We need to talk about Nigeria’s brutal war

As Nigerian culture rises globally, why do we ignore seven decades of killing?

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

A TV interviewer sits across from a young woman in an outdoor setting

Michael Palin interviews Amina Ali Nkeki, a Boko Haram abduction survivor.

Themichaelpalin.com

Nigeria is the world's largest Black-majority country. Its richly diverse population includes over 235 million citizens, and its global diaspora numbers 17 million people. Famous for their cultural emphasis on education and professional achievement, Nigerians occupy senior positions of leadership and influence in every prominent industry on earth. From Los Angeles to London and Geneva to Rome, the world is replete with Nigerians working to create better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities.

In April 2024, British TV station Channel 5 first aired Michael Palin in Nigeria, a three-part travel documentary hosted by English actor and comedian Michael Palin. The series exposed viewers to the magnificence and difficulties of life in the Giant of Africa. From the destitute, famous floating mega-village Makoko in Lagos to thrilling polo games in the North, the docuseries testifies to how the world remains fascinated by Nigeria, despite the significant geopolitical, socioeconomic, and inter-religious challenges it faces.

Shockingly, one of the gravest of these challenges has escaped the world's gaze for decades. A brutal war has persisted in Nigeria for over 70 years. It has gained scant attention from leading Western media and has been largely ignored by the Nigerian media. Just one short segment of Palin’s series hints at it – when he interviewed a survivor of a Boko Haram abduction of schoolgirls a decade ago.

The war against Christians in Nigeria began in the middle of the twentieth century but was exacerbated by the Biafra War (1967-1970), a bloody civil war from which Nigerian society has never fully recovered. The war led to over one million casualties. Its causes included economic, political, interethnic, and interreligious factors. It brought out the ugly side of religion in Nigeria: violence between Muslims and Christians colonially coerced to cohabitate.

Since 2000, over 62,000 Christians living in Nigeria have been murdered for their faith. The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law reported the killings of over 8,000 Christians in Nigeria in 2023 alone. Perpetrators of these lethal acts of violence include Boko Haram insurgents, Islamic State West Africa Province agents, and militias associated with the Fulani ethnic group. Despite the protracted duration of this unacceptable violence, Nigerian and Western Christian communities continue to turn a blind eye. Monthly attacks against Christians have grown by 25 per cent since 2021 and will likely increase.

Hundreds of miles from these outbreaks of sectarian violence, many Nigerian Christians feel too geographically removed for the violence to feel relevant to them personally.

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What factors might explain the global apathy towards anti-Christian violence in Nigeria? I have three answers to this question.

Firstly, many Nigerian Christians tend to prioritise other aspects of their identity, like their ethnicity or socioeconomic status, over their religion. This is because for these Nigerians ethnicity is the part of their identity most able to help them access networks, opportunities, and protection in a country where ethnic networks open doors socially and professionally. In 2014, Nigeria, then Africa's largest oil producer, had a continent-leading GDP of $574 billion. In 2024, Nigeria's GDP is projected to fall to $252 billion and its oil production has nosedived. Nigeria is experiencing one of the most debilitating downturns in its economic history.

In a desperate economic climate, many Nigerian Christians find themselves struggling to survive and simply lack the time or energy to support their fellow Christians. Prioritising non-religious features of their personal identity over their Christian faith leads these Nigerian Christians to ignore and emotionally distance themselves from the reality of anti-Christian violence in Nigeria.

Geography also contributes to this emotional distancing. Most murders of Christians happen in the Muslim-majority North of the country and in the Middle Belt, where the Muslim-majority North and Christian-majority South collide. Hundreds of miles from these outbreaks of sectarian violence, many Nigerian Christians feel too geographically removed for the violence to feel relevant to them personally.

Black suffering seems to only matter when linked to the Black Lives Matter movement or civil rights abuses of Black Americans mistreated by an unforgiving American system.

Secondly, the lack of Western Christian interest in Nigerian Christian suffering reflects an ambivalence rooted in a casual Christianity incompatible with biblical Christian solidarity. Christianity, despite misleading popular narratives characterising the faith as a declining religion of antiquity, remains the world’s largest religion by over half a billion followers. People living in Western societies, like the USA, UK, and many European countries, take for granted the civil, political, and legal freedoms they enjoy. They fail to acknowledge the historical spread of Christianity helped create the conditions for these freedoms to emerge. Lukewarm genres of cultural Christianity in the West could not be more different to the pure and authentic faith of Christians in Nigeria killed every day for their loyalty to Christ.

Thirdly, the Western media gaze deprioritises the significance of Black Christian suffering. In particular, the Western media gaze downplays the relevance and the ratings-oriented worthiness of suffering endured by Black Christians living outside of Western societies. White Christian suffering might appear as a footnote on websites of major media outlets. Black Christian suffering will unlikely be mentioned in the content of these platforms at all. Liberal values of Western media actors only drive them to report news of anti-Christian violence when it is linked to politically sexy stories able to increase consumer engagement. Moral outrage of anti-Christian violence, sometime in the historical lifespans of Western media entities, declined in ways no longer justifying its worthiness of headline coverage. Black suffering seems to only matter when linked to the Black Lives Matter movement or civil rights abuses of Black Americans mistreated by an unforgiving American system.

Jesus taught that the ultimate cost associated with being one of His true followers is high. Christians in Nigeria killed for their faith represent some of the best examples of genuine Christianity on earth and will be greatly rewarded for their sacrifices in the New Creation. Jesus teaches his followers to fear spiritual death rather than earthly death. Christians living today should do the same. Christianity’s Bible teaches Satan is the king of our sinful world. Satan delights in violence against Christians because as the ultimate predator he seeks to destroy the children of his enemy. The world ignores the killings of Christians in Nigeria because doing so serves the interests of its master.

The murder of one Christian anywhere globally is an assault on all Christians worldwide. Christians living in peaceful – both socially and religiously – regions of Nigeria (including the Southwest and Southeast) and in the Western world have a religious responsibility to repent of their apathy towards the killings of Christians in Nigeria. Still, more action must be taken. The global Christian community includes many thousands of Christians working in politically and financially influential centres of power globally. These Christians have a sacred duty to leverage their proximity to that power to petition leaders to intervene in any way possible to end the violence against Christians in Nigeria. Until every Christian in Nigeria is safe, the sanctity of the global Christian community will remain blemished.

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Monastic life

16 May 2025

5 min read

The Sycamore Gap vandals were chasing the wrong sort of fame

Fifteen minutes of notoriety is nothing - just ask St Cuthbert.

Graham Tomlin

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

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground

The stump of the felled sycamore tree.

Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was Andy Warhol who is said to have uttered the famous statement: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Never mind the fact that the quotation has been attributed to other people as well, whoever came up with it first can hardly have anticipated how quickly it would come true.

In our times, social media has democratised information. We all now have our own individual press office, issuing our considered statements to the world in the form of Instagram or Facebook posts, comments on X, reels and the like. Secretly we all hope one of our gems of wisdom, a joke or a video of something weird will go viral - in a positive way - and we will get our 15 minutes of fame.

I was thinking of all this recently on a walk by Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland in the North-east of England. It so happened that on that very day, the Wall was in the news, as the two men who had cut down the famous tree at Sycamore Gap – the one featured in the Robin Hood film - were convicted of the crime. We looked up at Sycamore Gap, and it was just that - a gap – denuded of its tree, it is now just like any other depression in the escarpment over which Hadrian's Wall runs. Only you couldn't avoid the memory of the distinctive tree silhouetted against the sky which was no longer there, like an awkward smile with a tooth missing.

The story of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers is a pretty unsavoury one. Two fairly low life characters without a great deal of purpose seem to have thought of this as a clever stunt which would somehow impress people. The video would go viral, they hoped, and they would be famous - maybe for 15 minutes - basking in the global coverage of their daring action. They seem to have totally miscalculated the affection with which the tree was held and the outrage this stupid act generated. They got their notoriety but not in a good way. Today they wait anxiously to see whether this mindless act of vandalism will lead to a prison sentence.

It is perhaps another symptom of our culture’s desperate desire for fame. Social media is full of influencers who are famous for not much more than being famous. Similar stunts, one more outrageous than the other are performed daily, recorded on YouTube and put out there to gain attention. We are addicted to fame.

The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form.

On the same Northumberland trip, not very far away, a very different approach to fame caught my eye. Cuthbert, a seventh century hermit was one of those hardy Christian monks and missionaries who spread the faith in these islands in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. He was known for his piety, astonishing miracles and sympathy with nature. His biographer, the Venerable Bede, tells us he would walk into the cold North Sea, standing up to his neck in water to pray, in order to increase his ability to focus on God, the object of his prayers, not the yearnings of his body. On coming out of the water, sea otters would come and warm his feet, sensing that this man was in tune with the heart of the universe and should be cared for and protected.

As his fame grew, Cuthbert tried to find more and more ways to run away from it. He was given permission to leave his monastery in Lindisfarne to go out alone to live on the remote Farne islands, far from prying eyes, giving him the freedom to focus on the one object of his desire - to know God through a deep life of prayer and meditation. People would try to come to see him, fellow monks bringing supplies, or pilgrims looking for a word of wisdom from the holy man, yet his focus was ruthless. Eventually, says Bede, “he shut himself away from sight within the hermitage, rarely talking to visitors even from the inside, and then only through the window… in the end he blocked it up and opened it only to give a blessing or for some definite need”.

The difference between Graham / Carruthers and Cuthbert could hardly be more stark. The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form - fame that turns out to be more like shame. Cuthbert fled from fame, longing for the attention not of other people but of his Maker and Redeemer.

Cuthbert’s relentless pursuit of God, and its results in a remarkable life - weird in a different and more nourishing way than the stunts on YouTube - fascinated people. After he died, his bones were transferred to Durham Cathedral where they still lie today. You find the name of St Cuthbert everywhere in the North East – on schools, road signs, coffee shops and fishing boats. It’s a name that will endure after the destroyers of the sycamore tree are long forgotten. We're still talking about Cuthbert 1,400 years later.

Fame is an elusive and dangerous thing. Tom Holland once called it “a beast that you can't control or be prepared for.” If you chase it, it rarely turns out well. More often than not you get the wrong kind of (unwelcome) fame. The best kind comes when you’re not making fame itself the thing you’re looking for. If you ignore it, and seek something more satisfying, something really worth attention – which for Cuthbert was God, the source of all beauty, truth and goodness - you won’t be worried whether you’re famous or not, because your heart will be full of something much more lasting and worthwhile.

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