In the middle of the night on April 14, 2014, terrorist group, Boko Haram, abducted 276 girls from their secondary school's dormitory in the town of Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. Over the following days, 57 girls managed to escape. For two years, 219 girls remained missing.
Then, in May 2016, the first of the missing students, Aisha Nkeki Ali, was found by the Nigerian military. In October 2016, 21 of the missing girls were released by Boko Haram in a deal brokered by the International Red Cross and the Swiss Government. Two more girls were found by the military in the last few months of 2016. One hundred ninety five girls are still missing.
Words have a power that numbers can never have. During the last four months of 2015, in the heat of the worst of the insurgency, Aisha Muhammed-Oyebode, the CEO of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation (MMF) in Nigeria embarked on a project to interview, photograph, and document the accounts of the parents of each of the missing girls. The MMF's team managed to meet the relatives of 201 of them, and also interviewed some of the 57 escaped girls. The Daughters of Chibok is a collection of these interviews and photographs-a tribute to the girls-which aims to capture their lives before the abduction and to highlight how their families have struggled to cope afterward. For the families of the girls, and for the Chibok community, the trauma of this experience remains a daily reality.
