How a pan-African freedom movement lost its way
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. A drummer pounded a rhythmic beat. Amid the roiling crowd, five men crawled toward a candlelit dais, where a white-robed priest stood holding an axe. Leading them was John,* a sophomore at the local college, powerfully built and baby-faced. Over the past six hours, he had been beaten and burned, trampled…
