Local media reported a flood of crimes that Axemen had allegedly committed, but his brother’s friends promised John that, were he to join the group, he wouldn’t be forced into anything illegal. John’s older brother, also studying in Jos, hung around with a group of Axemen-members of the Black Axe fraternity-who partied hard and bought drugs and cars. John’s mother sent him an allowance, and he made cash on the side rearing guard dogs for sale in Port Harcourt, the perilous capital of Nigeria’s oil industry. Four hours southeast of his native Kaduna, Jos was another world, temperate and green. At seventeen, John had enrolled at the University of Jos to study business. Her three boys were left alone for long stretches, and they killed time hunting at a nearby lake while listening to American rap. She’d worked all hours as a construction supplier, but the family still struggled to get by.
John had been raised by a single mother in Kaduna, a hardscrabble city in Nigeria’s arid north. It was the harmattan season, when Saharan sand blots out the sky, and the city lights in the distance blurred in John’s eyes as if he were underwater. John looked out at the landscape beyond the priest. Over the past six hours, he had been beaten and burned, trampled and taunted.
Leading them was John, * a sophomore at the local college, powerfully built and baby-faced. Amid the roiling crowd, five men crawled toward a candlelit dais, where a white-robed priest stood holding an axe. Eleven years ago, on a bitter January night, dozens of young men, dressed in a uniform of black berets, white T-shirts, and black pants, gathered on a hill overlooking the Nigerian city of Jos, shouting, dancing, and shooting guns into the black sky.
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