The Truth Resists Simplicity*

Tonight's post is going to be a more serious one, but I hope you'll read anyways.

I have been watching a lot of West Wing and listening to an astounding amount of NPR both in my car and at home. That combination is bound to put me in a more reflective and somber mind frame. And there has been a lot to reflect about this week. There always seems to be. This week stories on everything from the White House restricting militarized gear for local police to concern over the Rohingya refugees driven to the sea to escape Myanmar/Burma grabbed the headlines. Not to mention the fall of Ramadi in Iraq to the Islamic State. All of these stories are worthy of a great deal of consideration and attention, but the story that has captured my attention for the week is the ongoing saga of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

One of the reasons I am so keen on this story is that my knowledge of the African continent is woefully lacking. I can tell you a few things about Kenya. I could tell you Mt. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania. I even kept pace with stories out of Darfur in the Sudan and about Al-Shabaab in Somalia, but always in a rather distant - not quite disinterested, but quite disengaged way. I have come to realize that it is hard for me to engage with African political affairs. It is a sentiment I imagine many citizens of the US suffer as well. We don't engage well because we weren't taught to. Africa isn't high on the list of priorities in public school curriculum. We talk about apartheid in South Africa. We talk about the pharaohs and Cleopatra in Egypt. We may even talk about Rwanda or Darfur in high school (though I certainly don't remember spending any significant amount of time on it). I remember one very zealous high school teacher of mine had us memorize the map of Africa (a few years later I had a college professor who assigned the same thing), but I'll admit to not remembering much of it now. And that's it. We have no context for our engagement.

I think it is easier for us to engage with something we know at least the basics of or something that has an immediate impact on our own lives. It seems likely that people will educate themselves on the Middle East, because it's on the news all the time. Our country has more strategic interest in that region - therefore more coverage of the situation and history of the area. People are more likely to put their energies there (and let's be honest, most people in this country aren't even doing that much). Back in 2006 CNN released findings from a report that showed almost 2/3 (more than 65%) couldn't point to Iraq on a world map. We had been actively involved in a war in that country for 3 years at that point! Though that was perhaps an unsurprisingly revelation when viewed alongside the fact that a whopping 33% of respondents couldn't locate Louisiana on a map (this was 6 months after Katrina) and Louisiana has a pretty distinctive shape! Not to mention it's in the country the respondents actually live in. I wonder how many of them could place Ramadi on a map (not sure I could).

So maybe we even have difficulty engaging with anything that isn't directly outside of ourselves. Our family, our friends, our neighborhood, our town, maybe our state. I don't want to wag a finger and say "for shame" to people that feel that way, because it's a tempting feeling. To disengage and look out for ourselves. It's easier and (after listening to hours of NPR I can tell you) a hell of a lot less depressing. BUT (and here's where I do a bit of finger wagging) the United States is a superpower. The biggest in the world at the moment. We talk a lot in this country (or at least our politicians and commentators certainly do) about having a moral imperative to intercede abroad to uphold democracy and freedom. If we are going to do that we have to have an informed electorate capable of evaluating candidates effectively to speak for us. So that means the difficult process of engagement. For me, that also means confronting the great Vlogbrother's maxim that "the truth resists simplicity". Nowhere is that more apparent than in history, politics, and religion - three things that intersect splendidly in the case of Boko Haram.

So I'm going to take a swing at engagement myself today and see if I can take some of you along for the ride. Let's delve into Boko Haram a bit. Today I'm just going to explain what Boko Haram claims to be and what it grew out of. But I urge you to do your own searching because there are layers upon layers of nuance and minutiae involved in this (as in every) news story.

Let's start off simple -
What is Boko Haram?
Founded in 2002 Boko Haram is a Muslim terrorist organization based out of Nigeria (Maiduguri to be precise in the northeast of Nigeria). According to this BBC article "[t]he group's official name is Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means 'People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad.'" For my sake I'm going to refer to them by their Hausa name Boko Haram, which translated means "Western education forbidden" - Boko meaning western education and haram meaning forbidden.

What Do They Want?
What they wanted in the beginning was to oppose western education in northern Nigeria. What they want now is to overthrow the Nigerian government and create a Muslim caliphate in Nigeria. If that sounds familiar then you are clearly also listening to a lot of other extremist Muslim terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. It's hardly a new agenda.

Which brings us to... Are They Affiliated with Other Terrorist Organizations?
Yes. They have been affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the past, but since the rise of ISIS they have thrown in their cap with the ultra-violent extremist group and received recognition from that group.

But Who Exactly Are Boko Haram?
The founder of the group is Mohammed Yusuf, a Muslim cleric from Yobe State in northeastern Nigeria. He was killed in 2009 by Nigerian security forces after increased violence instigated by Boko Haram in Maiduguri. Though most thought Boko Haram finished after Yusuf's death, the group rallied under a new leader, Abubakar Shekau. Boko Haram recruits mainly from the Kanuri, an African ethnic group living in modern day Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. They are mainly Muslim. Many engage in the tradition of facial scarring. Their accent is also quite distinctive and they are an easily recognizable ethnic group within the country.

Where Did Boko Haram Come From?
So much for easy questions. This one is complicated and I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but for me this group can trace its beginnings to 1903 when the Sokoto caliphate fell to the British. Colonization leaves a long shadow and carving up the caliphate and imposing western education did not endear the British conquerors to their conquered. Like other extremist groups poverty also plays a large role in discontent in the region and therefore the formation of the group. It's no coincidence that some of the poorest areas of Nigeria are in the north, where Boko Haram makes its home. Young, unemployed, desperate men make for dangerous enemies. Between poverty and a historical dislike of the west you have some pretty good ingredients for anti-western extremism.

So Where Does the Complexity Come In?
The complexity is in the history in this case. There are hundreds, even thousands of years of history behind this area and the discontent is not new. And the west (and western-backed governments) clearly haven't been able to fix the problems for the region. At least at the group's core the dissatisfaction and mistrust with and of the west may very well be justified. As I said, colonization casts a long shadow. It is easy to dismiss this (and indeed all extremist groups) as "bad people" intent of causing death and chaos to upset the "good people" and the "good government", but nothing is ever that simple.
I won't argue that the people of Boko Haram aren't bad people. They're kidnapping school girls and raping them. They're forcing women to become child brides and adhere to laws they don't want (and shouldn't be forced) to follow. But they aren't mustache twirling villains out of Bond. Perhaps most importantly, they probably don't see themselves as the evil villains of the piece. They are just as convinced that we are the bad guys as we are convinced of the opposite. Their concerns aren't being honestly assessed and addressed (this is at least partly the fault of Boko Haram for pushing their agenda the way they do). But the group will never truly go away until the root of the problem is addressed. If we can't at least try to see it their way we are doomed to repeat this pattern again and again. There is a whole other side to this parallel - "the good guys". The Nigerian government is like any government, some people we would call good, some we would call corrupt and a whole lot in between.
The danger is to believe it is a simple conflict with a simple solution and a simple cause. History runs deep and memories last as long as we can hold our anger. And when you're hungry, poor, and see no promise of change for you or your children's future anger isn't hard to hold onto.



I know this a lot of information. And I know it's not easy to engage with it. There are a million "important" news stories out there. No one can really know them all. I can't tell you much about what's going with drug trafficking in Venezuela right now. Or with whatever our Congress is messing about with on the Hill. I focused on Boko Haram this week. There is a trade-off to be made. We can't do it all. But we can do something. We can make a commitment to knowing the world we live in. We can vow to look at that world with sympathy and compassion. We can try to see other countries as they see themselves, instead of imposing our culture and our norms on them.

The truth resists simplicity. But our minds love it. We have to look at the world critically, while keeping our minds open to the truth. That elusive ideal that can never quite be obtained.

Well Raven, I think that's all I've got in me for the night. I look forward to your update tomorrow (or I guess later today).



*Thanks to John Green for this gem of wisdom. You always keep me thinking.