and bitter. In Damboa, the winds had whispered warnings, but no one truly listened to the wind until it screamed. That evening, it screamed with gunfire. The insurgents descended like locusts, swift, merciless, and loud. Aisha had been preparing dinner, her baby, cooing beside her, wrapped in an old blue blanket. The hiss of the kerosene lamp was the only sound she focused on, grounding her in a moment of quiet amidst the growing chaos. But then the crack of a gun echoed. A single shot. It found its way to Aisha’s body. She staggered, a red bloom spreading across her side like a cursed flower. Pain clawed at her insides, but she ran bleeding, breath heaving, legs folding under her. Through the thorny brush and muddy path, she ran, clutching her baby to her chest. 

By the time she caught sight of her sister, Nasiba, waiting behind the baobab grove with others who had escaped, Aisha was crumbling. The color had drained from her face. Her breaths came like whispers. She knew. Death stood near. With hands shaking, she pressed her daughter into Nasiba’s arms.

“Take her,” she gasped. “She is yours now. Raise her strong… raise her knowing love.”

Nasiba had just collected the baby from her sister, who begged her to hide the child from the marauding insurgents. The air smelled of dust and fire, full of heavy fear.

“Take her,” she whispered, “Keep her safe. Name her Queen Safiya.”

Before Nasiba could turn, a shot cracked through the silence. Bang. She staggered, the baby pressed to her chest, blood soaking her wrapper.

“Ya Allah,” she gasped, falling into the sand.

The insurgents swept in like a storm, their rifles glinting. Women screamed, scattering like broken china. One of the fighters yanked the baby from Nasiba’s lifeless arms.

“Leave her,” he barked, nudging the corpse with his boot. “The child comes with us.”

And so, the women were herded like cattle into the darkness, and little Safiya disappeared into the belly of the insurgents’ camp.

For three years, the captives lived in the shadow of death. The camp was a prison in the desert. The women bore scars on their bodies and deeper scars in their souls. Safiya, barely old enough to remember her mother, grew up knowing only the sharp voices of fighters and the cold embrace of dust. 

On Friday afternoon, after Juma’at prayer, the Nigerian Army stormed the Sambisa Forest. The insurgents scattered, their black flags trampled into the sand. Most of them were killed, while a few of them were captured. Their camp was set ablaze.

“Secure the women! Secure the children!” the soldiers shouted.

The captives wept as chains were cut, as fear melted into relief. Fifteen girls below the age of fourteen were pregnant for the insurgents. The Amir’s wife, Leah Sharibu, died due to an injury she sustained from the RPG shot into her husband’s tent. 

Among the captives set free was Safiya—now three years older, eyes wide with shock, clutching the hem of a soldier’s uniform.

“Baba, Ina za mu je?” (Father, where are we going?), Safiya asked the tall soldier who carried her, thinking he was her father.

The soldiers combed the forest before setting out for Maiduguri, the capital city of Borno. The women were taken into rehabilitation camps—places where broken spirits learned to breathe again. 

Safiya was small, quiet, almost fragile, carrying a doll carved from a piece of wood she found in the camp. With a bright smile on her face, she aimed it like a gun at anyone who came close to her. She played around, crawling like a soldier whenever she saw armored cars driving into the camp. It was there that her uncle, her mother’s brother, came searching, face lined with grief and hope after he learned that the Nigerian Army had rescued prisoners of war from the famous Sambisa Forest. He met the women from his village, and he was fortunate to encounter a neighbor of his late sister, who narrated how his sister had died, leaving behind his niece, Safiya. They brought her to him. When he saw her, his body trembled.

“We’re going home,” the tall soldier said softly.

“Safiya?” he whispered, his voice cracking.

The girl looked up, uncertain, but something in her blood remembered him. She ran forward, arms wide. He knelt, catching her in an embrace that stitched together three years of loss. 

“Baba, ina son sweet.” (Father, I want candy.) Safiya said. 

“Ya Allah!” He whispered with tears rolling down his cheek.

“Baba, kalla bindiga na.” (Father, look at my gun.) Safiya added.

Tears fell freely as he whispered over and over: “You are safe now. You are home.”

***

Safiya was no longer the tiny bundle wrapped in blue. At seven years old, she had grown under the wide, weathered arms of her aunt, Ramatulia, in Bama, far from the songs of gunfire at Damboa. Her eyes held the curiosity of a child and the quiet grief of one who had known loss too young to name it. 

Ramatulia loved her fiercely like a mother. She told her tales of her mother, who once sang lullabies under mango trees when she was barely twelve years old. And though Safiya had no memory of her mother’s voice, she dreamed it sometimes, soft and distant. In Ramatulia’s home, Safiya learned to count stars, to carry water on her head, and to pray five times a day. Ramatulia made sure she taught her sunnah, halal, and haram. But deep in her bones, where memory sang songs of the women of her land, the shadow of that night remained.

On Tuesday night, after a long day when she had prayed maghrib, Safiya’s world shifted again when the earth claimed Ramatulia, the woman who raised her right and protected her from the cruel hands of the world. It began with faintness. Then swelling. Then the cruel verdict whispered by Dr. Muhammad Ali like a funeral dirge: kidney disease. The one woman who had loved her like a second mother, who had fought to keep Sayifa’s memory alive, now lay curled in pain, her strength leaking away drop by drop like water from a cracked pot. 

Safiya watched helplessly, too young to understand the slow theft of life, yet old enough to sense the final goodbye that clung to the air like dust.

When Ramatulia passed away, it was not just the end of a life; it was the end of Safiya’s warmth. She was ten years old when she was handed over to Salamatu, the wife of her uncle. Salamatu had always worn her bitterness like a second skin. She resented the extra mouth. She saw in Safiya the shadow of her husband’s dead sister. Or maybe cruelty had simply found a willing vessel.

In that house, love was rationed like water in drought season, and Safiya got none. She was scolded for being too quiet. Beaten for being too slow. Mocked for being too tall, too thin, too much. She scrubbed floors with hands that still trembled from grief. She fetched water under the burning sun while Salamatu’s own daughters played in the shade. If she cried, she was told her tears were a burden. If she smiled, it was called disrespect. Her uncle watched helplessly. He was a reed in the wind of Salamatu’s storm. 

When he found Safiya curled behind the goat shed, bruised and hollow-eyed, something in him snapped like dry wood. He took her away quietly to Abuja. With nothing but the clothes on her back and a silent prayer, he placed her in the care of a judge’s wife, hoping that influence might offer the safety that love could not. 

The judge’s wife smiled like a painted mask and spoke in honeyed tones. She fed Safiya like a beggar, beat her like a drum, and once, in a fit of rage, pushed her down the stairs. The girl who had already lost two mothers now tasted death’s breath again.

Her bones bruised, her lips cracked, her back a history of welts. She was returned to her foster father’s house like a broken clay pot. As she was dropped off, the judge’s wife hissed, with venom laced in pride: “Tell anyone… and I promise, the police will look away. My husband is the law.”

She vanished, the sound of her heels clicking like a mockery of justice.

As Safiya lay in the back of the keke that drove her home half-conscious, half-dreaming, the world blurred into twilight. Her eyes fluttered shut. In the soft hush of unconsciousness, she dreamed. She stood in a wide field of baobabs, their trunks wide like ancient mothers, their arms stretched toward heaven. A river flowed through the middle, glowing gold. And on the other side stood a woman wrapped in blue.

“Safiya.” Her mother pronounced her name.

She only opened her arms. Safiya ran barefoot through the grasses of that dreamland, into the safety she had forgotten. 

She whispered to Safiya, “To every night, there is a brighter day. Whatever you do, go hard. The pain will make you grow. Never let the pressure make you panic. A lot of people will not see your struggle; they will only see your trouble.” She sighed, “Safiya… my daughter, my blood. Weep not, child. Weep not, my darling. You are not alone. I am here with you.”

When she woke, she was crying softly. 

Her uncle held her close to his heart and soliloquized, “They told me Abuja is a place of promise. They told me she would wash plates and return with money enough to buy her own sandals, maybe even a small mattress to sleep on. That she would go to school. That she would be safe. That she would be respected. I believed them. I let her go. What kind of uncle am I? When the bandits came to Dan Gyalla, I held my wife’s trembling hand. I carried the youngest child. I watched our house, the only one I built with my bare hands, burn. I didn’t cry. I said, “Alhamdulillah. We are alive.” We came to Sokoto with nothing but our children. Later on, the daughter of my sister joined us. I thought the worst had passed. But now I know… sometimes the real harm doesn’t carry a gun. It wears perfume, drives fine cars, and speaks smooth promises through smiling lips. I should have known. I should have known that the world can be crueler in polished houses than in the forests of Zamfara.

Safiya… the only daughter of my sister… they took your softness and fed it to hunger. Locked you in a room like a cursed thing. They said you begged them to bring you home. They said you collapsed. That even the hospitals turned you away. What kind of world is this? I wasn’t there to stop it. I wasn’t there to hear your voice. You are the child who helped my wife cook, even when she was cruel to you. The girl who loved to draw flowers in the sand with a stick. The girl who ran errands barefoot in the village, laughing louder than the moon. And now… your body tells stories your mouth cannot. Bruises. Scars. Those eyes.”

“Why are you shedding tears for this thing?” Salamatu hissed and walked back to her room.

He sighed, “Even after you were rescued, you didn’t look at me the same. You looked through me, searching for the uncle who failed you. I keep asking myself: where have I gone wrong? I will not let them silence what you went through. Let the courts hear it. I failed you, the daughter of my sister, once. I will not fail you again.”

He called Safiya, but she was silent. He pressed his ears to her chest, but she wasn’t breathing. He screamed.