After the June 13–14 attacks on Yelewata, an agrarian community in Guma Local Government Area (LGA) of Benue State, by armed men the villagers described as Fulani herdsmen, survivors tell FIJ’s EMMANUEL UTI how they made it out alive and what survival now means for them.
Iorbun Aondo couldn’t see the attackers, but he heard everything. The visually impaired grandfather was resting when the first gunshot cracked through the night sky in Yelewata on June 13. At the end of the massacre, life became harder than it already was for him.
Before the attack, Aondo lived a modest but decent life. As part of Yelewata’s agrarian community, his family worked the land, grew their own food and stored their harvests in the house. Fluted pumpkin vines curled up trellises that they had built around the yard. It was an everyday sight, but on that fateful night, it became a lifeline.
Although Aondo is blind, he never felt like a burden. His family’s care wrapped around him like a second skin. They didn’t have much, but they did not need to rely on the benevolence of well-meaning people for him to have a decent life. Now, that has changed.
Aondo told FIJ that his family quickly ran into the bush when the Fulani came, leaving all they had behind. When they got to his house, he said, they thought the family was still shoehorned inside out of fear, before they set it ablaze.
“They left the bush and focused on the houses where people were. They thought we were there, but we had run outside. Some of my people hid under the fluted pumpkin leaves, while some remained in the bush until the break of dawn,” Aondo told FIJ.
Campers at the IDP camp at the Ultra International Modern Market in Makurdi, on June 20. Photo credit: Emmanuel Uti/FIJ Nigeria
When the day broke, his family came together and left for Daudu, a nearby village. At first, they resisted the idea of going to an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp at the Ultra International Modern Market in Makurdi, where over 3,000 people were camped in. They refused the buses that arrived to take survivors of the Yelewata massacre to Makurdi. But they changed their minds when they faced their new reality.
“Because we didn’t have any place to go to, we moved to the IDP camp. My building was burnt to the ground. But I am here with my wives and kids,” he said.
KILLING THE LIVING
Grace Joseph, a woman in her sixties, may still have her life but its course has been permanently altered by the actions of the herdsmen who attacked Yelewata and the inactions of the government. Now, she has nothing — absolutely nothing — to live on except for what she gets at the IDP camp, which cannot be enough.
Despite the weight of loss, Grace holds on to one big resolve: she will return to Yelewata. No matter what happens, she told FIJ, she and her family will go back to their ancestral home. Even if that means starting from scratch. Even if that means starting with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the pain in their hearts.
Grace Joseph while speaking with FIJ on June 20. Photo credit: Emmanuel Uti/FIJ Nigeria
She and her family had already left their house for a primary school before the assailants struck but they did not expect the ferociousness they came with. Had they expected it, they would have gone to the primary school with a few clothes other than the ones they donned and the wrappers they went along with.
“My house was burnt totally and nothing is left of it,” Joseph told FIJ. “We have no property, only our lives. If everything is over, we will leave the IDP camp and go back home.”
But going back is no simple act. It is not just the ruins she will face, but the memories etched in them.
That night, while Grace and her family hid at the school, her elder brother and his entire household of 10 were killed in the most horrific way, their bodies charred beyond recognition inside their house.
To return to Yelewata is to walk through the shadows of that memory every day. She will relive what happened, and for many days, think of the pains her brother and his family went through before dying. And yet, she will go back. That, she says, is the price she must pay for surviving.
DISPLACED ONCE AGAIN
Mary Aondohembe is a 27-year-old woman with four kids. She now lives with her children at the IDP camp, and though it is tough, her sufferings will be short-lived, she says.
Although she did not lose anyone to the massacre, the price she must pay if she and her family are to survive is to abandon Benue State completely. Her reasons are not unfounded. Before the attack on Yelewata, she was a Tiv woman living in a different market in Guma LGA. But armed Fulani men forced her to leave the market after they attacked it and its environs.
The next place Mary and her kids sought refuge in was Yelewata. But she would not stay long there. The same attackers who made her a refugee in Yelewata sent her packing to the IDP camp at Gboko Road in Makurdi.
In all of this, she is hopeful. After the first displacement, Mary’s husband left Benue for Kogi to raise money for the family. She says that when he has saved enough, he will come and take her and their children to a place with stability in Kogi.
“That is the plan. My husband has gone to make money for us. He will soon come and relocate us to Kogi State,” Mary told FIJ.
A house destroyed in Yelewata by the Fulani herdsmen. Photo credit: Emmanuel Uti/FIJ Nigeria
NO PROBLEM, NO CHILDREN
Josephine Aondona and her husband were alone in their house when the armed Fulani herders attacked Yelewata on June 13. How she and her husband did not die might be classified as a miracle, even she thinks so. But she has a reason, a quiet calculation that, in hindsight, may have saved their lives even without them attempting to run.
When the herders started attacking Yelewata, she and her husband thought of running away, but the imagined terror of what was happening outside froze them in place. The chaos outside was deafening; bullets slicing through the air, screams in the distance, and footsteps too close for comfort.
Then came the sound that truly paralysed them: an armed man at their doorstep.
Women and children at the IDP camp at the Ultra International Modern Market in Makurdi, on June 20. Photo credit: Emmanuel Uti/FIJ Nigeria
“He knocked. He struck the door several times. But when it didn’t open, and no one inside made a sound, he must have assumed the house was empty,” Josephine told FIJ.
“While he must have concluded that the occupants of the house had decided to pass the night at the primary school, our saving grace was that our kids weren’t with us. They were with my mother-in-law at Daudu.”
They remained hidden in their house, motionless and quiet, as the night burned outside their walls. Not until well past 3 am, when the sounds of violence faded and soldiers came knocking, did they finally step out of the darkness.
When FIJ asked Josephine why she and her husband lived apart from their children, she explained the hard truth behind their decision.
“It’s a painful trade-off,” she said. “But that’s the kind of life we live now. The attacks have become so frequent, so ruthless, that people send their children away to stay with relatives outside Yelewata. That way, if they come again, at least the children have a chance.”
MARKS OF A SURVIVOR
Anyone who saw Mary Emmanuel at the IDP camp on June 20 would instantly recognise her for who she was — a survivor. Draped in nothing but a wrapper, a part of her back and scapula were bandaged. Her wounds told their own story.
When armed herders descended on Yelewata, Mary didn’t care if she lived or died. What she did care about was how she would die. And burning alive was not an option.
That night, like many others displaced from their homes, Mary had taken shelter with her children inside a shop at Yelewata’s New Market. But the killers found it. And when they set the shop ablaze, flames licking at the wooden frames and black smoke choking the air, Mary made a choice.
Mary Emmanuel on June 20. Photo credit: Emmanuel Uti/FIJ Nigeria
“I would rather be shot than burned,” she told FIJ. “So, I did whatever I had to do to get out alive.”
In the heat and chaos, she found a way out with some of her children. She lost two of them to the attack immediately.
MEMOIRS OF CARNAGE
FIJ didn’t plan to speak with Terhemba Iormba that day in Yelewata but grief has a way of demanding to be heard.
Iormba had lost eight members of his family in the attack: two wives, a sister, two brothers and three of his children. Among the dead was Matthew Iormba, a young pharmacist who had just completed the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) after studying at the University of Jos.
Some of Iormba’s other children were spared only because they were away at school in Makurdi and wouldn’t return home until the end of term. While he is grappling with his profound loss and thinking of what next to do, a clear resolve in his mind is that he must sojourn to another land, at least for the meantime.
“As it stands, I will leave for another place. I have the place in mind,” Iormba told FIJ.
“I returned in 2018 but this place is not peaceful. There have been several attacks and no one is doing anything about it.”
Not far from him stood his brother, Fidelis Adidi, who had lost four sons and a wife in the massacre. He had been in the same shop as Ajah, the man whose story FIJ told in the first part of this series. When the bullets started flying, the shop where his wife and sons slept in was among the first to be hit.
He said his family couldn’t come outside. He did not answer many questions, except when he chimed in to his brother’s response to FIJ. He was numb.
“My other wife and another son were injured,” Adidi told FIJ. “Everything I had was burnt both at home and in that store.”
John Joor, another man who arrived while FIJ was speaking to one of the chiefs in the community, said he hung at the roof of his house where he watched the assailants kill some members of his family. By the following morning, the official count of his dead relatives had gone up to 12.
“We were in the house when the attack happened. I hung on the skeleton of the house but they killed so many people inside the house. They didn’t know I was there. When they had killed many of us, they then left,” Joor told FIJ.
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