The Stolen Daughters of Chibok

Description

In the middle of the night of April 14 to 15, 2014, terrorists abducted 276 girls from their secondary school’s dormitory in the town of Chibok, Northeast Nigeria. Over the following days, fifty-seven girls managed to escape. For two years, 219 girls remained missing.

During the last four months of 2015, in the heat of the worst of the Boko Haram insurgency, Aisha Muhammed-Oyebode, the CEO of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation (MMF) embarked on a project to interview, photograph, and document the accounts of the parents of each of the missing girls. The MMF’s team managed to meet the relatives of 210 of them.

In the intervening years, 107 girls have made it home: four by Nigerian military/paramilitary intervention, and 103 by negotiated release. At the time of going to press 112 girls remain unaccounted for.

The Stolen Daughters of Chibok is a collection of written and pictorial narratives from the families of these stolen girls. It features the photography of awardwinner photographer Akintunde Akinleye. Essays and analyses from acclaimed experts append these personal histories to create a tribute to the girls, capturing their lives before the abduction and presenting the trauma of a community desperately learning to cope.