America Whips Itself into Hysteria over 200 Girls Held by Muslims While Ignoring 700,000 Child-Slaves Kept by Corrupt Nigerian Officials & Businessmen

Girl Slaves in Christian South Nigeria

I'm sure you've all met the kind of person who divorces one abusive spouse only to marry another one within less than a year. Well, some countries are like that too.  They keep getting themselves sucked into meaningless, costly, unwinnable wars.  These are the conflicts that take the lives of our sons and daughters, for which there is no honor, no integrity, no victory, just year after year of piddling around with corrupt dictators, who use our tax dollars for toilet paper. And those of our children who do return, end up homeless on big city streets, trembling from nightmares that blanket their days.  

These war-tertainment fiascos  always start with a real crisis.  But within days the jingoism takes over, overwhelms good sense, and corporate media profits skyrocket as the news channels restrict information to whatever we might want to hear rather than what is actually going on.     

The news cameras have already started to roll in Nigeria.  After all, what could be more reprehensible and more a call to action than  the abduction of 200 young Christian girls by a diabolical group of Muslim terrorists, who are threatening to sell them into sex slavery?


As a mother, this situation is horrifying and it makes me heartsick.  But without leaving the borders of Nigeria, I see an even more horrifying story that is not being covered by the media.  Maybe this is because the theme is not one of evil Muslims deflowering Christian virgins. But it is a nightmare of even more immense proportions.

Child-Slaves Made to Forget their Families

Seven hundred thousand six and seven year olds have been abducted from impoverished Nigerian families.  They have been taken across the border to neighboring countries, where they are forced to spend their days chopping stones. It breaks them in, that is, makes them more docile. They are returned to Nigeria around the age of thirteen.  This time span is also necessary so that the children will no longer remember who they are and where they came from.  They are then sold to wealthy households in the Christian south of Nigeria.  While these children are turned into domestic workers, many of the girls are also molested by the males in the household.

Wait?  What?  Surely, this cannot be true.  Otherwise we would have heard about it.  Well, yes if you dug deep enough into United Nations reports. And actually there is a direct connection between this child slavery and what has happened to the school girls abducted by Boko Haram.

Firstly, child abduction and trafficking is not a news story in Nigeria. What makes this one unique is the fact that these are school girls, who have been abducted by Muslim terrorists.  Westerners will probably not understand the class aspect.  Christian girls who are taking school exams are from the privileged classes by Nigerian standards. They are not supposed to be enslaved.  They are supposed to go to college, become professional women, marry well, have middle class households and go to traffickers for nannies and household help.



Civil War?

The larger context of this abduction is the fact that Nigeria is sliding into a civil war.  And America needs to understand what is at stake rather than having the social media yelling about the Nigerian version of Taliban, and Muslim sexism, protecting Christian virgins and all the other rally cries we use to take leave of our rational senses when we're about to stumble into quick sand.  Now, why is this conflict occurring at a time when Nigeria has just been named the richest country in Africa, on account of its oil wealth.  The answer is actually quite simple.  The government in the Christian south has succeeded in impoverishing the Islamic north of the country.  There is no redistribution of the oil wealth. The level of corruption is staggering.  The tacit agreement that had kept the country together for years was one in which Muslims and Christians alternated as president of the country.  When Goodluck Jonathan took the presidency, he disavowed that agreement.   What do you think happens when you have a nation with immense oil wealth, a highly corrupt Christian government and business sector and a growing number of Muslim youth in the north with no jobs, no money, no prospect of jobs or money, no future, no way to marry because they don't have jobs or money.  But they do have growing anger.  Boko Haram didn't pop out of no where.  It took advantage of a suppurating wound on the Nigerian landscape, which was self-induced.

So, if there is something President Obama can do to help rescue these young girls, I would be elated. As for the U.S. launching another one of its interminable wars, I hardly see that the moral position of the Christian, child-slave holding Nigerian government is any better than that of the Muslim, school-girl abducting, slavery-threatening Boko Haram.