Voice of the Martyrs spoke to Nigerian pastor Emmanuel Maigari about his bold witness during and after captivity last year. Several thousand people were kidnapped in Kaduna state in northern Nigeria last year and the number is expected to increase this year
Pastor Emmanuel Maigairi had just finished praying with his wife and mother-in-law on the evening of February 27 last year, when the sound of gunfire erupted outside their home in Nigeria’s Kaduna State. Within minutes, nearly three dozen Fulani Islamic militants had burst into the house.
The militants ripped the curtains from the windows and used them to bind and blindfold Emmanuel, his wife, Ladi, and his mother-in-law. The attackers then took their phones and grabbed a box containing money that belonged to the pastor’s church.
“You are going to suffer in the bush,” the group’s leader said, “and if we like, we might kill you.”
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But Emmanuel was unfazed by the militant’s threat. “I have given myself over to God,” he said boldly, “and I am ready to die.”
The men then led their captives into the forest.
The kidnapping of Emmanuel and his family is just one of many that have occurred in northern Nigeria in recent years. In Kaduna State, several thousand were kidnapped last year, and frontline workers expect that number to be even higher this year.
“Nowhere in northern Nigeria is safe any more,” a frontline worker said. “People can no longer move about freely because kidnapping is on the rise. People are not even safe in their own homes, and people are traumatised every day because of the incessant kidnappings.” Just weeks before kidnapping Emmanuel and his family, the militants burned the pastor’s previous house in an attack on his village.
As the militants led their captives deeper into the forest, Ladi’s mother began to slow their progress.
Emmanuel begged the men to let her go, but they refused. Becoming more frustrated with her slow pace, one of the captors hit her on the head with the butt of his gun and another cut her on the back of her neck with a machete, leaving her for dead.
About an hour and a half later, the militants decided Ladi was also expendable. Though they initially discussed killing her, they eventually released her and told her how to find her way home. Ladi’s mother, who had been left behind earlier, also survived the ordeal.
Emmanuel walked on, unsure whether he would ever see his family again.
In the kidnappers’ camp
After walking for hours, Emmanuel finally arrived at the kidnappers’ camp, where he began the most difficult month of his life. During the daytime, he was bound, blindfolded and guarded by armed militants. At night, he and other kidnapping victims slept on the ground, where maggots crawled around their hands and feet.
“Our abductors used to go into town and buy drinks in plastic bottles,” Emmanuel said. “We would beg for the empty bottles and use them as pillows so the worms would not be able to enter our ears.”
Emmanuel’s captors beat him frequently, sometimes so severely that others in the camp feared he had been killed. The militants broke his ribs on his right side, broke a finger on his left hand and cut him with a machete on his lower back.
“The beating was a compulsory thing,” he said. “On Sundays, they beat me because I am a pastor. There was a day they saw me praying, and they almost beat me to death. I did not even know that I had fainted. After three days, I heard [some of the other] captives talking behind our shed. They said they thought I had died from the beating. They said the fact that I survived proves there is a God.”
The militants demanded 5 million naira (R204 000) from Emmanuel’s family, threatening to kill him if they wouldn’t pay. They took Emmanuel and the other captives to a bone yard to show them what would happen if their ransoms were not paid.
Amid the bones, the captives saw the skeleton of a 3-month-old baby. The militants boasted about having shot the infant while being carried on his mother’s back. They claimed to have removed the child’s eyes and sent them to his father.
Emmanuel’s captors threatened similar atrocities against him if his family did not meet their demands. But Emmanuel was unmoved. “If God says I will die here, then that will be my fate,” he told them. “If God says I will live, then I will live.”
Emmanuel trusted God to sustain him through whatever the militants had planned. “I had faith that God was there with me,” he said. “I prayed constantly. If not for the help of God, I would have been beaten to death. If not for God’s grace, I would have died.”
After a month and a day in the militants’ camp, Emmanuel was finally released and returned to his family. He wept with joy as his blindfold was removed and his eyes gradually adjusted to the light.
Depending on God
Following his release, Emmanuel learned that his family’s abduction had been arranged by the leader of his village. He hoped to silence Emmanuel’s Christian witness.
“He does not like hearing the Gospel,” Emmanuel explained. “He thought that kidnapping a pastor would bring him good money.”
The community leader was arrested, but he was detained for only two months. Emmanuel, meanwhile, resumed his pastoral duties in the same community where he and his family were attacked and abducted; he knows his community needs the Gospel.
“There was a day someone asked me to leave my station because of what happened,” Emmanuel recalled. “I said, ‘If I leave there, which pastor will want to serve in this community? If I can endure it, it will be an example to others.’”
Emmanuel has sometimes struggled with fear since his kidnapping and monthlong detention. But he takes encouragement from Psalm 23 and trusts that God will take care of him even if he is persecuted again.
“If I hear a gunshot, I get scared,” he said. “It is as if that day is happening all over again. But when that happens, I pray. I depend on God. I know that persecution is a part of the Christian life. We who are Christians will suffer. If this doesn’t happen to us, the Bible is not fulfilled.”
Emmanuel was reassigned to a different church recently, but he still sees his kidnappers occasionally. Surprisingly, he does not feel fearful or angry when he sees them. “All I can do is pray that God touches them,” he said. “Forgiving them is necessary because God has forgiven me. If I know God, if I know Jesus Christ, I must forgive them.”
Emmanuel’s message for his brothers and sisters in Christ around the world is the same truth that sustained him during those long days in the militants’ camp: “Depend on God in every situation.”
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