Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa, by Scott MacEachern

Abstract

In this original and timely book, archaeologist Scott MacEachern brings a (very) longue durée perspective to bear on the study of the Boko Haram insurgency in the southern Lake Chad basin, a region with which he has been intimately acquainted for more than three decades. Frequently presented in the Western media as a modern Islamist uprising in a hostile and remote part of the world, Boko Haram, MacEachern contends, can also be understood as the latest product of frontier dynamics which date back to at least the early second millennium CE and the slave trade across the central Sahara. The current spread of religious intolerance and militant Islamist beliefs is certainly important, but it is by no means the only lens through which to make sense of an insurgency which speaks to much deeper social fractures and patterns of conflict as well. This persuasive argument is developed in five substantive chapters organised along progressively shorter timescales. Following an introductory first chapter, Chapters Two and Three stretch over several millennia, tracing the peopling of the edges of a shrinking Lake Chad by agro-pastoralist speakers of ancestral Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages; the coming of iron technology and the growth of socio-political complexity from c.500 BCE; and the rise of expansive, slave-raiding Islamic states to the south of the lake from c.1000. The latter development (as Chapter Four shows) radically transformed the human geography of the area, as it sundered its earlier ‘common Iron Age inheritance’ and brought into being unprecedented ‘dichotomies of place’ (p. 55). In the new cultural landscape ushered in by the arrival of Islam and its trans-Saharan trading connections, the hitherto unpopulated, or underpopulated, Mandara Mountains along the present-day border between northern Cameroon and Nigeria (as well as other, more marginal, environments) were increasingly recast as internal frontiers between plain-based state systems, such as Borno, Wandala and Baghirmi. These zones functioned simultaneously as the targets of, and as safe havens from, raids by mounted Muslim aristocracies who depended on frontier warfare and the enslavement of non-Muslim populations for their economic and cultural reproduction. As MacEachern poignantly reminds us, the victims of Boko Haram’s depredations are only too aware of the historical parallel between their present plight and these earlier experiences of violence and exploitation.