Chad was named for a mistake. In the eighteen-hundreds, European explorers arrived at the marshy banks of a vast body of freshwater in Central Africa. Because locals referred to the area as chad, the Europeans called the wetland Lake Chad, and drew it on maps. But chad simply meant “lake” in a local dialect. To the lake’s east, there was a swath of sparsely populated territory—home to several African kingdoms and more than a hundred and fifty ethnic groups. It was mostly desert. In the early nineteen-hundreds, France conquered the area, called it Chad, and declared it part of French Equatorial Africa.
A few years later, a French Army captain described Lake Chad, which was dotted with hundreds of islands, as an ecological wonder and its inhabitants as “dreaded islanders, whose daring flotillas spread terror” along the mainland. “Their audacious robberies gave them the reputation of being terrible warriors,” he wrote. After his expeditions, the islanders were largely ignored. “There was never a connection between the people who live in the islands and the rest of Chad,” Dimouya Souapebe, a government official in the Lake Region, told me.
Moussa Mainakinay was born in 1949 on Bougourmi, a dusty sliver in the lake’s southern basin. Throughout his childhood and teen-age years, he never went hungry. The cows were full of milk. The islands were thick with vegetation. The lake was so deep that he couldn’t swim to the bottom, and there were so many fish that he could grab them with his hands. The lake had given Mainakinay and his ancestors everything—they drank from it, bathed in it, fished in it, and wove mats and baskets and huts from its reeds.
In the seventies, Mainakinay noticed that the lake was receding. There had always been dramatic fluctuations in water level between the rainy and the dry seasons, but now it was clear that the mainland was encroaching. Floating masses of reeds and water lilies began to clog the remaining waterways, making it impossible to navigate old trading routes between the islands.
Lake Chad is the principal life source of the Sahel, a semiarid band that spans the width of Africa and separates the Sahara, in the north, from the savanna, in the south. Around a hundred million people live there. For the next two decades, the entire region was stricken with drought and famine. The rivers feeding into Lake Chad dried up, and the islanders noticed a permanent decline in the size and the number of fish.
Then a plague of tsetse flies descended on the islands. They feasted on the cows, transmitting a disease that made them sickly and infertile, and unable to produce milk. For the first time in Mainakinay’s life, the islanders didn’t have enough to eat. The local medicine man couldn’t make butter, which he would heat up and pour into people’s nostrils as a remedy for common ailments. Now, when the islanders were sick or malnourished, he wrote Quranic verses in charcoal on wooden boards, rinsed God’s words into a cup of lake water, and gave them the cloudy mixture to drink. By the end of the nineties, the lake, once the size of New Jersey, had shrunk by roughly ninety-five per cent, and much of the northern basin was lost to the desert. People started dying of hunger.
In 2003, when Mainakinay was fifty-four years old, he became the chief of Bougourmi. He was proud of his position, but not that proud; his grandfather had presided over more than four hundred islands—until the government stripped the Mainakinays of their authority as Chiefs of the Canton, a position that they had held for more than two hundred years. The center of power was moved to the town of Bol, on the mainland. The islanders were of the Boudouma tribe; the mainlanders were Kanembou. They didn’t get along.
Other political developments were more disruptive. Colonial administrators had drawn the boundaries of Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger right through tiny circles of huts on the islands. When these nations enforced their borders, the fishermen and cattle herders of Bougourmi, which is in Chad, were cut off from the lake’s biggest market, which is in Baga, on the Nigerian shoreline. In the mid-aughts, hungry and desperate, they turned to foraging in the bush for fruit and nuts. Then they began to run out of fruit and nuts.
“These were our problems before,” Mainakinay told me, in late July, as he sat on the ground inside a reed hut. He wore a white robe over his bony shoulders, and his dark-brown eyes were turning blue at the edges, fading with age. “It was only recently that our real suffering began.”
One night in 2015, Mainakinay saw flames coming from the huts on Médi Kouta, less than a mile away. For the past several years, Boko Haram had sought to establish a caliphate in northeastern Nigeria. Mainakinay had heard of the group on his shortwave radio. Now, after spreading out along the lake, into southern Niger and northern Cameroon, Boko Haram had come to the Chadian islands and begun kidnapping entire villages, replenishing its military ranks and collecting new wives, children, farmers, and fishermen to sustain its campaigns. At dawn, Mainakinay led the people of Bougourmi to a neighboring island to hide. But Boko Haram continued its attacks, and so, for the first time, Mainakinay’s people sought refuge on the mainland, leaving their cattle and belongings behind.
The jihadis encountered little resistance in Lake Chad. Most islands had no more than a couple of hundred inhabitants, and their machetes and fishing tools were no match for Boko Haram’s grenades and assault rifles. When the militants arrived on Médi Kouta, they set fire to the mosque and beheaded a few men; after that, the terrified islanders followed the fighters into wooden boats and paddled west, to Nigeria and Niger. As they moved farther away from the Chadian side of the lake, the captives noticed that some islands were already flying the jihadis’ black flag.
That spring, a few thousand Boudouma fled to the Chadian mainland, near Bol. The United Nations, anticipating military operations in the islands by Chad against Boko Haram, contacted the government. “We met with the minister of defense and the chief of the Army, and urged them to let us know what they’re planning,” Florent Méhaule, the head of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Chad, told me.
Chad is a weak state with a strong military, known for its brutal .
Across the Sahel, millions of people are displaced, and millions more are unable to find work. The desert is expanding; water is becoming more scarce, and so is arable land. According to the U.N., the region’s population, which has doubled in the past few decades, is expected to double again in the next twenty years.
The Sahel is rife with weapons and insurgencies, and some states are beginning to collapse. In recent years, cattle herders and farmers have started killing one another over access to shrinking pastures—the number of deaths exceeds fifteen thousand, rivalling that inflicted by Boko Haram.
Western countries and the United Nations have been trying to stabilize local governments. Since the early aughts, the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on strengthening Sahelian security forces, in a bid to limit the spread of jihadism in the region’s vast, ungoverned spaces. But this strategy fails to take into account the complex cruelties of colonialism and the predatory nature of the regimes that have developed in its place. Across the Sahel, many people experience no benefits from statehood, only neglect and violence. “What we are actually doing is making the predator more capable,” a European security official told me. “And that’s just stunningly shortsighted.”
After France took over Chad, it learned that the territory lacked the riches that colonial powers had discovered elsewhere in West and Central Africa. France sent its least experienced and worst-behaved officers there—often as a kind of punishment—and, in the ensuing decades, French military campaigns disrupted trade routes and local economies, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from famine. The French focussed their attention on the forced production of cotton, in a fertile part of southern Chad that they referred to as “le Tchad Utile”—Useful Chad.
In 1958, French Equatorial Africa split up, and two years later Chad became an independent state. The country’s borders had been determined by colonial agreements, and many Chadians couldn’t communicate with one another—there were at least a hundred and twenty indigenous languages. Some Chadians in remote areas were unaware that their villages now belonged to a state.
A Reporter at Large
December 4, 2017 Issue
Lake Chad: The World’s Most Complex Humanitarian Disaster
Boko Haram, climate change, predatory armies, and extreme hunger are converging on a marginalized population in Central Africa.
By Ben Taub
Video by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for The New Yorker
Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.
Chad was named for a mistake. In the eighteen-hundreds, European explorers arrived at the marshy banks of a vast body of freshwater in Central Africa. Because locals referred to the area as chad, the Europeans called the wetland Lake Chad, and drew it on maps. But chad simply meant “lake” in a local dialect. To the lake’s east, there was a swath of sparsely populated territory—home to several African kingdoms and more than a hundred and fifty ethnic groups. It was mostly desert. In the early nineteen-hundreds, France conquered the area, called it Chad, and declared it part of French Equatorial Africa.
A few years later, a French Army captain described Lake Chad, which was dotted with hundreds of islands, as an ecological wonder and its inhabitants as “dreaded islanders, whose daring flotillas spread terror” along the mainland. “Their audacious robberies gave them the reputation of being terrible warriors,” he wrote. After his expeditions, the islanders were largely ignored. “There was never a connection between the people who live in the islands and the rest of Chad,” Dimouya Souapebe, a government official in the Lake Region, told me.
Moussa Mainakinay was born in 1949 on Bougourmi, a dusty sliver in the lake’s southern basin. Throughout his childhood and teen-age years, he never went hungry. The cows were full of milk. The islands were thick with vegetation. The lake was so deep that he couldn’t swim to the bottom, and there were so many fish that he could grab them with his hands. The lake had given Mainakinay and his ancestors everything—they drank from it, bathed in it, fished in it, and wove mats and baskets and huts from its reeds.
In the seventies, Mainakinay noticed that the lake was receding. There had always been dramatic fluctuations in water level between the rainy and the dry seasons, but now it was clear that the mainland was encroaching. Floating masses of reeds and water lilies began to clog the remaining waterways, making it impossible to navigate old trading routes between the islands.
Lake Chad is the principal life source of the Sahel, a semiarid band that spans the width of Africa and separates the Sahara, in the north, from the savanna, in the south. Around a hundred million people live there. For the next two decades, the entire region was stricken with drought and famine. The rivers feeding into Lake Chad dried up, and the islanders noticed a permanent decline in the size and the number of fish.
“Now that I think about it, he might have been holding a seven.”
Then a plague of tsetse flies descended on the islands. They feasted on the cows, transmitting a disease that made them sickly and infertile, and unable to produce milk. For the first time in Mainakinay’s life, the islanders didn’t have enough to eat. The local medicine man couldn’t make butter, which he would heat up and pour into people’s nostrils as a remedy for common ailments. Now, when the islanders were sick or malnourished, he wrote Quranic verses in charcoal on wooden boards, rinsed God’s words into a cup of lake water, and gave them the cloudy mixture to drink. By the end of the nineties, the lake, once the size of New Jersey, had shrunk by roughly ninety-five per cent, and much of the northern basin was lost to the desert. People started dying of hunger.
In 2003, when Mainakinay was fifty-four years old, he became the chief of Bougourmi. He was proud of his position, but not that proud; his grandfather had presided over more than four hundred islands—until the government stripped the Mainakinays of their authority as Chiefs of the Canton, a position.Around that time, Mohammed Yusuf, a young Salafi preacher in northeastern Nigeria, was delivering sermons about the ruinous legacy of colonialism and the corruption of Nigeria’s élites. After decades of political turbulence and military coups, oil extraction had made Nigeria the richest country in Africa, and yet the percentage of people living in total poverty was growing each year. “The Europeans created the situation in which we find ourselves today,” Yusuf said. It was easy to appeal to the existential grievances of northern Nigeria’s marginalized, unemployed youth. Yusuf told them that the only way forward was to install a caliphate in Nigeria. His followers, who became known as Boko Haram, revived a tradition of jihadism in northern Nigeria that goes back hundreds of years.
In the course of his life, Moussa Mainakinay, the chief of Bougourmi, has witnessed drought, plague, and famine in the islands. “It was only recently that our real suffering began,” he said. In 2015, Boko Haram attacked.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for The New Yorker
On June 11, 2009, police officers at a checkpoint in Nigeria stopped a group of Boko Haram members on their way to a funeral; in the confrontation that followed, officers opened fire and injured seventeen jihadis. The next month, around sixty Boko Haram members attacked a police station. Gun battles erupted in several towns, and Yusuf was arrested. A few hours later, the police executed him and dumped his body outside the station. A video of the mutilated corpse, still in handcuffs, went viral. Violence exploded all over northern Nigeria: at least seven hundred people were killed in the first week. Yusuf’s deputy, Abubakar Shekau, became the leader of Boko Haram.
Shekau dispatched some of his followers to train with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. When they returned, the group detonated car bombs in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Propaganda videos show Shekau double-fisting Kalashnikovs and screaming incoherently as he fires bullets into the sky. In 2012, after leading a rampage in the Nigerian city of Kano, he said, “I enjoy killing anyone whom God commands me to kill, the way I enjoy killing chickens and rams.” Shekau’s fighters terrorized remote villages, tossing grenades into huts and burning down mosques. They raped women, slaughtered men, and kidnapped children, whom they forced to carry out suicide bombings. Shekau pledged his group’s allegiance to the Islamic State, but his battlefield tactics were so depraved that isis eventually disowned him. Young men who joined Boko Haram were sent back to their villages to recruit their families. As a teen-age fighter explained to me, “If your family doesn’t come, you have to kill them, because they have chosen to be infidels.”
The Nigerian security forces responded with a series of massacres that drove villagers into the insurgency. One day in 2013, after Boko Haram killed a Nigerian soldier near Baga, on the muddy western shores of Lake Chad, government troops stormed into the town, lit thatched huts on fire, and shot villagers as they tried to escape. Some villagers tried to swim to the islands and drowned in the lake. Roughly two hundred people are thought to have died, and more than two thousand structures were burned.
On January 3, 2015, Boko Haram returned to Baga and attacked a local military base. The soldiers shed their uniforms and fled into the bush, leaving behind weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. During the next four days, Boko Haram slaughtered civilians in Baga and the surrounding villages. “It was impossible to know how many people they killed,” a survivor told me. “I just saw bodies in the streets. Everyone was running.” Thousands of people made for the islands of Lake Chad. Boko Haram followed them.
Many islanders were open to Boko Haram. The Boudouma used Nigerian currency, and for decades those who could afford to had been sending their children to study with Quranic tutors in northern Nigeria. A few years ago.
It seems likely that, even if Boko Haram is defeated, the rationales for insurgent violence will broaden beyond religion. I asked the European security official whether he thought that, in the future, there will be terrorist groups in the Sahel that carry out attacks in the name of equality instead of jihad. He smiled, and said, “If you examine the lacquer on a wooden table—I think your question is, how thin is that lacquer?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s pretty thin.” ♦