Esther ‘Samira’ Adamu, from Kaduna, was murdered by Belgian gendarmes on September 22, 1998
SINCE her low-key burial on October l7, Esther ‘Samira’ Adamu now appears like just one of those things — a sob-story that at best would make a newspaper bulletin. And newspaper bulletins, no doubt, are like a semi-clear photocopy of reality the day after they were published. Upon any further enquiry, they tend to end being wrong in many ways.
There were many things that were wrong about the unwholesome Samira Adamu affair. One of them was an important basis for the global outrage that greeted her murder by the Belgian immigration officials last month. And that was the claim (first made by the deceased herself) that she fled Nigeria because she was being forced into a marriage with a 65-year old man. This writer has followed the case very well and conducted an independent investigation into the matter. It can be authoritatively reported here and now that there had been no such incident within the Adamu family.
Samira (as she was nicknamed) had come from a background where she could not be forced into a wedlock. The idea of ‘forced’ marriages is known in cultures other than Samira’s in Northern Nigeria, but even so it usually affects non-literate girls. Western education in the Hausa society, for instance, where cases of ‘forced’ marriages are familiar, has reduced the incident considerably.
Prior to her departure to Europe, Samira had been an easy-going go-getter whose gregariousness saw her through the Northern Beauty pageant where she came second. Her lifestyle and repeatedly expressed aspiration were those of someone exposed enough not to be forced to marry anyone, not least someone old enough to be her grandfather. Samira was part of the all too familiar phenomenon which sees young African men and women moving into more affluent countries in the West in search of a greener pasture.
Such youth employ every means imaginable to cross the Rubicon and enter Europe and North America. Samira too had used such a trick by going through Togo instead of her own country and entering Belgium with fake documents. As an illegal immigrant, she was liable for deportation. The next trick in such circumstance was to try to appeal to sentiment, hence the bogey about forced marriage.
It hurts to write the truth about the dead, especially when that dead was someone related to you even by race. Yet it is important that commentators don’t ignore certain facts in assessing situations. By committing an illegality in the first instance, the 20-year old beauty queen had attracted the ire of a people increasingly becoming intolerant of foreigners, a people whose response to such incidents is often informed by racial considerations.
Despite her obvious misdemeanour, however, Samira didn’t deserve to die. The terrible method used by her captors — suffocation with a pillow — was a heartless act in a country professing to be a bulwark of human rights. The near global outrage is only understandable on this ground. As the saying goes, two wrongs do not make a right.
It was also wrong for our government to ignore the issue, the half-hearted pronouncement by the foreign minister notwithstanding. The Samira affair shouldn’t have been over with the burial of the hapless lady. The government can and should still pursue the matter by insisting on having a full investigation into the circumstances of Samira’s death and securing compensation for her family from the Belgian authorities. Hers was an uncanny episode that can befall any other Nigerian. Note that a lot of other Samiras abound, but their agony is never heard of until something goes unstoppably wrong. An investigation may unfurl other startling details, both about the Samira affair and the larger phenomenon of “body drain” (as opposed to brain drain) taking place daily between our unhappy shores and the perceived lands of milk and honey.
* Published in my column, Melting Pot, in the New Nigerian Weekly today
