The Boko Haram’s leader didn’t press Afua for an answer to his peculiar question. Instead, he simply changed tactics and asked, “Are you stealing all this for your family?”
Afua’s smile faded, and he nodded his head once.
“I thought so,” Iniabasi said, like he possessed supernatural powers of deduction. “But this is so little. How many mouths do you have to feed?”
Afua’s father had been dead for three years. He had endured the pain of an infected tooth, only to have the infection turn septic and drop him to the dirt weeks later.
Afua counted the people in his family on his hands.
“Eight, including me,” he said.
When the terrorist leader heard the number, he shook his head disapprovingly.
“No, no,” he said adamantly. “This is not enough food for eight people. You need much more. Come with us, and we will give you enough food to feed your family for two weeks.”
Afua looked the man over, trying to decide whether the man was trying to trick him. He knew better than just about anyone you didn’t get something for free. He glanced nervously at the dozen men surrounding him. They had all lowered their weapons.
A few of them had pulled down the scarves from their sweaty faces, either to personalize themselves to Afua, or possibly to breathe easier. Detecting no deceitfulness in Iniabasi’s demeanor, Afua dropped his empty canvas bag to the jungle floor. Iniabasi turned and began walking deeper into the jungle, and Afua fell in line with the other jihadis.
They walked a long, long way on paths in the jungle made by animals. Eventually, they came to a little town that was a large encampment in the middle of the dense forest.
Iniabasi took Afua over to a well and offered his new friend a cool drink of water. Afua drank his fill, returning the ladle back into the wooden bucket.
“You must be hungry,” Iniabasi said to him.
Afua didn’t know if that was a question or a statement. He assumed that most of the people Iniabasi found stealing food were indeed hungry, but he remained silent.
Iniabasi began walking toward a large tent about 100 meters away in a sunlit clearing. Afua followed. When they reached the tent, he held open the tent flap and gestured with his arm for Afua to go inside. The smells were the first thing he noticed, even before his eyes adjusted to the dim light. There was an infusion of aromas in the air from baskets of beans, sesame and maize. There was also a sweetness that hung in the air of cocoa beans, groundnuts, melon and ripe yams. Afua looked around at the piles and piles of food. There were bushels of millet, palm kernels, sorghum and rice. To his left were dozens of 50-gallon drums of palm oil, and to his right were thousands of canned foods. He looked at the pictures of the food on the outside of the cans. Much of it he had never seen before. Next to the cans were bottles of colorful liquids. Some were dark brown, some clear and many were either orange or blue.
Iniabasi was smiling at him.
“You see,” the leader told him, waving his outstretched arms at the stockpile before them. “We have everything your family could ever want.”
Iniabasi walked over to where the bottles of liquid were stacked. He grabbed one of the orange bottles, and using a tool at the end of his keychain, he popped the top. He handed the opened bottle of orange soda to Afua.
The young Nigerian looked apprehensive, so Iniabasi told him, “It’s OK. You will love it. It is called Fanta orange soda.”
Afua put the bottle up to his mouth and took a small sip. His brain almost exploded from the euphoric rush. He had never tasted anything like it before. It was the best thing he had ever eaten or drank. And, just like that, Afua was hooked. He was hooked on the orange soda. Soon he was hooked on the lifestyle of the
modern Nigerian terrorist and all the nastiness that accompanied it. After he finished his soda, Iniabasi had asked him if he believed in Allah.
Sure thing. If it meant Afua could get food for his family and more orange soda, he would believe in anything Iniabasi wanted him to believe in. Allah, Jesus, Buddha. Hell, Afua would believe that Iniabasi himself was a god if it meant more food.
So Afua told Iniabasi he believed in Allah. After that, his life changed. He could provide food for his family. However, the tradeoff was increasingly becoming more violent. Stealing food became kidnapping people. That soon transitioned to torturing those he kidnapped. Eventually that translated to killing them. The final evolution was senseless killing, and Afua was at the forefront of all the action.
Ten years after meeting Iniabasi, Afua moved his entire family to a four-bedroom apartment in the port city of Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria. Afua praised Allah, prayed regularly, and did Allah’s will. This, in his mind, ensured that his family remained well-fed and well-housed. Now, life was so easy.
As Afua stared at the 9K333 Verba missile in his hands he wondered if, after completing this mission, his life would remain the same. Other than going on missions to expand Allah’s influence into Chad, Niger and Cameroon, he had never been away from his family. Iniabasi had told him that Allah would reward him with his own men and his own territory. Afua would have his own land and be a king in his own region of Nigeria.
Tomorrow, Afua Diambu would embark on a twenty-day boat ride to a country he had never heard of. He was excited, like the day he had tasted his first orange soda. But this was going to be a very different experience. This would involve killing. Afua had become so accustomed to killing that it had become akin to the sin of stealing. In his mind there was little difference between stealing and killing. People had been reduced to nothing more than the bland cassava roots he had pulled from the soil a decade ago. He was so desensitized that he felt no remorse when he took a life. If his mother knew this, she would be very distraught, and she would tell him that killing and stealing was incongruent with Christ’s teachings. But at least she would be lecturing him from her air-conditioned kitchen while cooking a big feast for her extended family.
His mother didn’t know what her son did to put food on the table or what he had done to move his family into better housing. As far as Afua knew, she thought he was working on a farm, but then she also believed that he was still a Christian. She would be happy to know at least one of the two was correct. Diambu still believed in Jesus. Christianity was the only religion he had known during his impressionable childhood years. His mother and the rest of his family still prayed to Jesus. Each time Afua found himself on his prayer mat next to his jihadi brothers, he secretly prayed to Jesus to keep him and his family safe so he could continue to provide for them.
The Muslim stuff that Iniabasi had been cramming down his throat was just gibberish to him. No religion told their followers to kill other people of other religions. It was all a big joke. It was a big farce that allowed Iniabasi’s thugs to do the bad things they did in the name of their God — Allah. Deep down, Afua understood the sinful things he did were wrong. He also knew, as plain as the nose on his face, that he would pay for his sinful actions in Hell. But for the time being, he had successfully moved himself and his family out of their personal “hell” on Earth into an air-conditioned apartment with fully stocked shelves. He had lived in “hell” most his young life, and he was pretty sure he could tough it out in the afterlife.