For ten years, Boko Haram, a Salafi-jihadist movement and terrorist organisation has brought terror and violence to a region sagging under the weight of poverty, hunger and overlapping climate emergencies. In the Lake Chad Basin, a geographical region home to 30 million people and spans seven countries, the group - led by Abubakar Shekau - has wrought havoc on communities across the region, and latched itself onto the interwoven crises affecting men, women and children in Niger, Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon.

Boko Haram, and its splinter group Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP), have killed between 30,000 - 70,000 men, women and children utilising suicide bombs, kidnap, displacement, simmering ethnic tensions and scorched earth policies to bring disorder and chaos to hundreds of thousands of people.

Shekau’s soldiers, supported by Abu Musab al-Barnawi’s ISWAP, have outlasted their parent organisations such as Islamic State and Al-Qa’ida in terms of relevance, brutality and successfully holding onto territories it has captured. After a decade, the insurgency has deepened its roots and exploited one of the largest and least covered humanitarian crises in the world; the Lake Chad Crisis.

The statistics emanating from the Lake Chad Crisis are alarming. Fifty per cent of Chad’s population is in urgent need of humanitarian support. [1] The war with Boko Haram in the northeast of Nigeria has caused devastation leaving 7.1 million people needing assistance and left 1.8 million internally displaced. [2] It is estimated that 823,000 people live in areas inaccessible to international humanitarian organisations leaving parts of Borno State in a state of famine in February 2017. [3] Clashes between farmers and herders have killed thousands of people, ‘claiming far more lives than the Boko Haram insurgency’ with Amnesty International report, The Harvest of Death, noting that 3,641 people killed between January 2016 and October 2018, 57 per cent of them in 2018 alone. [4]

In northern Cameroon, malnutrition and hunger are rife. The Cameroonian government has been supporting the regional counter-insurgency effort to uproot Boko Haram and ISWAP yet it has been unable to quash unrest at home. In the English-speaking regions in the west of Cameroon, a conflict between the French-speaking government in Yaoundé and the separatist Anglophone Ambazonia Defence Forces has displaced half a million people. Villages have been incinerated, extra-judicial killings have been widespread and rape has been used as a weapon of war. [5] One refugee went as far as to describe the crackdown of President Paul Biya’s government as a “genocide”.

In Niger, Boko Haram’s operations in the Diffa region continues to deteriorate. In April 2019, a further 87,000 people were displaced by increased inter-communal and jihadist violence in Mali, a 450% increase in the number of families displaced across the country since 2018. [6] The conflicts in Mali have increased pressure on Niger’s ability to cope with the escalating violence in northern Mali and is destabilising the country’s south-western regions. 5 million people across four countries are facing the threat of famine due to food shortages. [7]

To compound the regional crisis, Lake Chad and the Sahel region are on the front-lines of the climate emergency. As with the major floods which put East Africa underwater in November, flash floods in 2018 killed over 200 people in Nigeria. Nearly 10,000 people living in displacement camps in Maiduguri were impacted by floods in August and September 2019. Drought has also led to a surge in resource scarcity, exacerbating conflict between farmers and herders and over several decades has caused Lake Chad, the source of life in the Sahel region, to all but disappear.

With crops and prized assets such as cattle dying or weakening and water scarcity rife, thousands are being forced to migrate in search of income in North Africa and Europe. The gateway to Europe for many thousands of migrants from the Sahel is Libya, whose response to the migration crisis has sparked on-mass trafficking and human rights violations.

It is in this context of inter-communal conflict, refugees, corruption, mass migration and climate catastrophe that Boko Haram and ISWAP have risen to prominence and allowed the Lake Chad region to become an incubator for the global ideology of militant Salafi-jihadism.

While Boko Haram and ISWAP fill the vacuum left by the Lake Chad Crisis with its military presence, the rise of their ideology is steeped in West Africa’s medieval history which runs through the colonial era and to the spread of militant Salafi-jihadism and puritanical Wahhabi ideology from the Arabian peninsula and South Asia for several hundred years.

The ideological roots of Salafism in Lake Chad are complex. Islam’s introduction to West Africa came through commerce as merchant and trading convoys from North Africa. [8] In West Africa, the young religion was slowly spread across the Sahel region, a broad band of land stretching from east to west of the continent, as trade fuelled the exchange of ideas in the West African kingdoms. Further south, Islam had begun to spread into Nigeria in the 15th century and the rulers of Hausaland eventually converted and empires in Mali and Ghana eventually took up the faith.

Islam reached the Lake Chad region in the 9th century when traders reached one of the key trading hubs in West Africa, the Kingdom of Kanem. A vast empire reaching southern Libya and extending to Niger in the west, the nomadic Tebu-speaking Kanembu had united under King Sef to form a city-state under the Dugawa dynasty. The capital of Nijimi was a key place to do business for Arab and Berber traders and for imams and scholars to introduce Islamic culture and administrative styles to the Kanem Empire.

Controlling and protecting these economic routes brought wealth and power to the Kanembu and exposed its courts to the traditions of Islam. Under the Duguwa and Sefuwa dynasties which ruled the empire, particularly the latter, ‘radical changes were introduced…including the Islamisation of court and state policies’ as ‘(Islam) offered the Sayfawa rulers the advantage of new ideas from Arabia and the Mediterranean world, as well as literacy in administration.’ [9] By the 11th century, the king was Muslim, and Kanem had become an Islamic State under King Umme, who adopted the nom de guerre, Ibn ʿAbd al-Jalīl.

The initial integration of Islamic society and values with the pagan practices used by locals was slow. ‘Life was a fearful and complicated web of taboos and ritual…and spirits called boruruka. What people believed in this part of the world before the coming of Islam would have been a cult-like belief, centred around a secretive priesthood who revered animal totems.’ [10] (Walker, 8-9) Islam, for a time, was an elite religion for the aristocracy, and its spread amongst the broader population was resisted. Repressive methods of Islamisation were not utilised by the aristocracy to impose the Islamic practice, rather the religion fused with pagan practices which were ‘Islamically acceptable’. [11] (Walker, 11) by Islamic journeymen known as mallams.

The process had to be gradual, as it could lead to the death or rejection of the mallam attempting to change customs too quickly (not dissimilar from Christian priests spreading the word of God in the New World) in rural, localised environments around Chad. The best expression of the development of Islamic and local practices came through Sufism. As Walker notes in Eat The Heart of the Infidel, the spiritual elements of paganism such as boruruka were similar to the concepts of spiritual wisdom and the spirit soul of Sufism, a branch of the Islamic faith. [12] (Walker, 11)

In Njimi under kings such as Umme and Dunama Dabbalemi, diplomatic ties with Sultanic Empires in North Africa strengthened the ability of the elite to conduct pilgrimages to Mecca. Dabbalemi and the Kanembu declared a holy war, jihad, during the period against pagan tribes such as Mune, Tubu and Bulala, a disaster which sparked widespread revolt across the empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. The war with the Bulala forced the Sayfuwa Dynasty to relocate to Bornu on the western edge of Lake Chad where a new capital was created: Birni Ngazargamu.

The fortress city in Niger, the new seat of the weakened Kanem Empire endured with Njimi being recaptured by the Kanembu (who had by this point become the Kanuri after intermarriages between Kanembu and Bornu). The wars with the pagan tribes, which had drastically weakened the empire, acted as a warning to the Kanembu kings that to wage jihad to convert its population was an act of folly for the political stability of the dynasty.

Reform, and balancing paganism with Islamic traditions, were key to maintaining the Kanuri’s grip on power, and under King Idris Alwma, several legal and administrative reforms based on Islamic law (sharia) revolutionised the region. [13] ‘He sponsored the construction of numerous mosques and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he arranged for the establishment of a hostel to be used by pilgrims from his empire.’ [14] The trade routes were maintained and expanded, and the empire held clout on trade to North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahara becoming a key for the exchange of natron (sodium carbonate), cotton, kola nuts, ivory, ostrich feathers, perfume, wax, hides and slaves and brought in imports such as salt, horses, silks, glass, muskets, and copper. [15]

King Alwma remade the Lake Chad region and empire which occupied it as the protector and facilitator of trade in the 16th and 17th century. Alwma’s death hastened the eventual decline and fall of the empire, as new ideas began to grip the region. The collapse of the Kanem Empire was catalysed by an individual who remains relevant to Salafism in the region to this day: Othman Dan Fodiyo.

As the medieval history of Lake Chad demonstrates, the region is steeped in Islamic tradition, however, in the early modern period radicalism and revolutionary ideas began to take hold in the Islamic faith in the 19th century. These ideas, including the rise of Wahabbism and Salafism in Arabia, were to ripple across the Islamic World into West Africa. The creation of the Saudi states, most importantly by Muhammed ibn Sa’ud and his ally, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, ‘inspired the renewal and moral reform of Islamic practices’ in Arabia’ who were dismayed by the new ways in which Islam was being practised. [16]

Both men, in the context of the divided Arabian peninsula where the future Saudi Arabian state would take root, saw these ‘practices as threatening both the authenticity and purity of Arabian Islam.’ [17] Vying for religious and political power, the alliance between Wahhab and Sa’ud ‘transformed the political landscape of global Islam’ with Wahhab’s family, Al ash-Shaykh, and the al-Sa’uds pact distributing societal and political responsibilities between them. [18] ‘The rise and fall of the first two Saudi states provided important contexts for the early politicisation of several concepts in Salafi thought.’ [19]

Salafi thought is broad and contentious, and like other faiths and varients of Islam (Sufism, Sunni, Shia, and Alawite) it is not monolithic. As the Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, Shiraz Maher, summarises in Salafi-Jihadism, The History of an Idea, Salafism is as an idea of redemption:

Salafism is a philosophy that believes in progression through regression. The perfect life is realised only by reviving the Islam of its first three generations. The message is a revivalist one, seeking to bring Muslims back to what is regarded as the “authentic” and “pure” Islam. Salafism is a redemptive philosophy based around an idealised version of Islam. [20]

There are a variety of expressions of Salafism, many (and most of them) non-violent, and peaceful but its idea as a socio-religious movement was profound. In this context, the Lake Chad region experienced its religious upheaval and was partly reshaped by the events in the Gulf and the rise of the Saudi states. Othman Dan Fodiyo - who would create the Sokoto Caliphate and revive jihad in the Lake Chad region - was born, and lived, during the rise and fall of the first Saudi state (1744 - 1818).

The British and French Empires and the Scramble for Africa were beginning. In the 19th century, in an ominous foreshadowing of today’s events in the United States and Western Europe, the dervishes (the terminology applied for Sufis) had ‘caught hold of the late-19th century British imagination’ as the concept of jihadism and the Global War on Terror has both terrified, challenged and fascinated the 21st. Victorian era jihadists in Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan had baffled writers, and generals, of the time, who struggled to ‘make sense of why such primitive forces were able to defeat modern, trained and well-equipped armies and to control such extensive territory…who sprang, stabbed and shot their way across the pages of newspapers, novels and magazines.’

This was no exception in north-east Nigeria and the wider Lake Chad region to both French and British soldiers arriving in a region where Islam was ingrained in the local culture and the aristocracies who contested and dominated West Africa. The campaigns bore little fruit for the French colonialists and brought death and dislocation. According to French historian Jean-Louis Triaud, ‘disruption to economic life brought about by the French conquest caused more deaths than the fighting…livestock was largely decimated and cultivation interrupted…traditional trade circuits were progressively dislocated.’

Much of French-ruled Chad lacked the resources that fuelled a modern European empire, and the new province added to France’s territories was neglected and became an outpost where the ‘least experienced and worst-behaved officers’ were sent to govern in one of the least important colonies of French Equatorial Africa. French power was concentrated in the south where the colonists were able to produce cotton with forced labour in ‘Useful Chad’. With a lack of resources, development and modernisation were neglected, and the region was decentralised. Cotton, and maintaining ‘a semblance of law and order’ to extract it, was the priority for colonists, and both were scarce to find.

The conquest of Chad took over a decade to repress the rebellions in the province and even in the south where French priorities lay, parts remained ungovernable. A French captain on a military expedition described the vast lake of Chad and its islands as a terrible paradise writing that the “…dreaded islanders…spread terror. Their audacious robberies gave them the reputation of being terrible warriors.” In a little-understood land whose local cultures and customs the deployment of the most brutal and ill-disciplined officers courted disaster as ‘French military campaigns disrupted trade routes and local economies contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from famine.’

Tit-for-tat atrocities and brutality accompanied France’s man-made famines. French counter-insurgency campaigns went from house-to-house and many villages and towns were wiped off the face of the map. The failure of the authorities to keep accurate records meant the death toll in the murderous and protracted war in the Chad region will remain unknown. In northeastern Nigeria, Sir Fredrick Lugard encountered similar difficulties and courted controversy and scandal in his ‘civilising’ mission in West Africa. Lugard was aware of France’s military struggles further north, and acutely aware of Britain’s ongoing struggle with ‘The Mahdi’.

The Mahdi was an expected spiritual and temporal ruler destined to establish a reign of righteousness throughout the world after the coming of Yajuj and Majuj, the forces of corruption and death. In Sudan, General Gordon had been decapitated by the previous self-proclaimed ‘Mahdi’ and rebel, Muhammad Ahmad, in 1885 and Lugard was determined to avoid the same fate as his idol.

Lugard was responsible for killing at least 2,000 men, women and children when he ordered the West African Frontier Force of European officers and their soldiers into Satiru. Thousands more were sold into slavery by the pagan troopers working with the British units, and many were tortured to death. ‘The massacre was suppressed from the British public,’ and reportedly turned the stomach of Winston Churchill in the Colonial Office in London. [Walker, 59] The massacre served as a message to Sokoto that insurgency and violence against the British colonists would be met with annihilation.

Boko Haram emerged against the backdrop of the wider spread of Salafist thought and scholarship in north Nigeria. Some of Boko Haram’s strongest critics are Salafi activists and imams. As this demonstrates, as with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East, many of its recruits were sourced from communities which were dismayed by poor governance, stark inequalities and corruption.

It would be an oversimplification to point to one factor, religious zealotry, as the sole cause for Boko Haram reigniting jihad in the north-east, and subsequent attempts by ISWAP to exploit the void left by the region’s chronic instability. To understand the Lake Chad Crisis means coming to terms with Britain and France’s violent legacy of colonialism as well as the historical influence of Islam in the region.