One year later, we want the girls back

One year since the Chibok Girls were removed from a school and wrenched from the relative peace, comfort and safety of their community, homes and families there are more questions that answers. Perhaps we as the community of humanity have began to doubt our ability to find and bring the young women back. There are oceans of tears that we cannot begin to reach the bottom of. We seem to be drowning in complex geopolitical issues and wars that render us voiceless bystanders in strange and perverse events. This gruelling matter is also one that illustrates the ongoing wars in which women are nameless, faceless proxies in men's wars.

These 267 (or so) people are also no longer girls. It has been a year - they are now young women, some broken, some silenced, confused and in despair. Some have run and yet we have not heard of what their journey has been since. Although we must bring the young women home, let us bear in mind the complexities of re-integration, stigma, shame, notoriety and healing. Some of these young women's families are no longer in Chibok because of the military insurgencies on that region. Where are we bringing our daughters home to? How will the state support their return? Will they need refuge in other regions and even other countries to escape the gazes and the wagging tongues? Will they be broken again by gossip, loneliness and shame? We must find the strength to keep them alive even in our minds, conversations, actions and words.

We call not only on the Nigerian government to take decisive action. We call on every nation of ECOWAS and the African Union to deploy and exhibit their power, skill and agency to correct an abominable situation. The threat of human security is echoed across the region as seen at Garissa in Kenya.

The discourse of security studies and international relations has long lacked a feminist and woman centric iteration and this is perhaps why our response and our vocabulary for the past year have been so garbled and muted. The Chibok women do not only belong to Nigeria; they belong to the Afrikan continent just as the students at Garissa belonged to us all. If we call ourselves Afrikan citizens, activists, feminists, women's and human rights actors, thinkers, writers, dreamers and doers, we must rise to this occasion.

* Liepollo Lebohang Pheko works with Four Rivers Trade Collective.