This Is My Home. They Will Bury Me Here.

“We don’t have any other country than Nigeria. Nigeria is our father, is our mother. We must embrace Nigeria.” The old man spoke with a tear in his eyes, which soon led to several, an outpouring of emotion for his home and the changes that have torn at his community over the past ten years.

I’m spending the next three months in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria, interning with Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an international NGO that focuses on addressing and transforming conflict in some of the world’s most dangerous places. In the past ten years, Jos has been rocked by ethno-religious violence pitting Christians against Muslims, engulfing whole communities in an area known as “The Home of Peace and Tourism.”

This is the first major activity that we’ve undertaken in my time here. The goal: unite religious and community leaders with media partners to promote peace in the region. To this end, today we brought together forty journalists and community leaders to discuss issues they’ve faced over the course of nearly a decade of violence. The man who spoke the above words captured everything at stake in this conflict and, for me, drove home the emotional, human side of violence.

He was a community leader, a Hausa, a Muslim. He had grown up with Christians and Muslims sharing the same space, going to the same schools, working alongside one another as neighbors and friends. From his childhood, he remembered his Christian playmates, and his community has successfully avoided violence in part because community leaders from both sides, Christian and Muslim, have remembered their common humanity and come together to protect one another in times of crisis.

But the strain on these men and women was palpable in his voice, and he perfectly articulated how he and other leaders were “tired.” Tired of the violence, but also exhausted from their attempts to hold back forces that are often outside of their control. The sad truth is that Nigeria suffers from horrible infrastructure, a failing health and education sector, an economy entirely reliant upon oil revenues, and corruption that is endemic to nearly every part of life. Youth unemployment is impossibly high, and it is often young, unemployed men who are the main protagonists in the violence. “It’s people instigating this issue. It’s a government effort, all the industries. No one is working a job. How many industries do we have in Jos, in Kaduna, in Bauchi? How many industries do we have that are working? Most of our children are graduates; when it comes to employment, sorry if you don’t know anybody. You don’t know how, where you will find employment.”1 This man articulated all of these issues in one fell swoop, painting a picture of a conflict far more complex than the simple Muslim/Christian dynamics represented in far too many media depictions of the Jos violence.

But even when these problems are all stacked up, one on top of another, in seemingly insurmountable opposition to any solution, these community leaders are still committed to peace. The stakes are too high to do anything but to continue to strive toward a solution. Thousands have died in Plateau State in the past decade. The violence has displaced hundreds of thousands and caused billions of naira in property damages. Many adolescents cannot remember a time in their lives in which Christians and Muslims trusted one another, let alone lived amongst one another as neighbors and friends. Many worry that these children, knowing nothing but trauma and fear, would carry hatred with them into their adult lives, further alienating any chance of a future peace.

The old man finished his speech in a voice fiery and defiant, his tears giving him the strength to remember a past in which Christians and Muslims were not separated by violence: “We’ve grown up together. We’ve schooled together. We’ve worked together…I was born in Bauchi, but I settled in Jos. They will bury me here. This is my home. Let us go back and tell our people, ‘We will defend our lives and everything for them.’”

For many, it is the loss of this past, a history of tolerance and mutual respect, which gives them reason to continue the struggle for a solution to the violence. Jos was once known as a cosmopolitan city that married various and diverse cultures from all over the country. Now it is known mostly as the front for a battle that could tear apart not only Plateau State, but all of Nigeria. However, with these dialogues, perhaps there is hope for a unified state and a sustainable peace. For the future of Jos, and for its past, I certainly hope so.