Nigeria’s terror survivors share their stories

This violence is not gruesome fiction, it’s reality.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A Nigerian man looks up towards the camera, behind him is dusty ground

Manga survived an attempted beheading.

Open Doors.

This article contains distressing content.

Something is happening. And nobody is talking about it.

Nigeria, the big and beautiful ‘Giant of Africa’, is becoming a place of increasing terror for the hundred million Christians who call it home. Since 2000, 62,000 people have been killed for having a Christian faith. Eight-thousand people were killed in 2023 alone. These staggering numbers mean that more Christians are being killed in Nigeria than in every other country combined.

The violence is as extreme as it gets. And yet, very few of us know that it’s happening.

When it comes to the Nigerian government and media, the relentlessly brutal attacks are seemingly hidden in plain sight; undeniable and yet somehow unstoppable. While, in the UK, we appear to be entirely unaware. This violence is out of sight, and therefore largely out of mind. The reasons why are admittedly complex, as outlined by Chris Wadibia. Nevertheless, the violence being carried out toward the Nigerian people, particularly those living in the Northern states, surely deserves our attention.

Earlier this year, I took a trip to Northern Nigeria. While I was there, I got to know a group of people who had endured unimaginable trauma, largely because of their Christian faith. Every day, they would bravely tell their stories – who they were and what they had experienced. Every day, I looked into the faces of children who had lost parents, parents who had lost children, husbands who had lost wives, and wives who had lost husbands. All of a sudden, the bewildering statistics were people before me – people who were having to live with the images of their loved ones being ‘butchered’ before their very eyes. Their villages being burnt down. Their lives being turned upside down by militants with assault rifles and machetes.

The only reference I had for stories such as the ones I was hearing were apocalyptic movies. But these things happened. They happened to the people sitting across from me. This violence is not the stuff of gruesome fiction, it’s the stuff of reality.

As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety...

I met one woman, she was incredibly gentle and kind, and told her story with a composure that’s hard to fathom. She was working on her land along with her husband and mother-in-law, a totally run-of-the-mill day. They were so engrossed with the task at hand, they didn’t notice that their village was being attacked by armed ‘Fulani’ militants (the majority of the violence being carried out in Northern Nigeria is at the hands of Islamic extremist groups such as Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP - Islamic State in West African Province). She looked up to find herself face-to-face with two attackers and despite their command for her to surrender to them, she ran, as did her husband and mother-in-law. While she was running, she could hear bullets flying past her head and the screams of her mother-in-law. Making it to a neighbouring village, she gathered help and eventually went back to find her husband and mother-in-law. Both of whom were stabbed and killed that day.

The Fulani militants now have control over her village, and she told us how she’s been praying that she would be able to forgive these men for what they’d done, as she is now forced to live alongside them. And so, she felt proud because she had recently been able to respond to one of the men as they greeted her.

There was another woman, she was strong and defiantly compassionate. Her story is laced with horror. She studied at a university – the discrimination she experienced there meant that a course that was supposed to be four years long, took her eight years to complete. In 2014, Boko Haram attacked the university – while she was trying to escape, her friend was shot and ‘hacked at’ while he refused to deny his Christian faith. She recalls how his last words were ‘I’m happy. I’ve saved lives today. And I have Jesus’.

He died and she continued to run. As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety, as she did so, she heard the mother being shot behind her.

She ran those twins to Cameroon, leaving them in safety, and now lives in a rural Nigerian village where she teaches the local children. Her Christian identity is no secret, and so faces continual danger. Her crops were burnt to the ground and destroyed, twice. And the villagers have tried, repeatedly, to get her to leave. One night, she came face to face with young men with bats and machetes who threatened her life – she told them – ‘you can’t scare me. I have seen the Lord’.

And they left. Remarkably, that village is still her home.

One heart-wrenchingly-young girl told us how, while she sleeping – she was awoken by her father who told her that they needed to run, they were under attack. She ran, hand in hand with her father, while her mother carried her younger brother. While they were fleeing, her dad was shot and killed. Her mother pried her hand out of her father’s and buried both her and her brother in sand, instructing them to stay hidden. The next day, they found that their house, their crops, their entire village had been burnt down.

This is what is happening. This is what we are not seeing.

While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

Since my return, I have met with a man who bears the physical scars of his trauma. He thought his house was being pillaged by armed robbers - it was only when they led him, his brother and his father outside, made them kneel with their hands tied behind their backs, and demanded that they denounce their Christian faith that he realised he was being attacked by Boko Haram. It was a regular evening, he was putting together a lesson plan for his class the following day, and now he was kneeling before an executioner. His father refused their demand, and they beheaded him. His brother also refused, and they took a blade to him, too. Then it was his turn, and while his mind was filled with thoughts of death and how much this was about to hurt, he also prayed that these men would be forgiven for what they were doing. Taking after Jesus, who forgave his executioners mid-execution, this man continued to pray as he felt the blade in his neck.

Left to bleed to death, miraculously, both him and his brother survived. Now, his scar tells an astonishing story.

This epidemic of violence seems to reside under our radar. It’s not quite catching our eye, is it? And, as a result, is not quite receiving the force of our outrage nor benefiting from the depths of our compassion. So many of the people that I met expressed a feeling of being neglected – like they’re suffering in deafening silence. While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

What’s happening in Nigeria is a crisis, one that we must acknowledge.

Article

Church and state

Creed

Leading

Politics

Weirdness

1 October 2025

5 min read

The one thing the new Archbishop can offer the world

How an unlikely argument between the Pope and Madonna points the way for the new Archbishop of Canterbury

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The archbishop crowns the king.

The Catholic News Agency is a news outlet whose Instagram account posts warm pictures of the Pope, Catholic saints and so on, with heart-warming, if a little anodyne, quotations. A week or so ago, it sparked one of the most unlikely social media spats in recent times - an argument between Madonna (no, not the Virgin Mary) and Pope Leo himself.

With the announcement of Sarah Mullally as the 106^th Archbishop of Canterbury, this debate may have something to say to her as she moves from London (where I knew her well and worked with her as a fellow bishop) to Lambeth.

The CNA had posted a picture of a smiling, waving Pope Leo with the caption: “My priority is the Gospel, not solving the world’s problems.” It referred to an interview in which the Pope had said: “I don’t see my primary role as trying to be the solver of the world’s problems… although I think that the Church has a voice, a message that needs to continue to be preached, to be spoken and spoken loudly.”

The comments below were predictable, ranging from “This is a God-inspired pope!” to “The pope is irrelevant’ – and much worse. But among the 2000 or so comments was one by Madonna herself: “The whole point of teaching and learning the Gospel is to inspire people to love one another and make the world a better place. Not just with words but with actions, which is exactly what Jesus did. I am truly disappointed by this.”

Madonna has always had an odd relationship with the Catholic Church, and this was not the first time she has engaged with Pope Leo (or his predecessor Francis for that matter) online. But the story still went viral.

So - back to soon-to-be Archbishop Sarah.

She certainly faces a challenging inbox - divisions among Anglicans over sexuality that threaten to tear the Anglican Communion apart; safeguarding scandals; the ructions that being a female Archbishop will raise for traditionalists within the Church of England and with the Catholics and the Orthodox; the rise of Christian Nationalism, criticism of the Church’s commitment of £100m for reparations for slavery, not to mention the continue decline of Anglican congregations around the country.

So what should her priorities be as she starts her role?

I must confess I’m on Pope Leo’s side in this one. Unsurprisingly, the scholarly Augustinian Pope is a better theologian than the singer of ‘Like a Prayer’.

Pope Leo went on to say: “The values that the Church will promote in dealing with some of these world crises don’t come out of the blue, they come out of the Gospel. They come from a place that makes very clear how we understand the relationships between God and us, and between one another. Going back to the very basic things of respecting one another, respecting human dignity: where does that human dignity come from and how can we use that as a way of saying the world can be a better place, and we can treat one another better?”

It is the job of politicians – not the Church - to work out the precise policies and mechanisms that will deliver a better society. Yet of course that begs the question: what does ‘better’ mean? And that is where the church does have something to say.

Pope Leo’s point is that if the Church does make political interventions, they have to arise strictly from the very heart of its own faith. Christian leaders shouldn't get too involved in detailed policy recommendations, but they can outline their vision of what a good life together looks like, based on the story of the gospel itself.

The one thing that the church has to offer the world is Jesus - in other words, the remarkable, world-shattering belief that God the Creator entered human history, like an author stepping on to the stage of his own play. Yet he did it in the most unexpected way possible, without fanfare, simply showing a radical, determined, self-giving love, dying an excruciating death at human hands and rising from death as the first sign that death is nothing to be afraid of because it has been beaten once and for all.

To believe that is weird. It changes everything – life is not a search for wealth, friends and success but for holiness and wisdom. It is not a search for self-fulfilment but a radical turn away from self-centredness to a growing love for God our Maker. The poor not the wealthy are the ones who matter. We are held in the hands of a God whose love for us is endless. The universe is not impersonal and silent but pulses with love. Evil is a force trying to undo everything that God has created. Death is just the gateway to something far better for those who believe.

Tom Holland put it like this this: “If you're a Christian, you think that the heart of the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity where someone who is a God and a man set everything on its head.”

And paradoxically, it is by focusing on that extraordinary message, that the Church can play its part in helping unravel some of the other problems, whether in the Church or the world.

Pope Leo was right. And maybe this is the advice for our new Archbishop: don’t start out by trying to change the world. Start with the gospel. It’s all we have to offer. Teach it, remind the church and the world of it. Use imagination, creativity, social media – whatever.

You may end up solving the world’s problems, you may not. The early Christians didn’t march on Rome, petitioning Caesar for new laws on migration across the empire or fairer treatment for slaves. They simply lived out their faith, creating communities that included everyone, worshipped Jesus and excluded idolatry. They taught, learned and lived the gospel. And eventually the world was changed.

So our new Archbishop will and must talk about immigration, assisted dying, poverty and other political issues, but she must make sure it’s always rooted in something Christian. Or as St Paul put it: “Proclaim the message, whether the time is favourable or unfavourable. Always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.”

And let the rest of us encourage her in doing that as well as she can.

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