From the novella: Slates and Bowls
Religious violence and child neglect are deeply connected in many vulnerable communities. When children grow up without education, care, or protection, poverty and indoctrination can turn them into instruments of extremism. Eye of the Storm reveals how neglected childhoods evolve into violent futures.
Before Lakuta learned the sound of gunfire, it knew the sound of children begging. At dawn they drifted through streets with bowls swinging from thin wrists, singing for leftovers in a tired chorus. They were everywhere and, somehow, nowhere. The city’s background noise were like flies, like dust that would not settle down.
I taught Literature at Yagurza Girls’ School, one of the old mission schools at the edge of town. A stream ran between us and the last row of shops, and a narrow footbridge joined the two worlds. Each morning, before assembly, I would see boys crossing that bridge with slates under their arms and bowls on their wrists. They never came to learn. They walked past to survive.
One morning a boy lingered at our gate after the others moved on. His bowl was cracked plastic, the colour of old bone. His slate was rubbed shiny at the centre, polished by years of erasing. ‘Madam,’ he said, eyes lowered, ‘is there bread?’
I had two rolls in my bag. I also had the small, selfish fear that if I fed one child, ten would appear. So, I lied. ‘No.’
He nodded like denial was a language he spoke fluently and turned away. ‘What is your name?’ I asked, as if a name could count as charity.
He hesitated. ‘Mujahid.’
The name stood between us like a stone. Later I heard of Mallam Gazali in Azeri, the scholar whose madrasa ran on slates, hunger, and talk of jihad. His pupils rose before dawn, read and wrote at first light, then scattered into town to beg, fetch water, cut nails, whatever kept a small body alive. They were children, but the street taught them early that contempt is a kind of hunger too. When you leave a child long enough in the open, the world rides on him and teaches him how to ride on others.
The first time our region truly heard the storm, it was a Friday in Lakuta. ‘Lakum-Hakum’ that was the name whispered after they struck the central mosque. The dead were counted in hundreds; survivors walked like ghosts with blood on their clothes.
People argued about religion, politics, and war as if arguments could stitch flesh back together; as if they could bring the dead back to life. I kept thinking of slates and bowls that had turned to swords and receptacles for collecting blood.
After the bombing came the abductions and the ransom calls. Demands arrived with the calmness of invoices: pay, or mourn. Some families sold land; some sold jewelry; some sold hope. Some received their children back thin and silent. Some received nothing. Then the storm came to Yagurza. That night, the school compound lights failed, too neatly to be an accident. Boots scraped gravel. A guard at the gate of the compound shouted once, then went quiet. Doors shook under kicks. Girls woke to panic, their dormitory breath turning into a single frightened animal.
I ran into the corridor and saw men moving with the cold efficiency of people who had rehearsed cruelty. Faces wrapped. Rifles carried as casually as sticks. One torch swung and painted the wall in harsh white. In that slice of light, I saw a familiar shape hanging from a wrist, not a weapon, not yet. A plastic bowl. For a second, a face turned. Younger than the gun. Eyes sharp with an old, restless anger, the kind that once asked me for bread. Not a boy anymore. Not a pupil but a matured product of violence. Somewhere in the darkness a voice barked a slogan I had heard men repeat with bitter jokes in town: Slates to swords. Bowls to blood.
The girls were marched out toward the stream. The footbridge groaned under their weight. A student called for her mother and a gunshot cracked the night open. I tried to follow, but the muzzle of a rifle stopped me the way a wall stops water. When they disappeared into the bush, the school compound fell silent except for sobbing and the far-off insects that never stop singing. At dawn, I found a slate near the gate, snapped at one corner. Beside it lay a cracked plastic bowl holding only rainwater and a leaf. That was when I understood the storm was religious violence: bombs, kidnappings, violations, ransoms. The eye of the storm that made everything possible was the neglect we normalized: children turned loose on streets, without food, without shelter, without school, until hunger became their brains and anger their teacher. In the middle of our screaming this night, there had been a lament we refused to hear. This lament would return to haunt us again.