The children who were still attending class at the Toulfé village school on the afternoon of November 12, 2018 were struggling to focus. It was late in the day. But that was not the reason for their lack of concentration. They were worried, Grégoire , a member of the school’s staff, knew. “We were … living in [a state of] psychosis,” he says.
In many corners of Burkina Faso’s border area with Mali and Niger, schools were burning, teachers were kidnapped or killed, and parents terrorised into keeping their children out of school. For the village of Toulfé, in Nord region, the relentless attacks on education would prove disastrous. As documented in a new Human Rights Watch report,, teachers and young people are bearing the brunt of the conflict.
Stunned, Grégoire watched as children began vaulting out the windows and running for safety. Those who didn’t get away in time were ordered to get down on the ground. Then the attackers came for him and his colleagues. “One pointed a gun at me,” Grégoire recounts. “He said … he was there for jihad [and] they’d already said to stop teaching French, so why were we still teaching French….
Since the emergence of this group in 2016, Burkina Faso has been grappling with a surge in armed attacks, spreading from central Mali to Burkina Faso’s northern Sahel region. Between 2017 and 2020, there have been at least 126 attacks on education professionals, schoolchildren, and schools by Ansaroul Islam and other groups allied with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State that Human Rights Watch was able to document. Dozens more attacks were reported by the media and local sources.
Psychological support for teachers and children who experienced attacks has remained inadequate. Like Grégoire, many still suffer from anxiety and nightmares, have difficulties sleeping or are afraid to be out after dark. “For months after the attack I used to wake up and cry out loudly,” Grégoire recounts. To this day, the sound of motorcycles startles him. “You never know who’s coming,” he says.
He knows of many children from Toulfé who did not finish the 2018-2019 school year because parents were unable to re-enroll them elsewhere. Like so many others whose schools were shut down or who were displaced, the children are now working as street vendors, domestic workers, brickmakers and in Burkina Faso’s many artisanal gold mines. Girls are particularly at risk of early marriage, domestic violence and sexual abuse.
africaupdates That is terrible. May God SaveTheChildren
And TimesLIVE expects us to care about Bianca when Black people are in life and deaths situations everyday. Smh
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