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Understanding Boko Haram

2015-02-10 · explainer · John · 6:17 · watch on YouTube

Topic: World affairs · mode: News analysis · tags: timely hook, heavy topic

John argues that Boko Haram grew out of a northern Nigeria left impoverished, uneducated and poorly governed by resource allocation and colonial legacies rather than by religion, and that its atrocities must be known and not go unnoticed.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Greeting; how Islam spread to northern Nigeria by trade, Christianity in the south, British indirect rule and the north-south education and oil gap

  • ★★ John says that, contrary to the idea that Islam spread mainly by conquest, in many places including sub-Saharan Africa it spread primarily through trade. — 00:00:07
  • ★★ John says leaders in what is now northern Nigeria began converting to Islam around 1100 while trading with North African Berbers; by the 18th century most people in the north and southwest were Muslim. — 00:00:18
  • ★★ John says the Muslim empires never reached the rest of southern Nigeria; there, many people became Christians when European missionaries arrived in the 19th century. — 00:00:31
  • ★★ John says the British colonised what is now Nigeria for much of the 20th century, ruling the north indirectly through local emirs who pledged allegiance and paid them part of their money. — 00:00:43 · United Kingdom
  • ★★★ John says indirect rule left the north with much less Western-style education than the directly ruled south, so the south got most doctors, lawyers and bureaucrats; also, all the oil is in the south. — 00:00:57 · education
  • ★★ John cautions that this is oversimplified: Nigeria has hundreds of languages and ethnic groups and mixed religious communities, so it is not simply north versus south, though the gap is big. — 00:01:13

00:01:29 — Colonial borders, 1960 independence without a unified nation (Bloom's definition in Ulysses), coups and the Biafran civil war

  • ★★★ John calls it one of colonisation's many catastrophes that it drew borders convenient to Europeans but not to the people who actually lived there. — 00:01:29
  • ★★ John says Nigeria won independence in 1960, which he calls awesome, but it had never been a unified political entity. — 00:01:39
  • ★★ Citing Leopold Bloom's definition of a nation in Joyce's Ulysses, John says 1960 Nigeria was instead 'different people living in the same place', which led to coups and civil war. — 00:01:45
  • ★★★ John says the 1967 civil war began when parts of southern Nigeria seceded as the Republic of Biafra; it lasted two and a half years, killed more than a million, and ended with Nigeria reunited. — 00:02:00

00:02:21 — Nigeria today: strong economy but polio, low life expectancy, poor schooling and rising poverty in the north; religion is not the problem, resource allocation and colonial legacies are

  • ★★ John says Nigeria today is split almost evenly between Christians and Muslims. — 00:02:23
  • ★★ John says Nigeria has one of the world's fastest-growing economies and very little national debt, and is the largest economy in Africa and the 20th largest in the world. — 00:02:25
  • ★★ John says Nigeria's film industry generates 10 billion dollars in sales a year. — 00:02:32
  • ★★★ John says Nigeria is Africa's last nation with polio, found only in the north, and that its life expectancy of 52 is lower than Somalia's, which he says has no government. — 00:02:35
    • check: doesn't even have a government — doubtful
  • ★★★ John says that in much of northern Nigeria fewer than half of children attend elementary school, and gives a female (il)literacy figure of over 50% (the two sources disagree on the word). — 00:02:46 · education
    • a number in question (doubtful): "over 50%" — check against the recording
  • ★★★ John says that while Nigeria's overall economy grows over 8% a year, absolute poverty in the north is actually increasing. — 00:02:50 · extreme poverty
  • ★★★ John says it is easy to call religion the problem, but many Muslims live in Nigeria's southwest, where female literacy is over 90% and the economy is growing well. — 00:02:59
  • ★★★ John says the problem is partly resource allocation, since the export economy depends on petroleum found almost only in the south, and partly colonial legacies and indirect rule that weakened federal governance from education to the army. — 00:03:09

00:03:24 — Boko Haram: origins under Mohammed Yusuf, militarisation after his 2009 execution, attacks 2011-2014

  • ★★★ John says Boko Haram emerged in 2002 in a northern Nigeria that was disproportionately impoverished, uneducated and poorly governed. — 00:03:24

  • ★★ John says the words Boko Haram literally mean 'Western education is forbidden'. — 00:03:32

    “Boko Haram literally mean "western education is forbidden"”

  • ★★ John says founder Mohammed Yusuf had a Western-style education and spoke English, yet believed the earth is flat and that rain is not caused by evaporation. — 00:03:37

  • ★★ John says that from 2002 Yusuf recruited unemployed young people, railing against rampant official corruption and calling for an Islamist state. — 00:03:48
  • ★★★ John says Boko Haram became a military organisation only after Yusuf was arrested and executed in 2009; over a thousand people were killed in the riots that followed. — 00:03:59
  • ★★ John says Boko Haram claims to want to restore righteousness and justice to Nigeria but funds itself mainly through drug trafficking and bank robbery. — 00:04:13
  • ★★★ John says Boko Haram carried out Nigeria's first suicide bombing in 2011, killed 41 people at churches that Christmas, and killed at least 792 people in 2012. — 00:04:22
  • ★★★ John says that in 2013 Boko Haram murdered nine women distributing polio vaccines and 54 mostly Muslim college students asleep in their dorms. — 00:04:35
  • ★★★ John says Boko Haram drew worldwide attention in 2014 by kidnapping 276 girls from their classrooms. — 00:04:45

00:04:52 — Escalation: the Baga massacre, control of the northeast, extreme Sharia, attacks in Niger, Chad and Cameroon, army size

  • ★★★ John says attacks have since worsened: on January 3 this year (2015) Boko Haram seized Baga, burned it to the ground and murdered as many as 2,000 people. — 00:04:52
  • ★★★ John says Boko Haram now controls Nigeria's northeastern corner under a Sharia regime more extreme than anything seen in sub-Saharan Africa, 'like too extreme for al-Qaeda'. — 00:05:00
  • ★★ John says Boko Haram regularly massacres people who won't fight for it and has begun attacks in Niger, Chad and Cameroon. — 00:05:12
  • ★★ John says Boko Haram still has an army of between seven and ten thousand. — 00:05:18

00:05:21 — Why we need to know about Boko Haram; 99.9% of Nigerians oppose it; two Muslim volunteers who stopped a bomber; sign-off

  • ★★★ John says it is hard to understand the evil of an army that conscripts people, uses child soldiers and forces preteen girls to be suicide bombers, but while he may not need to understand it, he does need to know about it. (hedged) — 00:05:26
  • ★★★ John says not knowing is problematic: a great tragedy is that Boko Haram grew for ten years because Nigeria's government and the world community didn't notice how terrible it was. — 00:05:39
  • ★★★ John says it is really important to learn about Boko Haram and not let its atrocities go unnoticed. (hedged) — 00:05:53
  • ★★★ John says it is also important to understand that literally 99.9% of Nigerians do not support Boko Haram. — 00:05:56
  • ★★★ John says that a few days ago two Muslim volunteers in a northern town gave their lives to stop a Boko Haram suicide bomber from entering a market where she would have killed hundreds. — 00:06:04

In the description and comments

  • ★ video description: In the description John gives the 'standard reminder' that educational videos are allowed to be over four minutes long. — video description · Four-minute rule · also in: The Woman Who Invented Stuffed Animals
  • ★★ John offers links for further reading: a timeline of Boko Haram's attacks and a detailed introduction to the group, an overview of how Islam came to sub-Saharan Africa, and more on the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War. — video description · Wikipedia

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Boko Haram · colonialism · indirect rule · Nigeria

Also: People: Mohammed Yusuf

Works: Ulysses

Organizations: al-Qaeda · Federal Government of Nigeria

Groups: Berbers

Concepts: child soldier · Christianity · education · extreme poverty · flat Earth · Islam · Islamism · life expectancy · literacy · nation · petroleum · polio · political corruption · religion · Sharia · suicide attack

Places: Africa · Baga · Biafra · Cameroon · Chad · Niger · Somalia · Sub-Saharan Africa · United Kingdom

Events: 2015 Baga massacre · Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping · Nigerian Civil War

Characters: Leopold Bloom

Only in the description or credits: Four-minute rule · James Joyce · terrorism

Also centred on colonialism: SOMALI PIRATES! France Penetrates Chad! · Why is Haiti Poor? · The 51st State · Why Are Poor Countries Poor?

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