When Ruth Adamu finds her son, Hikame, he is in school. She walks down its corridors to find him, takes his hand, and tells him to come with her. She promises to buy him a new pair of shoes, and together, they head towards the gate. 

But just as they are about to leave, he pulls away and says, “Mummy, I’m coming,” before turning back inside. As he wanders off, she begins to worry he might get lost or go missing, and panic sets in. 

This is how her dreams about the boy go. 

Other times, when he appears in her dream, he tells her he is going to school, and she urges him to stay home. She reminds him that school is almost closing, and that he can go when it opens again.

The last time she dreamt of him, he asked her to be patient as he was going to meet “them.” In other dreams, he confides that he is afraid of the people he is with. 

Whenever she wakes up from such visions, she slips into despair so deep it ruins her day and leaves her unable to do anything at all. She agonises over what state he might be in and wonders whether he has been radicalised by Boko Haram, the terrorist group in whose hands her son fell in 2014 as they fought to establish a radical Islamic state. 

“I know they won’t be easy on him. If he’s alive, they’ll definitely train him,“ she says, and that thought makes her heart ache.

Ruth was a 48-year-old mother of five in 2013 when her husband was killed by Boko Haram. She was surprised by how much her youngest child, 11-year-old Hikame, brought her comfort in her grief. Whenever she appeared to be sad or lost in thought, he would run to her and shout, “Mummy! Mummy! What is it? Come with me, let me show you something,” and then he’d engage her in a way that lifted her out of that heavy, sorrowful mood.

“He was very caring and very obedient,” she reminisces. “He never wanted, or allowed himself to see me worried or alone.”

When she headed out to sell eggs, he would drop whatever he was doing, even a game of football, and run to her, saying, “Mummy, let me come with you.” She would tell him it was fine and that he should go play, but he always insisted. 

He would accompany her, help with the sales, return home, and then assist with chores. Only after making sure everything was done would he ask, “Mummy, there’s nothing else, right?” Then, and only then, would he finally go off to play.

Hikame loved pigeons. He saved some money and asked his mother to help him cover the rest so he could buy one. A cage was built for it, and he delighted in feeding and caring for his new bird. Soon, Ruth grew an interest in the joys of pigeon-rearing as well. 

Ruth was separated from Hikame when he was 12 years and 10 days old. She remembers precisely that it was October 30, 2014. On that day, the town of Mubi, in Nigeria’s northeastern Adamawa State, came under attack by Boko Haram, which had declared war on the Nigerian state. 

That morning, she had started the generator to pump water into her fish pond. The sound kept her from hearing the chaos until her children came running to warn her. When she turned it off, the gunfire became loud, and she looked up to see an aeroplane firing downwards. 

She took all her children in the car and fled. They spent the night in the bush before proceeding at dusk, only stopping to ask for directions. A group of people by the roadside told her it was safe enough to drive on the main road, as the terrorists were already in Mubi, so she was unlikely to encounter them. Just then, a car passed by, and she was confident to follow suit.

“What I didn’t know was that it was a Boko Haram vehicle. When we reached a checkpoint manned by the terrorists, it was allowed to pass, but I was asked to stop,” she narrated.

Ruth, her children, and the three other people she had kindly given a ride obeyed the commands they were given. She handed over her keys to the gun-wielding terrorists who surrounded them, one from the front and another from behind. 

“The man in front turned to the other and asked, ‘What do we do with these ones who have obeyed us?’ The other stayed silent at first, then turned to me. ‘Madam, are all these your children?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I replied. He paused before saying, ‘All of you may go, except these two young men [Hikame and one of the passengers she had given a lift].’”

Ruth immediately fell to her knees and cupped her palms in an attempt to plead, but even before the words left her mouth, the terrorist violently cocked his gun and told her to get out of his sight. Her daughter dragged her away. 

They found a spot nearby, sat and waited for him to change his mind, or for his associates to convince him to let them go, or maybe for some miracle to happen where she could walk away with all her children. After waiting for what felt like too long, her daughter convinced her that it was time to move forward. Reluctantly, she left Hikame behind. 

When they reached the next safe town, she got a phone and called her eldest son and told him to try contacting Hikame. After several attempts, he spoke to his brother and told him to run whenever he got a chance. He warned him not to stay with the terrorists or listen to anything they preached to him. Then he emphasised, again, that he must run away. 

Whether Hikame got a chance to do so is still a mystery to his family 11 years later. They have never heard from him since that call. His number stopped going through, although tracking showed that he was around Bama, in Borno, northeastern Nigeria. Ruth went to the police station and declared her son missing. She did the same with the Nigerian Army, too, and finally, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“The ICRC were the one who truly cared,” Ruth says. “I gave them Hikame’s details, and we’ve stayed in touch for about eight or nine years. At first, they often called to ask if I had heard anything about him. But those calls upset me badly. I would tremble, feel anxious. Talking about him was too painful, so I asked them to stop calling,” she explains. 

One time when they called, she broke down, shouting, crying, her head aching. Then one staff member consoled her softly. He told her that he, too, had been a victim. He offered words that soothed her and gave her strength and a renewed sense of hope. He also told her about a programme for the family of the missing she could join, promising that if she tried it and didn’t like it, she could leave whenever she wished.

“That programme helped me so much. It taught me resilience, how to manage my emotions, and gave me counselling. I used to isolate myself, but now I socialise more. We sit together as a family in the programme, they support us, even with transport fares, and they empower us. I’ve also built friendships there, and we visit and strengthen each other,” she says.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has registered at least 25,000 missing people in Nigeria since 2015, with over 14,000 of them being children.  

The protracted insurgency in the country’s North East has fueled a massive missing person problem across the region. Some vanish while fleeing violence, others are captured by terrorist groups, and many civilians are arbitrarily detained by the army, unable to distinguish terrorists from innocent people. 

An investigation by HumAngle revealed the devastating scale of the issue, documenting mass killings and mass graves. For families, the emotional toll is immense as they wait for news, grieve without bodies, and face practical challenges like inheritance disputes, as missing loved ones are not legally declared dead. Women wait years for their husbands, and children grow up with unanswered questions about their parents or siblings.

The ICRC started an Accompaniment Programme in 2019, which offers families of the missing emotional, economic, legal, and psychosocial support, helping them find hope and resilience.

It is the same programme that Ruth participated in. It has provided her with a support system, she says, as those who go through it have formed an organisation. They visit one another, pray together, and contribute small amounts of money to support each other during emergencies or special occasions, like weddings. It gives Ruth strength and comfort.

She says she no longer wallows in her grief for long periods of time. She doesn’t cry as frequently or avoid social interactions anymore. Talking about Hikame has also gotten easier, and the panic attacks don’t happen when she is asked about him. 

However, Ruth still believes that her body has suffered the consequences of grief and left scars that aren’t easily seen.

“Like my eyes,” she says. “I no longer see well with them, and I know it’s how much I cry that has affected it. It became so bad that I couldn’t step outside of my room into the light at some point. It hurt to look at the light. My legs also hurt, and I’m not as active as I used to be.”

When Ruth stands up, it is slightly laboured. She disappears into her room and reappears with two photos of Hikame in her hands. In one, he’s wearing a blue and yellow graduation gown and hat. There are other students in the background wearing school uniforms. 

Hikame will turn 23 on October 20 this year. If he were safe with his family, he would have worn a similar gown about three more times by now: once for his secondary school graduation, again for his university matriculation, and later for his convocation. 

Perhaps this picture is one that conjures up her frequent dreams of him in a school setting. 

In grief psychology, there’s a concept called continuing bonds. It refers to the way people hold on to memories, thoughts, or moments with loved ones who have passed or gone missing, sometimes even dreaming about them. “This is seen as part of healing, helping them cope with loss. In Ruth’s case, dreaming of her son in a school setting likely shows how important those school memories were to both of them,” Chioma Onyemaobi, a licensed clinical psychologist, explains.

Now 60, Ruth lives with her teenage granddaughter, who she says has helped in engaging her so that she doesn’t fall into despair again. The girl reminds her of Hikame and how he did the same for her when she was grieving her husband. 

If grief, as they say, is love that has nowhere to go, then while nothing can replace Ruth’s love for Hikame, she channels it into her granddaughter, all the while holding onto hope for a reunion with her son.

She no longer runs her fishery or egg businesses, partly because the war took everything from her and forced her to rebuild from scratch, and partly because the weight of grief has drained her strength. 

Now she buys wholesale rice, shares it among retailers, and earns a commission from their sales.

There’s one more thing Ruth does. One more place she channels love into: the rearing of pigeons. 

“To this day, I make sure I never stop caring for pigeons,” Ruth says, and a teardrop escapes her eyes. She blinks. “I rear some even now, and every time I feed them, I think of Hikame.”