Providence or Something

A couple of years ago, I had a crisis of conscience over the request from a stranger that I open my house to the family of a Nigerian Christian pastor who were in danger of having to go back to Nigeria. I forget all the details but in the end I helped them out with funding their stay until their eldest daughter's GCSEs were over. 

This week I had a letter from one of the people who was trying to assist Pastor Feri's family: they're in Coventry now, apparently. The area where they come from has been the scene of a dramatic upsurge of communal violence. It's a mess that goes back a long time. The Plateau district of central Nigeria is the home of two groups of people, the Fulani, who are partly itinerant cattle-herders and Muslim, and the Berom, who are sedentary farmers and mainly Christian. There has always been the potential for conflict between these two different communities and ways of life, but more frequent droughts in this part of Africa mean that the strain on its natural resources is increasing: the Fulani herders stray farther in search of pasture, and the Berom farmers encroach on the traditional Fulani transhumance routes. The collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya has poured illegal armaments into west Africa, most particularly into Nigeria, and quarrels that might once have been pursued with knives and clubs are now prosecuted with machine guns.

The family who were nearly billeted on me in 2016 come from a district where a large number of people were killed in June this year - figures range from 86 (the Nigerian police's conservative estimate) to more than 230. They didn't include Pastor Feri's mother, who escaped, but did include a cousin and baby, I'm told.

And so Muslims in the Plateau - and in other places - kill Christians and Christians (possibly in smaller numbers, but totting up head counts is invidious) kill Muslims, but this is not Boko Haram country: the Beroms' religion is a way of identifying them and churches are a place to find them, and if they are attacked it is not because the Fulani are trying to wipe out their religion, but because their quarrel is with the human beings who bear it. Notwithstanding that, the death toll is now arguably higher in this conflict than in the civil war in the north of Nigeria in which Boko Haram is involved. 

It isn't the Islamist campaign of persecution that some people would have you, and me specifically, believe. But motivation is probably a minor matter when you have an enraged cattle-herder pointing an AK-47 at you, and perhaps Pastor Feri and his family would indeed have been hacked to collops without my few quid.