Story of Mother Who Outsmarted Boko Haram For 9 Months By Pretending To Be Mad

Here is a story of the woman who countered extremism with her own extreme measures.

Hassana was only 12 when her mom gently pushed her into a deep ditch in the backyard one morning in August 2014.

The push was not to kill her, but instead to save her from being becoming a child bride to the Boko Haram foot soldiers who had just invaded their hometown of Madagali in the northeastern Nigerian state of Adamawa.

Since 2009 when the death of its founder Mohammed Yusuf triggered the insurgency, hundreds of women and girls have been abducted, sexually violated or killed outright even as the sect continues to wage war against perceived ‘Western ideals’ including education for youngsters like Hassana.

In April 2014, the high-profile abduction of over 250 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok in the neighbouring Borno state made the headlines. The capture of many other girls remains under the radar; some of those released have admitted to suicidal thoughts, due to the trauma of living – and being sexually and physically abused – in the terrorist camps with the Sambisa forest base.

Girls aged 15 and younger have also been used in carrying out suicide bombings in the worst hit Borno and Adamawa states.

Knowing all of this, Hassana’s mum, the 47-year old Zainabu Hamayaji hatched a plan to outsmart the terrorists as well as save her four children. Her instincts warned her that Boko Haram would consider Hassana, her eldest daughter to be of marriageable age and would kill her husband. She was soon proved right.

“They killed my husband and many of the men here”, she tells this reporter in a school-turned-camp in the mountainous town of Gwoza, declared by the insurgents as the seat of their caliphate in August 2014. “Some of my children ran off but the rest of us could not leave the house because they were killing people running out of town. So many people were dying and couldn’t escape.”

Hamayaji loosened her hair to look mentally unstable and began to roll on the floor for several hours a day outside our house and in various parts of town. She urinated on herself. She defecated on her clothes. Then she rubbed both all over her body. Her neighbours avoided her just as flies swarmed to her.

The Boko Haram extremists were sceptical at first. They had come knocking after a villager mentioned that Hamayaji had a daughter old enough to be carted away into captivity. She denied it and for that, they beat her mercilessly, dislocated her shoulder with their guns and knocked out a tooth from her mouth.

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