It’s sad how these Chibok Girls emerge one after the other. Now another has been reported found with a six-month old baby. When will this end. Will we continue to see them emerge after years of dehumanisation? Sometimes I wonder how the parents feel. Most times when some of them are found, there are parents who wish their daughters are among. This is only natural. Once, they had daughters who probably used to help their mothers cook in the kitchen, run errands and go to school. Now they are no longer there. God forbid, but what if years from now they keep showing up? Amid the talk by some that these girls are not the actual Chibok Girls, they keep coming up in the news. The ones that have been found are already being re-habilitated. How long will it take for those that come later to recover? Some of them have even developed emotional attachment to their captors. Will you blame them? A group abducts you and a man is forced on you as a husband and for many months he sleeps with you and acts as a husband will in those circumstances.
No one knows how much maltreatment the girls go through before they submit, but the bottom line is they can hardly survive without a certain level of submission. Then suddenly they are free and are supposed to re-adjust to living a normal life. But how normal can that be? There’s the evidence of a baby to haunt them all their lives. In the child’s eyes is the memory of what their ‘husbands’ looked like. Husbands that are perhaps long dead or still at large waging war against the innocent. May God help the Chibok Girls.
Yakubu Wasanmaza, Kaduna State
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