Two days have passed since the Pentecost of Blood of Owo and the dead are still being counted. The toll of the massacre in the Catholic church of San Francesco Xavier remains undefined. The victims are “over fifty”, the number of injuries unknown, some of them very serious. There are many children. It was a special holiday Sunday for believers and the church, the largest, most central in the city, was crowded.
Anger grows. Yesterday there was a protest march in the city, the authorities give the impression of being stunned, incapable. The attack lasted an infinite amount of time – who says half an hour, even if the terror perhaps extended the minutes – and there was not the slightest reaction from the security forces. So the attackers had the ease of devoting themselves to a manhunt, flushing people out from under the pews of the church, from the sacristy where some had barricaded themselves, from the surroundings. A slaughterhouse.
Massacre in Nigeria, a witness: “Panic broke out in an instant. There were bodies everywhere”
by Raffaella Scuderi
06 June 2022
There was plenty of time for the bravest of those present to grab their mobile phones and document what had happened on social media, showing scenes of blood, death and devastation. Unfortunately, Nigeria has long been accustomed to crime, Islamic terrorist attacks and widespread insecurity. But the Owo massacre seems to have crossed a new threshold, perhaps due to its dimension, rawness, gratuitousness. And because it took place in an area of the country, the south-east, which had so far appeared relatively sheltered from these problems.
The governor Rotimi Akeredolu he was in Abuja, the Nigerian federal capital, to participate in the primaries of the ruling party (the presidential elections are next year). He rushed back to his hometown. He did well: so he avoided participating in the banquet offered in the evening by the president to the notables of the party, which infuriated the social networks even more. In his first tweet he wrote that the perpetrators of the Pentecost massacre are “the enemies of the people”. Which is certainly true, but just as surely too little. No more precise indications have come from the authorities so far: it is probable that they do not have certainties, but also that they fear indiscriminate popular reprisals if they point to a culprit.
Who are the enemies of the people? Difficult to choose, due to the abundance of candidates. The religious authorities, in the front row the Catholic ones, immediately repeated, like a mantra, that the matrix of violence is not confessional – even if its target is, indeed. Behind this convinced stance there is certainly the anxiety to prevent Christians and Muslims from arming themselves against each other; but also the awareness that 200 million Nigerians have behind them centuries of coexistence between different faiths and that the enemies of this harmony are a tiny minority.
The Africanist: “For Nigeria a huge shock. Now even in the Christian South no one feels safe anymore”
by Paolo Rodari
05 June 2022
Where to look then? In the great Nigerian north there has been a serious Islamist problem for some time, of which the terrorists of the Boko Haram movement are protagonists. However, the state of Ondo, where the massacre took place, is very far from the territory in which they operate. And there was no claim. Also flourishing, always in the north but a little everywhere, are the kidnappings, which here and there have seen the corrupt local authorities conniving with the bandits. In recent days, some Methodist pastors have been kidnapped and then released upon payment of a ransom. But what happened in the church of San Francesco Saverio is of a completely different dimension and gravity.
The dominant theory in Owo is that the perpetrators of the massacre are ethnic Fulani killers. The Fulani (but it would be more correct to call them Fulbe) are, traditionally, semi-nomadic breeders, scattered throughout the entire Nigerian territory – and, in various distinct subgroups, almost throughout West Africa. They are Muslims and, just as traditionally, are involved in sometimes bloody disputes with farmers over the grazing rights of their herds.
With the population increase, the scarce rains, the growing food shortage, these tensions are only increasing, and they are certainly not unique to Nigeria. In the state of Ondo the people are Yoruba, Christian and Muslim in more or less equivalent parts, but unanimously detest the Fulani. Last year, the governor Akeredolu had clashed severely with the herders, accusing them of various illegalities up to ordering them to leave the region. According to widespread opinion, the massacre of Pentecost would be their revenge. An apparently reassuring reading of the facts, because it brings back the matrix of the massacre to local factors. In fact, it makes it appear as a possible spark of a frighteningly larger fire. The future will tell.