Recently over 500 Catholics died at the hands of a Muslim mob in Northern Nigeria. It would be easy to understand the killings simply as an expression of a wider Muslim intolerance of Christians. But comment by local Catholic bishops suggested a broader context.
The Bishop of Jos, where the massacre took place, situated it in a struggle between Muslims and Christians over which religion was more powerful. The Archbishop of Abuja spoke of wider social, economic and tribal roots. In communal fighting in January, too, many people had been killed, the majority Muslim. The present violence may have been planned as a revenge attack, both tribal and religious in character.
Such complex tensions and conflicts are often better understood through literary representation than through analysis. One of the stories in Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (Abacus, 2008)
represents the subtle interplay of religious faith, tribal loyalties, traditional religion and group identity in Nigerian society. Akpan is a Jesuit priest, and his confronting stories describe dire situations through the eyes of children.
'Luxurious Hearses' describes a bus trip on which people are fleeing from a massacre of Christians by Muslims in the north of Nigeria. The central character is Jubal, a 16-year-old boy baptised Catholic in the South, but raised a devout Muslim in the North. He had bravely, almost proudly, endured the amputation of his hand for stealing a goat, and had stood by silently as his brother Yusuf, an outspoken Pentecostal Christian, was stoned to death.
During the riot Jubal was falsely denounced as a traitor to Islam by friends who owed him money. He was beaten, but rescued and protected by a Muslim teacher and by Pentecostal Christians whom the teacher was also harbouring. The latter bought a bus ticket for him, advising him to conceal his amputated hand and his religion.
The bus trip was confusing for Jubal. It is interminable for the reader, because it represents a series of desultory conversations, often prompted by scenes of violence shown on the television set. Each exchange is a potential threat to Jubal's life. Different passengers appeal to traditional charms, rosaries, holy water, speaking in tongues, and to democratic process.
Each speaker momentarily wins favour, only to be supplanted by another. The power of Islam is recognised by the pact made not even to mention it.
Each of these interventions calls into question Jubal's certainties as he warms to claims on behalf of religious and political settlements by a traditional tribal chief, a charismatic Christian, a devout Catholic woman and a soldier who had fought and been crazed by service in Liberia. But their behaviour inevitably betrays their rhetoric.
Finally, moved by the destruction of mosques in reprisal attacks in the south of the country, Jubal forgets himself and points to the screen with his damaged arm. He then becomes the centre of attention and unites all the passengers in murderous hatred except the crazed soldier. Both Jubal and the soldier are beaten and killed.
In this climactic scene Akpan's level prose becomes lyrical as he describes Jubal's passage from confusion to certainty about his identity:
'They told him to lift up his cut wrist so that Muhammad would come to his help. He did not argue. He obliged them, raising he stump as straight and as high as he could.'
Knowing full well that these people were not going to spare him, he returned to his God of Islam, the one he truly knew, although this journey had permanently altered his fanatic worldview. He flushed the desire to be a Christian from his soul.
With all he had seen and experienced, he could not forget the sources of Allah's help during his flight. He raised his stump for Mallam Abdullahi and his family, for showing him another way. He raised it to celebrate the Christians who had held a Muslim's prayer mats for him. He raised it for those northerners who had lived their whole lives in the south, who were struggling, like him, with the unsettling prospects of going home for the first time.
He raised his arm for Yusuf, who refused, when the crucial moment came, to abandon his faith; he felt one with him though they belonged to different faiths and worlds now. He saw the stump as the testimony of his desire to follow Allah wherever he led him, of his yearning for oneness with him.
In his extremity Jubal is drawn beyond the level of group identity, where religious and political ideas were located on the bus, to a deeper personal level of a compassionate faith. It suggests that to see the recent killings in Nigeria as simply the expression of the character of Islam or of Christianity would be as dangerously superficial as were the conversations on the bus.
Jubal's story points both to the causes of communal violence and to the level at which it might be resolved. For Christians there is no adequate response other than the heroic call to love one's enemies.
Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.