An Oasis of Hope in the Desert of Jos Carnage

By Farooq Kperogi The heart-rending mass massacres in and around Jos unfolded while I was racing to meet a book chapter deadline, so I misse...

By Farooq Kperogi

The heart-rending mass massacres in and around Jos unfolded while I was racing to meet a book chapter deadline, so I missed the news as it broke. When I finally caught up, one report stood out amid the carnage. 

In an April 1 story by Daily Trust, a Muslim man, Sa’idu Murtala, recounted how his Christian neighbor hid him in his wife’s room, fed him, asked him to stay the night, and called his father to pick him up the next day.

 “He knows I am a Muslim because I used to do my business there every day and leave for my area,” Murtala said. “He knows my faith… I will never forget this man who saved my life.”

That account recalls the actions of Abubakar Abdullahi, the imam who sheltered 262 Christians in Nghar Yelwa, Barkin Ladi, Plateau State in June 2018. At the risk of his own life, he hid them in his mosque and home while armed attackers searched for them. 

These moments do not cancel the brutality that surrounds them, but they complicate it. They expose a stubborn truth about human nature: the same social world that inspires and justifies cruelty also contains the resources for inner moral courage.

Hatred depends on abstraction. It thrives when people are reduced to categories, to members of out-groups, when “Muslim” or “Christian” or “other” replaces the irreducible fact of a person. Once that substitution is complete, violence becomes easier to justify and easier to repeat.

 Empathy, by contrast, requires a reversal. It asks us to encounter individuals as individuals, to recognize in them a life that is continuous with our own. The neighbor who hides you from the lethal danger of people who are like him or her is not thinking in categories; he or she is responding to an intrinsic human presence that interrupts the logic of group hatred.

I learned a version of this, awkwardly, when I first arrived in the United States more than two decades ago. I befriended a man who turned out to be a racist skinhead. (Skinheads are white supremacist and anti-immigrant bigots who literally shave their heads clean). I did not know what that meant at the time. Others knew and were alarmed, but they hesitated to tell me. 

Eventually, a Black American warned me that I was putting myself at risk. By then, the friendship had already formed. We got along easily. He was attentive, respectful, generous and, in his dealings with me, disarmingly kind. Yet he held crude, hostile views about Black people as a group. I was, in his words, “different.”

The contradiction is instructive. His prejudice rested on inherited prejudice, not on lived experience. I was the first Black person he had known closely, and that proximity disrupted the fiction that sustained his beliefs.

 When I asked why I was “different,” he had no coherent, noteworthy response. There was none to give. The category had failed in the face of the person.

My own role in that encounter was not moral heroism but ignorance. Had I known the cultural meaning of “skinhead,” I would not have touched him with a ten-foot pole. That ignorance, accidental as it was, allowed me to meet him without the filter of fear or prior judgment. It does not excuse his views, of course, but it reveals how fragile they were in the face of ordinary human contact.

What these stories suggest is not a sentimental claim that individuals are always better than their groups. It is that moral perception begins at the level of the individual. Group identities can organize solidarity, but they can also homogenize perception and permit harm. When they do, the corrective is not abstraction but attention, that is, the discipline of seeing people as everyday humans first.

The Christian neighbor in Jos did not resolve the larger conflict. The imam who sheltered Christians did not end bloodstained communal violence. But each act unsettled the moral grammar that makes such violence possible. 

They affirmed that before anyone is a member of a stereotypical group, they are a life, a friend, a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a relative, etc. That recognition can still, even in the worst moments, reorder what we think we are permitted to do to one another.