Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree

• Author: Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Vivianna Mazza
• Genre: YA Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: September 4, 2018
• Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

On April 14, 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls. Some managed to escape. Many are still missing. A new pair of shoes, a university degree, a husband—these are the things that a girl dreams of in a Nigerian village. A girl who works hard in school and to help her family. A girl with a future as bright as live coals in the dark. And with a government scholarship right around the corner, everyone—her mother, her five brothers, her best friend, her teachers—can see that these dreams aren’t too far out of reach. Even if the voices on Papa’s radio tell more fearful news than tales to tell by moonlight.

But the girl’s dreams turn to nightmares when her village is attacked by Boko Haram, a terrorist group, in the middle of the night. Kidnapped, she is taken with other girls and women into the forest where she is forced to follow her captors’ radical beliefs and watch as her best friend slowly accepts everything she’s been told. Still, the girl defends her existence. As impossible as escape may seem, her life—her future—is hers to fight for.

I’ve heard of the Islamist group Boko Haram, and am old enough to remember the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. Most of the girls still haven’t been returned, and Boko Haram is a terrorist group forcing Islam on Nigerian Christians. Much like ISIS, Hamas, the Taliban, and other Islamist groups, the goal is to forcibly create an exclusively Islamist caliphate across the world. This book is based on the experiences of girls who escaped Boko Haram, and is a collaboration between a Nigerian author and an Italian journalist, and reads realistically. 

I read the audiobook version, narrated by Robin Miles. The Nigerian-accented speech was beautiful to listen to, and I felt like the story she relayed was done sensitively. Her soft, girlish voice made Ya Ta’s story feel more realistic, and easy to get lost in.

The book is characterized by short, snappy chapters that made it easy to fly through the reading. Each one is given a title that foreshadowed what was to come. I especially appreciated the way it clearly tells about the horrors these girls were exposed to without it feeling like trauma porn. The authors were able to stealthily imply the worst experiences of the experiences of these girls, without laying everything out in plain sight. 

To start with, the authors show readers the daily life of a young Nigerian Christian girl. In doing so, we get so much information without it feeling boring or like an info dump. This is a great book to demonstrate the technique of showing, rather than telling. And this book transported me to a small village in rural Nigeria. Life operates on an entirely different plane for these girls than it does in America, where I was born.

For Ya Ta, she tries to go to school consistently, but a lack of availability of sanitary products makes it difficult to attend school while menstruating. Thinking back to my own middle school years, it was difficult to predict when it would come, and having a boy find out that I was menstruating would have been mortifying. Ya Ta and her family didn’t have running water, and with five brothers, a lot of the responsibility for taking care of the household chores falls to Ya Ta. In addition, there are reports of Boko Haram infiltrating their area that Ya Ta hears on her father’s radio. But Ya Ta dreams of a bigger life. She’s smart and on the verge of receiving a government scholarship that could change the trajectory of her entire future, and she can’t wait to move forward in her life.

Just before she receives the scholarship, her hopes and dreams are derailed when she is one of 276 girls kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram. Ya Ta works hard at her schoolwork, and equally hard to make life easier for her parents. She’s a good daughter one day, and a hostage the next. Not all of the girls kidnapped are Christian—some are Muslim, like her friend Aisha. As their captors force them to choose between conversion to Islam or death, most of the girls begin to obey Muslim rituals and customs, Aisha tries to help her Christian friends. 

Rather than explicitly discussing the topics such as forced conversion and rape these girls are exposed to, the book skirts around them much like is expected in Nigerian society. It’s very different than American society, although more than anything, this shows that girls all around the world are the same. They like to learn, play with their friends, help their parents, and dream big dreams. But instead, these girls are forced into hijabs and pushed into maturity far before their time by trauma.

The book focuses more on how these girls lived, a coming-of-age story in extreme circumstances, where they create bonds like sisters. I was so impressed with this book, and it is going to be one that stays with me for a long time. In my own efforts to read more diversely, I can say that I know more about these events, and having them based on factual interviews with girls who escaped or were rescued leave me confident that it has a firm basis in truth. Since the worst of the horrors were only alluded to (but murder does occur on page), this is suitable reading for YA audiences, and helping them understand more about various events around the world. It also gets into the boys who were kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, like Ya Ta’s brother in the story. Overall, this is an incredibly powerful read, and despite these events occurring in 2014, we are seeing similar situations around the world even now. As much progress as we make, there’s always such a long way to go. But I can honestly say I’ll never forget these girls and their story.

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