Letter from Africa: Custody battle after Boko Haram child kidnap

In our series of letters by African journalists, Nigerian novelist and writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani looks a mother's desperate battle to recover her kidnapped toddler.

For many victims of the Boko Haram insurgency in north-eastern Nigeria, the tragedy never seems to end. It simply takes on new dimensions.
Take the case of 32-year-old Maria David Zaya, whose two-year-old daughter, Precious, was kidnapped by militants of the Islamist group in September 2014, while she was visiting her in-laws in Madagali in Adamawa state.


Precious was taken captive along with six other children and two women who lived in the same neighbourhood.
Two weeks later, one of the women escaped.
She told Mrs Zaya that Precious had been quite favoured in captivity because of her light skin and pretty face, and given to one of the wives of an "amir", a Boko Haram commander, who did not have any children of her own.

Distressed about the thought of not seeing her daughter ever again, Mrs Zaya returned to Port Harcourt, in the southern state of Rivers, where her husband, David, works as a security man.
Shortly after, she gave birth to her second child, a boy named Emma.
Seven months after she returned, Mrs Zaya received some unexpected good news: the Nigerian military had rescued a number of Boko Haram captives from the Sambisa forest, and taken them to the Malkohi camp for displaced people in Yola, the main city in Adamawa.
"One of my neighbours in the village saw my daughter and some of the other six missing children there and called me to come quickly," said Mrs Zaya.
But by the time she arrived, Precious had disappeared.

'I recognised her'

After three months of shuttling between various government, military and NGO offices, with the assistance of a Red Cross official, Mrs Zaya finally located her daughter at the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna, where legitimate wives of Boko Haram members (not those forcefully married) were being held with their children for a debriefing process.
"When I saw Precious, she was wearing a headscarf but I recognised her," Mrs Zaya said.
"She continued following me and staring at me."