The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold Read Free Book Online Page B

wrecked village about a mile down the road from Wase Rock’s two humps. The mud walls of a school still stood, but nothing else. The village had also lost all its corn, which had been just about ready for harvest. The cornstalks’ height had hidden the flash flood’s monstrous wave, so no one had time to run, Fakcit said. Sheled me to a fallen log in a clearing. I looked down and saw that she was barefoot. The flood had taken her shoes. The village gathered around her to listen as we talked. Two men were fixing a bicycle; the others were sipping from gourds filled with home brew. The only thing to do was drink, and they weaved around the village dazed with loss.
    Like most of the communities at the edge of town, Fakcit’swas Christian—a fact anyone could tell from the potent smell of sour mash fermenting in the sun nearby; most Nigerian Muslims do not drink alcohol. There were other traits that sometimes told Muslim from Christian. Fakcit belonged to one of the historically non-Muslim hill tribes, and although it was a generalization (and sometimes inaccurate), they tended to be shorter and broader than theirrivals, the ethnic Fulanis, who looked taller and more angular, like the Emir of Wase. Many carried the spare air of nomads from the arid north, even though they had settled one hundred years ago.
    In many of Nigeria’s Muslim towns, Christians, like other outsiders, historically had to live outside the city walls, and in some cases they still do. The legacy of being an ethnic minority forced tothe edge of town had embittered Fakcit. “The Muslims call us fools,” she said. Three years earlier, a Muslim mob killed her father and burned this village to the ground. As the Christians sat gathered around a bicycle, two nomadic herdsmen—willowy Fulanis—walked quietly through the clearing and called greetings to the flood victims. As northern nomads, they were undoubtedlyMuslims, yet when Iwent to speak to them I noticed a curious marking on one man’s face.
    His tattooed cheek bore an indigo Coptic cross. I asked him about its origins; he shrugged and smiled. He did not remember receiving the mark as a child, nor did he know the symbol’s history. Maybe his nomadic ancestors had once belonged to the ancient Christian kingdoms of Nubia, in northern Sudan. Maybe when the last of theNubian kingdoms fell to Muslim armies in 1504, his kinsfolk converted to Islam. Maybe over the past five hundred years, his ancestors had migrated here to the southwest, two thousand miles from northern Sudan, bringing their cows and what they carried on their bodies: this symbol of their former faith.
    Cross tattoo or no, he belonged to the Muslim herders who had come to blows with the Christiansin the past several years. Despite Fakcit Alexander’s grumbling, the flood seemed to have brought the two groups together—at least for the moment—or else there was simply nothing left to lose, nothing over which to fight. Although the flood had killed most of their cattle, the nomads’ most pressing problem was water. For the past several years the land had become so desiccated that the herdsmenhad begun to dig boreholes right at the edge of the river, where it was easiest to hit water—and most destructive to the bank. The farmers of Fakcit’s village also planted corn right to the water’s edge. Overfarming and overgrazing had destroyed the riverbank, so that when the flood came, the bank fell all the faster. This was one way in which human error compounded environmental pressures. Practically,the village was ruined, spent; but Fakcit and her fellow villagers were determined to stay.
    “This place is our father’s land,” Fakcit said. “This place is our place.” The flood brought with it plagues of insects and illness, including a malaria outbreak. 1 Each of Fakcit’s eight children had contracted malaria from sleeping in the open air, even the baby; she pulled a warm, dozing lump from thecloth on her back. “They’re