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out. I visited retired army general Mohammed Shuwa, known for his role in Nigeria’s civil war, at his home in the city and he showed me the Beretta handgun he carried because he feared that even he could one day be targeted. He was right. Later that year, gunmen shot him dead.
    After we landed in Maiduguri for the military tour in June 2013, it was difficult to draw any firm conclusions about whether the situation in the city had significantly changed, with soldiers keeping us on a tight leash. We were corralled on a military base and an erratic form of show-and-tell began, with military officers making presentations that were haphazard and contradictory. Inside a meeting room, they first showed us slides that explained characteristics of the region as well as aspects of Boko Haram. We were then rushed around to different areas of the base so soldiers could present weapons to us supposedly seized from insurgents. They included rudimentary weapons such as daggers and bows and arrows, but also AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns to be mounted on 4×4s that one military official called anti-aircraft guns. Asked repeatedly where the insurgents were obtaining these weapons, military officials informed us that they did not know, but said most of the arms seemed to have been of the type that would typically come from the former Soviet bloc. There had also been concern that the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 and resulting chaos had led to looted weapons being sold across the region, helping further arm extremist groups.Boko Haram elements may have benefited. A Nigerian military arms depot at a barracks in the town of Monguno had been raided as well.
    We were hurried along, limiting the number of questions that could be asked but assured there would be time for further discussion later, then told to board buses for the drive deeper into the north-east towards the villages of Marte and Kirenowa, the area where insurgents were said to have set up a camp later cleared out by soldiers. The road would pass through increasingly remote territory as we travelled in the direction of Lake Chad, and we were soon moving through flat, semi-desert landscape, only acacia trees, shrub and occasional patches of grass breaking up the dull, grey sand for long stretches at a time. A tiny village sometimes made of thatched huts, others with homes of concrete or brick, would periodically come into view. It felt in some ways as if we were travelling back in time. The silent, wide-open savannah can seem like a separate country altogether compared to a place like Lagos, the heaving economic capital in Nigeria’s south-west, or even nearby Maiduguri. As we moved closer to Lake Chad, the patches of grass became more frequent, the trees more prevalent. The rainy season had not yet fully begun, though it would soon come and would alter the landscape.
    During the journey, the military asked that we wear flak jackets as a precaution, but, to our surprise, the route seemed to pose little risk. We reached a military base after driving for a few hours, the road having become so eroded in one stretch that we veered off to the side and rumbled across the sand, dust billowing around our convoy. When we entered the base, Lieutenant-Colonel Gabriel Olufemi Olorunyomi stood before maps and a large, hand-drawn diagram, then launched into a choppy explanation of how the army had retaken control of the area from Boko Haram. According to the narrative he laid out, Boko Haram members arrived in the area and preached to the local people that ‘everything that has to do with government is haram’ and forced girls to marry them. Laterthey sought to forcefully take control of areas of Marte, burning a local government secretariat, the governor’s lodge and a church, while also destroying a hospital and looting drugs from it. He said they even raised their own flag in place of Nigeria’s – an echo of one of the points made by