Some of the released Chibok Girls at Aso Rock
The story of the missing Chibok Girls now has a book captioned “Beneath the Tamarind Tree” and the author, Isha Sesay, ex-CNN Anchor says if the girls were of rich parentage, Nigerian government would have acted differently. The book reveals the wickedness and nonchalance of Nigerian government.
Sesay who says she sees herself in the girls she writes about told CNN that five years after the kidnap of the Chibok School girls, there is still a feeling of cluelessness on the part of the Nigerian government on the whereabouts of the girls, some of whom, she said, have become women by now.
Sesay who has covered the sordid Nigerian story said during one trip to the land of the terrorists, she was embedded for over five hours in the midst of troops. “The experience was traumatizing”, she recalls.
Isha Sesay is a Cambridge University-educated, Peabody Award-winning former anchor for CNN. They — the subjects of her book, “Beneath the Tamarind Tree” — are the mostly poor girls from, in her words, “homes without distinction,” kidnapped by the jihadist group Boko Haram five years ago from their boarding school in the parched, impoverished northern Nigerian town of Chibok, writes the New York Times in its review of the book.
The New York Times review notes: “Sesay is not from Chibok. But she is, as she says, one generation and one lucky lottery-ticket-of-life removed from them. Her mother, Kadi Sesay, was born to poor, uneducated parents in a small city in Sierra Leone, not unlike Chibok. Kadi insisted on going to school. She excelled. She became a college professor, then a government minister and ultimately the shaper of Sesay’s destiny. “If not for fate, twinned with my mother’s childhood determination, I could just as easily have started off in a place not much different from Chibok,” she writes.
