The heart-stopping and definitive account of the rescue mission to free hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls, and their survival, after the 2014 kidnapping spurred a global campaign that showed us the blinding possibilities - for good and ill - of activism in our interconnected world.
In the spring of 2014, American celebrities and their Twitter followers unwittingly turned a group of teenagers into a central prize in America’s War on Terror by retweeting #BringBackOurGirls, a call for the release of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls who’d been kidnapped by the little-known Islamist sect Boko Haram. With just a few words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators, spies, and glory hunters into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a part of Nigeria that had just barely begun to use the internet.
When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As their days in captivity dragged into years, the young women learned to withstand hunger, disease, and torment, and became witnesses and victims of unspeakable brutality. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the path offered them - converting to Islam.
While world’s most sophisticated surveillance technology sputtered out, a covert Swiss agency and its Nigerian recruits worked painstakingly in the shadows to free the girls. A riveting narrative that unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of northern Nigeria to the White House; from clandestine meetings in Khartoum safe houses to century-old luxury hotels on picturesque lakes in the Swiss Alps, #Bring Back Our Girls is a cautionary tale that plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fueled by the power of hashtag advocacy.
