Things fall apart

Last week, the Islamist group Boko Haram launched a horrific attack, bombing five Nigerian police stations and killing 186 in one day. What started as a campaign targeting Christians in the north has now grown into a crisis that threatens to overwhelm the Nigerian government — and the church leaders who appealed for foreign assistance have had little response. When Nigeria’s president said he is now facing a crisis as grave as the civil war of 1967, in which a million died, his words were barely reported by the foreign press. This former British colony, which we controlled until 1960, has slipped off our political radar.

Just as the Foreign Office missed the emergence of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, it is having difficulty recognising the new evil of religious cleansing. It takes different forms in different countries, from pastors being randomly assassinated in the Philippines to the massacres of congregations in Iraq, whose ancient Christian community is now midway through an exodus of Biblical proportions. Behind it all lies a virulent strain of radical Sunni Islam, enlisting young men in a new war where the enemy lies not over a border but in the church, synagogue or temple.

Boko Haram is not part of a global jihad, though it imitates al-Qa’eda with its suicide bombs and internet videos. It is a Nigerian campaign perpetrated mainly against the English-speaking Igbo Christians, whom British missionaries helped convert in the 19th century. The ensuing cultural tension was the subject of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Its protagonist, Okonkwo, resented what he regards as Christianity’s effete emphasis on humility, forgiveness and turning the other cheek: his was a world of warriors, valour and (if needed) human sacrifice. Nigeria’s latest insurgency reads like a 21st-century Islamist postscript.