At first, Stephen Samuel thought he was dreaming.
He heard voices and banging inside the dormitory at the Catholic school in northwest Nigeria where he is a student, he said. He opened his eyes. A gunman was walking past his bed.
Stephen, 18, scrambled under the bed, but it was too late.
The gunman forced him outside, where his sister, some staff members, his three best friends, and hundreds of other children, some as young as 4, were lying in the dirt. Many were clad only in underwear. The gunmen tied the older students’ hands and, after midnight, herded them out through the gates like cattle.
The Nov. 21 abduction of 253 children, along with 12 staff members, from St. Mary’s Catholic School was the largest in Nigeria since the armed group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from the village of Chibok in 2014, prompting a global campaign to free them.
It underscores how insecurity has metastasized across the country despite years of public outcry. Kidnappers often target boarding schools that serve as lifelines for the rural poor, like St. Mary’s, where most of the students come from farming families of modest means.
There has been a chorus of warnings about threats to Christians in Nigeria, fueled partly by a wave of attacks and kidnappings by armed groups and Islamist insurgents over decades. But Nigerians of all faiths have suffered, and there is no clear evidence to show that Christians are attacked more frequently than Muslims, the other main religious group in the country.
While 99 St. Mary’s students were released on Sunday, 154 remain in captivity. Interviews with parents, officials from the Catholic Church and Stephen — who escaped that night — reveal a community shattered by the attack and frustrated by the government’s response. They’ve gotten few answers about the children who are still being held, and many fear the government will continue with its approach of shutting down schools rather than securing them.
On the night of the kidnapping, Markus Philip, a farmer who lives a few miles away from the school, awoke around midnight to the roar of motorcycles. Rushing to his window, he said, he counted nearly 50 bikes passing by, heading toward Papiri, where his only child, Rita, 10, was a boarder at St. Mary’s.
He tried to call several people in Papiri to warn them that bandits were coming, but no one picked up. So he ran to the road and hid, waiting for the motorcycles to come back.
After a long wait, a car with two gunmen on the roof sped past, Mr. Philip said. Then came what sounded like herdsmen driving cows, kicking up dust. As the sound drew closer, his heart plummeted. It was a crowd of children, surrounded by men with guns, on foot and on motorcycles.
“Run!” he heard the men shout in Hausa. “Your parents enrolled you in schools. Run.”
He could not see Rita in the melee. Then, they were gone.
“If I had a gun I would have chased them,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “I would prefer to die instead of my daughter.”
Stephen said he had been part of that crowd of children as they moved on in the dark along the road, siblings carrying the youngest children, passing villages and a market. The kidnappers shuttled back and forth on their motorcycles to speed the pace, ferrying students forward, he said. Stephen’s 13-year-old sister, Fibi, was put on one, and he wondered how she would manage.
Then it was his turn. The motorcycle lagged behind, and when the back wheel sank in a patch of deep sand, Stephen said, he saw his chance to slip off. The man driving didn’t notice and zoomed off into the night.
With his schoolmates and his sister on their way to captivity, Stephen said, he rushed back the way they had come. Eventually, he found a family friend and got a ride home. As he approached he saw his mother, weeping outside with her neighbors. She ran to embrace him.
Parents across the 50 villages served by the school, spread across an area of Niger State near a vast reservoir, were waking up to the news. Most of them are poor farmers, but they had scraped together the fees to send their children to a school with a track record of turning out future doctors and lawyers.
Elizabeth Samuel had been trying to find out what happened to her tall, gentle youngest boy, 16-year-old Lamkusu. At 2 a.m., relatives had knocked on her window, waking her up with news of the abduction. Her husband went to the school and came back carrying Lamkusu’s school bags — the ones she had packed for him at the end of the school break. She couldn’t even look at them.
Over the next few weeks, Mrs. Samuel couldn’t eat or sleep. She heard that Lamkusu had been captured while helping some other children jump a fence to avoid being taken. Initially, she said, “I was angry with him. I said, ‘Why would he do that instead of saving his life?’ But later I said he did a good thing.”
She heard of another family paying a ransom of 30 million Nigerian naira, or about $20,000, for two brothers. But Mrs. Samuel, a community health worker and peanut farmer, had not even managed to pay Lamkusu’s $124 fees for the semester yet.
“I know I can’t afford it,” she said. “I know I will sell everything in my house and it won’t be more than one million.”
Many families expected the military to rescue their children. Instead, parents said, soldiers arrived the next morning and, ignoring what the families told them about the road the kidnappers had taken, instead headed the other way.
“It wasn’t a misunderstanding,” said the Rev. Musa John Gado, the vicar-general of the local diocese, which runs the school. “Only God knows why they decided to do that.”
A Nigerian ministry of defense official did not respond to requests for an explanation.
The state government was no better, according to Father Gado and a spokesman for the bishop. No state government official even visited the area, they said.
“They just count us as villagers — people that come from a remote area,” said Mr. Philip. “We have low education, and nobody can come out and just challenge them.”
After 99 students were released on Sunday, the state government was suddenly visible.
The next day, officials paraded the traumatized, bemused children before news cameras at a media event in the state capital, in the particular choreography familiar to Nigerians from many other high-profile mass abductions. The parents were not informed about their children’s release, but found out from watching the news.
After they saw that some children had been released on social media, Mrs. Samuel and Mr. Philip went to the event, 160 miles away from Papiri, hoping that Lamkusu and Rita would be among them. A convoy of armored cars drew up, and then some buses, out of which poured dozens of children, dressed in new clothes.
Mrs. Samuel said she could not look at the children, because she was so scared Lamkusu would not be among them. But then she turned her head and saw him. “That’s my child!” she exclaimed, and began praising God.
Beside her, Mr. Philip was desperately scanning the children’s faces. But Rita’s was not one of them. The other children told him that Rita was still being held, along with most of the smaller children. They said the kidnappers were feeding her, but he found himself unable to ask much more.
“I started shivering,” he said. “I didn’t know what was even happening. At the end I just sat down and maintained silence. That is the only thing I could do.”
Mrs. Samuel said she was able to hug Lamkusu only briefly before he had to go and have his picture taken for the state governor’s social media account. When the ceremonies were over, she was allowed a few minutes to talk to him.
Lamkusu told her that around 100 kidnappers had made the children trek for hours through the bush. The smallest, he recalled, had been in the back seat and the trunk of the car that Mr. Philip had seen.
He told her that when they arrived at the kidnappers’ camp, he was held with the other older children and teachers in a room so small that they had to take turns sleeping.
On Sunday, Lamkusu said, they were suddenly piled onto motorcycles, taken to a national park and handed over to another group of armed men.
He told his mother that it was only when the men bought them food did they accept that these were soldiers who had come to take them home.
It may be a long time before the children return to class. After the St. Mary’s attack, eight states, including Niger, ordered all schools to close because of the insecurity.
Many parents said they were against this, asking that the government provide security for the school instead.
Politicians’ children are often educated abroad, Mr. Philip noted, but for the less privileged, education is the only hope. “Closing the school is not the means of solving this problem,” he said.
For now, he is pinning his hopes for his daughter’s freedom on faith and desperate prayer. He named her for St. Rita, the patron saint of impossible causes.
“She’s like a goal in my life, more than a goal,” he said. “She’s my hope.”
Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering 25 countries including Nigeria, Congo, the countries in the Sahel region as well as Central Africa.
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