When terrorists in northern Nigeria killed 18 staff, students and associates of one of the region’s universities in April 2012, the target was not Christians, Muslims or any other section of the institutional community — it was higher education itself.
This is the view of Abubakar Rasheed, vice chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, who described in an early May podcast interview with Times Higher Education how his institution has been shaped by the terrible events that left three of his close friends and colleagues of 30 years dead “for no reason other than the fact that they happened to be in the wrong place that day”.
“In the morning hours of the day, Christian worshippers in the university were attacked and 18 of them were murdered — many were professors, some were students, some were friends of the university who had come to what was supposed to be a safe environment to worship on Sunday,” recalls Prof. Rasheed.
Islamic extremists hoping to force a divide between the institution’s different communities carried out the attack, he says, “but the university community was not deceived”. Despite leaving “a very serious dent”, the incident strengthened the university and brought its community closer together, says Rasheed. The institution now attracts more government funding, has created more programmes, and has increased the size of its academic faculty, including the number of Christians, since the attack.
“If there is anything positive that emerged, it’s the fact that we as a community of knowledge seekers, and knowledge disseminators… have realised that we have to work together to understand that the main objective of the terrorists… is to divide us,” he says. “If they had succeeded in dividing our university community along religious lines two years ago… that division would have affected more and more institutions in the country.”
Instead, the academic community’s “common human properties have become more important than the differences that the terrorists want to exploit”.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)