Life and Death in the Middle Belt: A Clash of Civilizations in Nigeria

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Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian, had hardly been voted into office in 1999 when 12 states in northern Nigeria introduced Sharia law, triggering an outcry throughout the Christian world.

The causes of periodically erupting religious conflict are sometimes banal and often far-fetched. When the Miss World contest was scheduled to be held in Nigeria in 2002, Muslims were angered by an insensitive newspaper commentary. The ensuing violence claimed 215 lives in Kaduna alone.

Uche Uruakpa, 38, can describe the religious conflict from a unique perspective. He's a Christian doctor, and in 2001 he started working in the largest Muslim hospital in Kano, a city of a million people -- 90 percent of them Muslim. "On some mornings, there were 2,000 patients lying in front of my office in the hospital," says Uruakpa.

The bloodshed began when a fundamentalist Muslim saw a Christian child on the street carrying a page from the Koran -- and promptly killed the child. Hundreds died in the ensuing frenzy. "The government covered up the real numbers," says Uruakpa, who hid for two weeks in Kano's Christian neighborhood and left the city a year later. "They would have to offer a lot for me to work there again," he says.

Uruakpa lived in a culture that he found foreign and impenetrable. "I saw them all," he says, including men with four wives, the maximum number a man is permitted to have in Islam. Some married girls, he says, were not even 12 years old. "The men came to me with their large families, and I had to ask them which ones were their wives and which ones were their daughters."

Exodus from the North

The irony in Nigeria is that the north has a greater need for the better-trained experts, doctors and scientists from the south, and yet the lack of culture and persistent acts of extreme violence have led to an exodus of businesspeople, professors, doctors and scientists.

In the early 1990s there were about 500 industrial firms in Kano. Ten years later, that number had declined to about 200. This is one reason why many Muslim Hausa-Fulani have moved further south where, in cities like Kaduna, Jos and Bauchi, they now form the new proletarian poor.

Sheikh Khalid Aliyu is familiar with the boys who sell adulterated gasoline in bottles along the arterial highways in Jos, periodically getting high by sniffing gasoline or glue. "Poverty, bad policy and tribalism are the fuels of discontent," says Aliyu, whose organization promotes conciliation and understanding among the Muslim population.

Aliyu knows all too well that the successes are modest. "Politicians aren't solving the problems," he says. "No jobs, no education, no electricity, nothing to do. A hungry man will not produce peace," he says.

The Christians now feel threatened, while the Muslims feel marginalized. The Hausa-Fulani have particular problems when they arrive in Jos. Because Nigerian law distinguishes between new arrivals and local residents, they are unable to shed the label of "newcomers" in the city, which has a Christian-dominated government. This prevents them from securing jobs in the public sector or gaining access to universities. The same is true throughout Nigeria, but in places of great poverty, anger grows rampant -- and with it the urge to find refuge in religion.

'Both Sides Are Preparing for Battle'

Maiduguri in the far northeastern corner of Nigeria, with an estimated population of more than a million, is one of those places -- dusty, isolated, impoverished. There are dozens of Koran schools in Maiduguri, some funded with money from Saudi Arabia. Trucks filled with children from Niger and Chad occasionally arrive in the city, and the children are taken to madrassas to learn the Koran, but not reading and writing. When they are not in school, the children are expected to work.

"It's modern slavery," says Bolaji Aina of the German's Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), which supported women's projects in Maiduguri for many years. Boko Haram, an Islamic sect, has been all too willing to take on these latter-day slaves. More than 700 people died last July during clashes between the sect and police in Maiduguri.

The country has plunged headlong into 2010, divided, without any real prospects and without leadership. President Umaru Yar'Adua has been in a Saudi Arabian hospital for weeks, incapable of governing his country amid growing demands for the appointment of a successor. But who would it be? Another Muslim like Yar'Adua? Or is the Christians' turn?

"Both sides are preparing for battle," says Pastor James, the peace missionary, in Jos. "It's a cat-and-mouse game. The events in the north are also radicalizing the south."

It was quiet in Jos over the Christmas holidays. But, as it happened, the rumors coming from Bauchi were not rumors at all. Clashes in the city last Monday, instigated by an Islamic sect, claimed 38 lives.

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• Part 1: A Clash of Civilizations in Nigeria
• Part 2: 'The Government Covered Up the Real Numbers'