Unseen and unheard: Nigeria’s children of conflict

My novel, ‘When We Were Fireflies’, centres around a man, Yarima Lalo, going about his usual business when he suddenly realises he might have been murdered twice before. He eventually embarks on a journey to some of Nigeria’s conflict towns and cities to trace what he believes are the remains of his past lives and […]

My novel, ‘When We Were Fireflies’, centres around a man, Yarima Lalo, going about his usual business when he suddenly realises he might have been murdered twice before. He eventually embarks on a journey to some of Nigeria’s conflict towns and cities to trace what he believes are the remains of his past lives and makes startling discoveries about himself, his country, and our history of hate, violence and love.

While the story focuses on Yarima Lalo’s quests, a group of secondary characters in the novel holds a special place in my heart because of what they represent. They are the “Lost Children” whom, once Yarima starts seeing, he simply can’t unsee. Dressed in similar flowing garments, they push their carts, collecting fireflies in jars. They are enigmatic figures embodying decades and centuries of history, carefully interwoven into the story. What they all have in common is that they were murdered in various conflicts over the years. Instead of vanishing into the ether, they drift among us, performing a crucial task.

My depiction of these children is an homage to the many who have been caught in the crosshairs of adult conflicts, often murdered for reasons and disputes they cannot grasp and will never understand. Their nascent dreams were abruptly and crudely plucked from the firmament, their parents left to grieve, and their stories forgotten.

For me, it was important to reclaim these lost children from the precipice of forgetting and give them a new purpose—even if through fiction. It was my way of centring their stories, of prompting people to ponder what happens to the children we kill in our senseless conflicts.

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Despite the novel’s publication, I often find myself wondering about these children in relation to those we have actually lost in conflicts. I have been reflecting on the 59 schoolboys of Buni Yadi slaughtered by Boko Haram in 2014. February 25 this year will mark the 11th anniversary of that tragedy. In most other places, a tragedy like that, like Chibok, would have marked a turning point. Yet, a decade after that grave atrocity, the fate of Nigerian children is still being determined by sharpened machetes and bullets. Since then, conflicts have proliferated, banditry and secessionist movements have sprung up, and the map of Nigeria today looks like an elephant’s ear covered in symbols of fiery explosions and the red of spilled blood.

Recently, the Lagos-based think tank, SBM Intelligence, published data about Nigerian children caught in the crossfire of conflicts in 2024, and it makes for grim reading. There are 229 documented killings of children in various conflicts, including banditry, Boko Haram attacks, communal clashes, and mob violence, among others. When considered alongside the 886 missing children, the scale of the hazards our children face becomes even more evident. These figures are drawn from documented cases. Taking into account the many undocumented deaths and kidnappings affecting children, the numbers will be even higher.

Children are the most vulnerable targets in conflicts, and for years we have seen insidious criminals and terrorists deliberately targeting them because they are defenceless. They are the future in which we are investing our present. It takes an exceptional level of depravity to wish to destroy that future, especially when that future is innocent.

We find ourselves in a situation where our systems and institutions have continued to leave children unprotected during crises. Often, when these children are abducted, go missing, or are brutally murdered, we are so ashamed of our losses and the failures that allowed them that we frequently refuse to acknowledge, as a country and as a people, that we have suffered a tremendous loss.

Consider the most infamous case of children caught in the crossfire of conflict. When nearly 300 schoolgirls were abducted from Chibok, we remember how, for days afterwards, the government continued to deny that the girls had been taken, how their abduction was politicised, and how much effort was expended refuting the obvious instead of rescuing the girls until it was too late. Ten years later, some of those girls, now women, are still lost in the wilderness of gun barrels erected by Boko Haram.

One might think that our embarrassment over the continual loss of children to conflict would compel us to do more to protect them. That doesn’t seem to be the case. After Buni Yadi and Chibok, we have had several instances of mass abductions of children, such as the 800 students taken on December 11, 2020, from their school in Kankara, Katsina State.

In the latest data from SB Morgen, Zamfara and Katsina alone accounted for over 600 of the 886 missing children in 2024. Yet, for some reason, alarm bells have not been ringing furiously. We are haemorrhaging children while failing to acknowledge it. We are not properly documenting these losses or actively working to recover these children and prevent future losses. Instead, we endure them, waiting for the next tragedy, and then the next.

Today, in Europe, the monuments built to commemorate the children lost during the Second World War still stand, not just as memorials to those children but as reminders never to let such a thing happen again (except the world has stood by and watched a genocide unfold in Palestine, where thousands of children have been brutally murdered).

We do not have a tradition of keeping records and building monuments to remind us of our losses and hold us accountable for safeguarding the future of our children. We do not have an archive to document the people lost in any of our conflicts, neither children nor adults, as if we wish their loss to be total, without records to remind us of our failing as a people. It is often as if they did not exist and did not matter.

That is why it was important for me to immortalise the children lost in conflict in my novel. To reimagine a life in which their deaths are not in vain, in which they play an important role in our lives, even if unacknowledged, in which they have sustained the purpose that was taken from them with such brutality.

It is tragedy enough for our children to be taken from us through conflict. It is even more tragic for us to give away their memories, their names, and the fact that they were once here because we would rather bury our heads in the sand than be reminded of our failings. But sometimes you need to remember where you slipped so that tomorrow you don’t fall again. With the recently published data, all sorts of alarm bells should be tolling. Why are they not?