nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. IN PURSUIT OF DISOBEDIENT WOMEN A Memoir of Love, Rebellion, and Family, Far Away By Dionne Searcey Dionne Searcey grew up in Wymore, Neb. , a child of a young widow who prayed that her daughters would stay out of trouble and go to a Christian college. Their mother wanted Dionne to find a “nice minister-in-training” and live out her days as a “stay-at-home preacher’s wife,” serving her husband, kids and church.
The plan worked for Searcey’s sister but not for Searcey, who got busted at her Christian college for sneaking out to a Rolling Stones concert. The administrators talked about suspension, and even expulsion. Instead, she dropped out and enrolled at the University of Nebraska, abandoning Jesus for journalism. The student rule breaker went on to work as a crime reporter in Chicago, and spent a decade at The Wall Street Journal before she was hired to write about the U.
S. economy for The New York Times. By the time Searcey was 44, the mother of a young son and twin daughters, her husband, an executive at a conservation nonprofit based at the Bronx Zoo, was spending 45 minutes every night hunting for a legal parking space on their street in Brooklyn. Their dual-career household’s New York life “had devolved into a huge, rat-raced rut,” she writes.
She decided to take off. She joined The Times’s foreign desk and flew her husband and children away to live in West Africa. The family lucked out. They landed in Dakar, Senegal, home to some of the region’s best music, to a particularly warm kind of hospitality known as Teranga and — as I was struck on my last visit — to endless seaside muscle gyms that make you think of Venice Beach.
Searcey and her husband abandoned much of the advice they’d been given back in Brooklyn. Her children skateboarded without helmets or elbow pads and washed their sandy feet in the French bidet, “perfect for spraying off grains between little toes. ” They stopped taking the malaria medicine prescribed by their pediatrician; “long sleeves, candles, bed nets and spray were more than enough” to keep them safe. Her husband became addicted to surfing.
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Some reporters view the world from the top down. Others, among them some of the very best, prefer to see it from the bottom up. Searcey is one of the latter. Avoiding what a colleague who also served as a Times bureau chief in Africa calls the “ooga-booga” — the stereotypes that mark Africa as primitive and violent — she dived into her “beast of a beat,” which sprawled across some two dozen countries, some with capitals most Americans didn’t even know how to pronounce, such as Ouagadougou (“wah-gah-DOO-goo”).
Stretching from the Sahara in the north to the Congo River in the south, Searcey’s beat demanded a mix of every kind of reporting. When she arrived in West Africa, northeastern Nigeria, one of the region’s poorest areas, was beset by a militant Islamist group whose attacks would make it the biggest story of the day. For seven years, Searcey writes, Boko Haram “had been roaming the countryside, raiding villages, burning homes, murdering people and stealing livestock in rural communities where the families of farmers and fishermen lived hand-to-mouth. The group was hellbent on returning the region to a state where a harsh interpretation of Islam ruled.
They wanted a caliphate. ” A year before she got there, Boko Haram had kidnapped more than 250 girls from the small Nigerian town of Chibok, invading the girls’ school as they slept and driving off with them in the back of their trucks. For months, Boko Haram taunted the girls’ parents and the government, broadcasting videos of the girls in captivity.
“The kidnapping turned the war into a celebrity cause with its own hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls.”
Searcey made the story of Boko Haram’s bullying tactics her own, focusing especially on how the group used young women, turning some of them into suicide bombers, to advance their cause. Women bombers were a rare phenomenon in Africa’s Islamist wars, she writes. Yet enlisting them for this job made strategic sense. They were less likely than men to be suspected, and in conservative societies were less likely to be thoroughly searched.
Searcey traveled to northeastern Nigeria and across the border where the group was pursuing its war into Cameroon, an area the French called the “Extreme North. ” To find out what was really happening there, she had to get past officious government spokesmen and cagey U. N. officials who thought journalists should take down dictation rather than do their own reporting.
Over the next few months, two remarkable fixers helped her in her sleuthing: a Sierra Leonean named Jaime Yaya Barry, who had helped The Times cover the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and, later, a northern Nigerian named Shehu, who had already established a reputation locally for his reporting on Boko Haram. Interviewing a woman bomber would offer a new way to look at Boko Haram, Searcey believed. But locating one who would reveal her intention to blow herself up would not be easy. (And anyone who had already pushed the detonator button was dead.
) Then she was introduced to a woman called Rahila. Rahila told Searcey that she had been stolen from her home one morning when Boko Haram arrived in three vehicles, abducting as many women as possible. She spent 10 months as a captive of the group. They didn’t have a lot to eat, and Rahila quickly lost weight.
Then one day they were rounded up and driven to an old cement factory where another group of young women was being held. These girls were plump. Some were crying. They told Rahila they had been kidnapped from a school in Chibok.
Rahila realized they were Boko Haram’s most famous hostages — the Chibok girls. Soon the girls began training. First they were sent to Koranic school — days and days of it. Then weapons training, and, later, decapitation school.
“Always cut from the back of the neck,” their instructor told them, “to prevent the victim from squirming. They’ll die quicker that way. ” Next came suicide bomb school. “Keep the bomb tight in your armpit,” Searcey reports the girls were advised, “to stop it from shifting around and exploding too soon.
When you reach a crowd of 10 or 20 people, detonate. ” “You press this,” Rahila told Searcey, miming the act of pushing a button. “They taught us that as soon as you pressed it you’d go directly to heaven. ” In the end, though, Rahila couldn’t go through with a bombing.
Taking advantage of a moment when a big crowd was assembling at the Boko Haram camp, she ran away, trudging with her grandchildren for seven days to the border between Nigeria and Cameroon until she reached the desert refugee camp where Searcey recorded her account. “In Pursuit of Disobedient Women” abounds with stories like that of Rahila, the suicide bombing school dropout. Quietly listening, Searcey takes down the details of their everyday experience — including details the authorities around her might prefer were not made public. In doing so, she reveals herself to be, even today, one of the “disobedient women,” bearing witness to so many ordinary lives tossed and turned by other people’s whims.
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