It was carnage.

Mawu shook his head to rid his mind of the horrific memories. He had now stopped in his tracks, watching the truck disappear into the horizon with a handful of villagers he knew, including Ladan, his friend since childhood. All of his earliest memories had Ladan in them. They were circumcised together at a ceremony when they were about seven years of age, nursed by Ladan’s eldest sister who gave them hot fried meat to help them heal quickly and ligidi, a local sweet. The other kids teased them mercilessly as they walked about town with no trousers to allow their wounds to heal. That was a little over ten years ago. Hard to believe they ever had such carefree days. How drastically their lives had changed now.

He wiped the sweat dripping down his face and started walking back to their makeshift home, wondering if he was ever going to see Ladan again. He only survived the Boko Haram raid because of Ladan. Ladan forcibly held him down in a corner of a hut, where they took cover when the shooting started. Mawu had tried to run off to his father’s rescue when he was shot but Ladan wouldn’t let him go. From where they hid, they could see the violence that ensued. When the shooting had died down and Boko Haram had left, Ladan stayed with him as he sobbed for hours, not saying a word, Ladan’s presence enough.

For days after the raid, Mawu, Ladan and others who survived searched for and buried the dead. They salvaged whatever they could from what remained of the village. Every day, a handful of them wandered aimlessly around, trying to make sense of the sudden tragedy their lives had become. Their misery was as palpable as it was unimaginable. Almost all the families were dispersed. The Boko Haram soldiers took many women and girls, as they usually do in every raid. It was as if girls were pawns in their game of war.
The surviving villagers went days without food, rest or peace of mind. Their faces blank, reflecting the sudden void in their lives. Worse they heard days after the raid that Boko Haram was on the prowl, recruiting soldiers for their army and so the villagers lived in fear of the return. Every day more villagers left in groups to find shelter elsewhere. It didn’t matter how far, even as word spread that Boko Haram soldiers had attacked settlements near and far. The birth of a ghost village.

Mawu and Ladan used to have long discussions daily on how they would leave if the opportunity ever presented itself, an opportunity like the truck Mawu missed.

“Mota! Mota!”

The villagers shouted, coming out in droves like bellowing white ants from a crushed sand hill when they saw the truck. They jumped on, desperate. No one asked for permission. Anywhere was better than where they were. The driver flabbergasted at how quickly the truck was filling up turned it around and drove off.

Three weeks later, Mawu stood under the same scorching sun in the sweltering heat, very near the spot that he had stopped running after the truck that had taken Ladan away. Boko Haram had returned a few days after Ladan left. The soldiers arrived at dusk, no shooting this time. They just drove into the centre of the village in their usual show of power and military might with endless numbers of army trucks and vans. Every soldier was armed. There must have been hundreds of them. They surrounded the whole village in a matter of minutes and raised their symbol of victory and conquest, their black flag, in front of the only water borehole in the village.