‘We just want to sleep without fear we will be killed in our beds’

In Nigeria’s Plateau state, Martha Dalyop awoke to gunfire one night in December. 

Within minutes, her village was surrounded by armed attackers. 

Despite frantic calls to security forces stationed just 7km away, help arrived five hours later — long after the attackers had disappeared, leaving 37 dead, including Martha’s husband and two children.

“They came from all directions. We had nothing to defend ourselves with,” Martha recounts. “The government says we cannot have weapons to protect ourselves but they also cannot protect us. What are we supposed to do?”

This scenario, repeated hundreds of times across Nigeria’s vulnerable Middle Belt communities, represents more than a national tragedy — it signals a regional crisis with profound implications for West African stability.

Nigeria’s persistent security failures are creating ripple effects across West Africa:

• Refugee flows: Displaced populations from affected communities are increasingly crossing into neighbouring countries, straining regional resources;

• Arms trafficking networks: The weapons supply chains arming attackers in Nigeria connect to militant groups across the Sahel;

• Radicalisation concerns: Communities abandoned by state protection become vulnerable to recruitment by extremist organisations operating across porous borders; and

• Economic disruption: Nigeria’s role as West Africa’s largest economy means agricultural collapse in the “food basket” regions impacts food security throughout the region.

The systematic attacks in Plateau state follow consistent patterns: nighttime raids on sleeping communities, attackers carrying sophisticated weapons, telecommunications mysteriously failing before assaults and security forces arriving hours after the perpetrators have fled.

Nigeria’s Firearms Act effectively prevents law-abiding citizens from possessing defensive weapons while failing to stop the proliferation of illegal arms among attackers.

Ibrahim Musa, a community leader in Bokkos Local Government Area, explains: “When we applied for licences to protect our village, we were denied. The process requires multiple trips to the capital, connections to officials and fees no farmer can afford. Meanwhile, those who attack us carry weapons freely.”

While the Nigerian constitution recognises self-defence rights, firearm regulations make it nearly impossible for threatened communities to legally prepare for defence.

Several nations have developed balanced approaches to firearms regulation that Nigeria could adapt:

The Czech Republic maintains regulated civilian ownership with thorough vetting and training requirements, while Finland recognises the unique security needs of rural populations through specialised licensing

These models demonstrate that regulation, rather than prohibition, can balance legitimate safety concerns with citizens’ protection needs.

Nigeria needs pragmatic reforms that acknowledge both public safety concerns and the reality that state security has consistently failed vulnerable communities:

1. Community protection licensing: Create a legal framework for vulnerable communities to maintain defensive capabilities under strict oversight.
2. Comprehensive safeguards: Implement robust vetting, mandatory training and secure storage requirements.
3. Modernised enforcement: Focus on controlling illegal trafficking rather than restricting legal ownership.
4. Integration with existing security: Formalise community defence structures with clear protocols for coordination with security forces.

“This isn’t about undermining state authority,” emphasises Joseph Lengmang, former director general of the Plateau Peace Building Agency. “It’s about creating regulated pathways for communities to protect themselves when the state cannot reach them in time.”

Since January 2023, over 200 communities across Plateau state have experienced attacks resulting in more than 1 800 deaths. Behind each statistic is a story like Martha’s — families torn apart, livelihoods destroyed and survivors left wondering why their government prohibits them from defending themselves when it cannot provide protection.

James Tsok, who lost his entire family in a 2023 attack in Mangu, puts it simply: “We don’t want to fight anyone. We just want to sleep without fear that we will be killed in our beds with no chance to protect ourselves.”

The world cannot afford to ignore Nigeria’s security collapse. As Africa’s most populous nation and largest economy, Nigeria’s stability is essential for regional security. When communities lose faith in the government’s ability to protect them, the foundations of the state itself begin to crumble.

Redzie Jugo leads the Srarina Initiative for Peace, Justice & Development, working directly with affected communities across Nigeria’s Middle Belt.

The God Edition | The runner’s high is the smug hill on which I’ll die

I don’t have religious convictions. My approach to my own agnosticism is to argue that any all-powerful, ever-loving creator, if they exist, is unlikely to be perturbed by what I, one among the billions of life forms on an ever-increasing number of stars and planets, believe about them. 

It’s more important, I think, for each person to start in their own sphere of influence and behave in a way that they can morally live with themselves among those closest to them.

So then why does having been to church feel so good? 

Is it the sensory delight of smell and sound and sight, as bells tinkle, hymns resound, incense trails and stained glass reflects? Is it the soothing familiarity of the ritual, the call-and-response suggesting communality, solidarity, belonging? Or perhaps it is the sense that all the people around me have willingly taken time out of their busy days and lives to devote a slice of time solely to trying to become a better human?

It’s all of the above for me. And yet I never feel like going to church. In the abstract, sure, but not in practice, at 8.45 on a Sunday morning. 

Another thing I don’t ever feel like doing is getting up at 4.25am three times a week to go running. Still, it’s something I’ve been doing for almost three years now so I don’t suppose I’ll stop anytime soon.

The trick, in the deep midwinter, is to sit bolt upright the minute the alarm goes off, eyes wide open, almost as quickly as the Spanish Inquisition appears at the heretic’s door in a Monty Python film. In July, be sure you’ve actually gone to sleep in your Sunday best, I mean, running kit. 

Do not question yourself, nay, entertain no doubts. Obey. Pick up your shoes and go out to proselytise among the other early risers about the pace, the route and the running injury. 

A good tip from our brothers over on the side of religion: unite against your common enemy. FYI, our common enemy is not cars on the roads — this is, after all, why runners run before rush hour. Our common enemy is cyclists, a word that has almost as many S sounds as satanists. 

Yes, we are insufferable. But not as insufferable as cyclists, surely the prosperity church preacher of the exercise world.

I’ll likely be stoned for this, but it is the hill I’ll die on. 

Did someone say “hill”?

Runners will use literally any conversational segue to shoehorn in an anecdote about their hill training. 

Like church-going, running is a voluntary communal activity that you endure at the time to reap the rewards afterwards. I’ve never yet regretted a run, and probably only one or two church services. 

Also like church, running is free. As free as the air you breathe.

All you have to do is fork out for running shoes, lights, reflective jackets, shirts that don’t chafe your nipples off, industrial-strength sports bras, a GPS-enabled smartwatch, a Strava subscription (the social media app my running partner and also my son calls “Instagram for runners”) and a couple of race entries a year, and you’re all set.

“You don’t need all of that gear just to propel yourself forward on your own two feet,” critics may say, but have you ever tried to pass the collection plate down the pew without putting anything in it? It’s not as easy as it sounds. 

Both running and church services take about an hour — longer for the more ardent devotees — and if you haven’t been for a while, you may be rusty. But loosen your legs a little, even out your breathing, be mindful of where you’re placing your feet and, for the love of God, don’t look at your watch yet, and you’ll soon have smashed the first couple of kays. If you’re already doing this in church, try it on the road next time, it works in either setting.

Somewhere about halfway, muscle memory takes over. You go from wishing you were dead every second to every minute to … entering a zone of contemplation, near-enjoyment even, that can in good light and with the right filter be called meditative. If you’re already doing this on the road, try it in church next time, it works in either setting. 

After church there’s tea. After a run there’s coffee. Both are served with a side of self-righteousness, but the sugary carbs at church beat running gels, hands down.

Runners speak of little but running. They become obsessed and single-minded, boring their friends, convinced of their own moral superiority. Church-goers are almost as fervent about their hobby as runners are. 

And just like that, you’re addicted. 

It’s a better vice than most: you don’t have to go to AA, and you collect Discovery Vitality points like dopamine Smarties from a one-armed bandit. 

 My long-suffering husband has recently completed a couch-to-5km plan, and even went on to compete in a 5km road race. He’s converted and joined the cult. Club. I meant club. It’s only fair: he’s been rubbing his Catholicism off on me for decades. 

I’m so proud I could burst. If the family that prays together stays together, stands to reason that the couple that jogs together snogs together. Regardless, now that he’s drunk the Energade and stepped inside the circle of trust, we get to be revoltingly smug to the power of two. And that’s the really unbeatable runner’s high.

Margot Bertelsmann is a freelance writer and editor and the Mail & Guardian’s proofreader.

The God Edition | Searching among the bones for Homo naledi’s soul

Did Homo naledi have a soul?

That may sound like a very strange question, but let me explain the context.

It is now 10 years since the excavation of H naledi’s skeletal remains in the Cradle of Humankind near Krugersdorp. 

About 1  500 fossilised bones, estimated at about a quarter of a million years old, were recovered from an almost inaccessible recess of the deep and convoluted Rising Star cave system.

How the bones got there remains a mystery; there are no signs of occupation, while natural transport by moving water or predators seems unlikely. 

One (controversial) theory is that H  naledi transported its dead comrades and offspring to the depths of the cave and intentionally buried them, using fire to light the impenetrable darkness and scratching geometric patterns on the cave wall.

The burial claim, rejected as unproven by most peer reviewers a decade ago, was bolstered by a follow-up paper with more compelling evidence published last week.

Naledi was a hominin, a member of a broad genus of species ancestral or closely related to humans. Where it slots into the evolutionary family tree is unclear, as it was a “biological mosaic” of primitive and derived features.

It had a very small brain, at 400-600cc about half the volume of Homo sapiens, and the upper limbs and curved fingers of a climber. But it walked upright with a modern gait on feet like ours.

Reverting to my initial question, what, in the first place, does “soul” mean? A number of ideas, some very ancient, coalesce in this term.

At its most humdrum, as in “there isn’t a soul in the street”, it means a single person.

But it can also carry the idea of a unique individual, with his or her own subjectivity and identity. 

The biologist and author Richard Dawkins argues that used in this way, “soul” denotes one’s personal DNA, which is unrepeatably distinct from everyone else’s.

And it is bound up with human freedom, in the sense that free choice presupposes an awareness of oneself and the range of one’s possibilities — including ethical and devotional options.

The soul is often thought of as the wellspring of moral consciousness, artistic sensibility and the higher emotions, such as agape (selfless love), with its concomitants of service and self-sacrifice; compassion for one’s fellows; and the intuition of a higher cosmic order.

This is integral to the religious conception, which goes much further. Under the strong influence of Aristotelian physics, the Catholic Church views the soul as the “form” or immaterial deep nature of the human being, the vital principle which animates the body and survives bodily death.

 In the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, for example, death is the “loosing of the silver cord” that links soul and body. The Latin “spirare” — to breathe — is the root of the term “spirit”.

No reasoned or scientific evidence as evidence for the soul’s immortality, which is a pure article of faith.

And crucially, the soul is conceived of as peculiar to human beings. 

Down the Christian ages this has been the source of much monstrous behaviour, with the cruel punishment and slave-driving of colonial subjects and animals seen as divested of souls by the Creator.

In our day, after Charles Darwin’s world-transforming proposition that humans are part of, and continuous with, the animal kingdom, claims for a rigid human-animal distinction have a very old-fashioned feel.

Modern biology and anthropology have steadily chipped away at the range of cognitively advanced activities once considered uniquely human, including language and tool-making. 

If anything, we are closer to the older idea that there is a continuum, with humans intermediate in the great ladder of being between the beasts and the angels.

Where does all this leave H  naledi? 

If it intentionally buried its dead, could such a practice point to a very human connection between the living and the departed — even, perhaps, some dim notion of life after death?

And what of the cave markings? If one could show they were a primitive attempt by the creature to assert its presence, rather than the result of natural processes — in other words, to proclaim “I was here”, like hand-prints in other cave settings — would that not also suggest cognitively modern human behaviour in embryo?

Was this “ensoulment” at a lower level, and is it conceivable that the soul itself evolves, as it does in successive lives according to Hindu belief?

Naledi’s evolutionary relationship with H sapiens, if any, is unknown, because it has not proved possible to extract its DNA.

But scholars tend to see the transition from the australopithecine genus, which includes Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), the Taung Child and “Mrs Ples” on the one hand, and the Homo genus on the other, as a crucial leap forward in the development of modern humans, though the nature and timing of that transition is poorly understood.

Is that supposed leap, when australopithecines started on the path to Homo sapiens, conceived as the trigger-point of “ensoulment”? If not, when, where and how in the long journey of human evolution did the switch from animals to humans, and thus the emergence of the human soul, take place?

With their belief in miracles, revealed mysteries, angelic visitations, divine interventions and the like, religions encourage the idea of sudden, inexplicable, world-shaking events.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey argued, for example, that the birth of Jesus had to be seen as a metaphysical singularity standing outside the march of history.

Likewise, Pope Pius XII argued in his encyclical Humani Generis that although our bodies may have undergone evolution from previous biological forms (under divine initiation and guidance), all souls are immediately created by God.

Catholics like to argue that they have never denied the theory of evolution, in contrast with the mainly American biblical literalists of “Young Earth Creation” beliefs, who hold that the world is between 6  000 and 10  000 years old.

The latter would dismiss the estimated age of the Naledi bones — between 335  000 and 236  000 years — as a plot by atheistic scientists to undermine the credibility of “inerrant” scriptures, including the folk tales of the snake in the Garden, Noah’s Ark, Jonah’s whale and the rest of the nursery school library.

The Catholic Church has made an effort to reconcile faith and science. But scholars do not see evolution as a sudden leap or series of leaps. They see it, rather, as an extremely slow process involving the gradual interchange and admixture of genes from many hominid species, referred to in the current literature as “a braided stream”.

The revolutionary new technology of ancient DNA extraction and analysis has shown that all modern Europeans have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, for example, while East Asians carry some genes of a mysterious newly discovered hominid species dubbed “Denisovans”.

A further difference is that many scientists would not separate body and soul as being of a different “substance”, shaped by different creative forces, in the manner of Catholic theology.

They would hold that H  Naledi’s soul, its intrinsic personality and behaviour, would have been subject to the same evolutionary drivers as its hands and feet.

Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.

The God Edition | Making a meal of religion

For those who are not true believers religion can be terribly confusing. Some would say incomprehensible. Others would say mystifying. The less tolerant would say unbelievable.

There are tomes, screeds, scrolls, scriptures to be studied, interpreted and memorised. There are strict rules to be obeyed.

Sins to be avoided and punishments to be absorbed. There are songs to sing, chants to repeat, clothing edicts to be adhered to, places of worship to be attended, ceremonies to be held. Like I said, it is confusing and often overwhelming.

The one element that is not open to interpretation is the role that food plays in religion. How can gluttony be a sin when there is such a tempting array of food associated with the various religions? And we are not talking about the fish and loaves or the communion wafer here.

We need look no further than Easter. For the gluttons this is a time to tuck the bib into our collars and let the belt out a notch or two. There is no better way to start the day than with a nicely toasted hot cross bun slathered with butter.

Some parents might really need the strong cup of coffee that goes so well with the buns because they forgot to hide the Easter eggs in the garden for the children and had to rush around frantically before the brats wake up and see that the Easter bunny is actually an unshaven, grumpy guy in a tatty dressing gown.

And they might also see the bleary bunny pocketing all the candy-coated ones that look so convincingly like hen’s eggs.

After coping with the sugar rush it is time to move on to lunch with pickled fish taking pride of place on the table, perhaps with some rice or crusty bread and a nice leafy salad. The slightly sweet generously spiced fish with lots of onions is a proudly South African version of the traditional Easter Sunday fish menu. 

There are some upstarts in Johannesburg who are convinced they can make pickled fish better than the aunties on the Cape Flats, but I put my faith in the Woolies offering.

As the gluttons stifle a belch and collapse on the couch for an afternoon nap they might even spare a moment to reflect on the religious significance of the three Easter staples.

A month of fasting, with no food from sunrise to sunset, is enough to make most gluttons sick to their stomachs. I have heard some muttered complaints, or perhaps that is the growling stomachs, but generally I am amazed at how calmly Muslims cope with this lengthy time of dietary restrictions. I might even hold out for a day or two knowing that a plate of sweet dates would be waiting for me as the sun goes down.

There is no doubt that the mountain of delicious mutton biryani that awaits at the end of the month makes all the hunger worthwhile. 

The devious gluttons carry on with their normal eating habits and then towards the end of the month begin their relentless campaign of hints, pleas and outright begging until a large tupperware of those delicious, beautifully decorated little biscuits appears in the office.

The more hardcore gluttons will down their knives and forks at the thought of a meat-free menu, and shudder at the mention of the stricter vegan option. It is their loss because they miss out on the beguiling combination of vegetables, pulses, grains and spices enjoyed by members of the Hindu faith.

There are endless clever ways to transform these simple ingredients into delicious meals, but it is the simplest that is my go-to lunchtime favourite: dhal and rice. Easy to make and satisfying to eat, especially with some kumquat pickle and a side order of flaky, buttery roti.

It seems ridiculous that with all this fabulous food on offer, many of the people who are strict adherents of these religions still prefer the bitter taste of conflict. Religious wars have left a bloody trail throughout history and the shocking situation in Gaza is the latest senseless human tragedy. 

Israeli and Palestinian diets are similar in many ways, but it would be overly optimistic to think that sharing a meal of falafel in pita with all the trimmings is going to do anything to resolve this conflict.

But don’t lose faith.

Way back in 2012, chefs and business partners Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, who grew up on different sides of the divided city, had this to say in their book, Jerusalem: “It takes a giant leap of faith, but we are happy to take it — what have we got to lose? — to imagine that hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will.”

Bob Marley said: “A hungry man is an angry man,” but Rastafarians generally have a peace-loving reputation. The ganja probably helps with this. They adhere to one of the strictest vegetarian diets. Vegetables, fruit and grains, prepared without salt. No meat, maybe some fish but no shellfish. No milk or coffee, everything natural and unprocessed.

This is a diet probably best enjoyed in a ramshackle house in the hills above Kingston nestled in a dense growth of all the trees and plants that provide the vegetables, fruit and grains. The soundtrack would be strictly reggae, with the venerable Max Romeo, who died this week, providing some religious inspiration.

“I’m gonna put on an iron shirt and chase the devil out of Earth

“I’m gonna send him to outer space to find another race.”

It is tempting to believe that even all those years ago Max had Elon Musk in mind when he wrote these words.