The renowned South Sudanese scholar, Francis Deng, once observed that exclusion is not merely the denial of belonging but also the denial of identity. His insight captures, with painful precision, the contradiction at the heart of our national crisis. Christian communities who bear the brunt of unrelenting violence are counted when political arithmetic is needed, yet erased when truth must be spoken. Their suffering is simultaneously acknowledged and denied, included and excluded, visible and invisible. In this column two weeks ago, I reflected on this paradox through Deng’s lens. This week, I return to his insight to further illuminate what the denial of belonging and identity looks like amid the genocidal attacks against Christians in northern Nigeria. Few claims are as stark or as sobering as that of Prince Rwang Pam Jr., spokesperson of the Southern Middle Belt Alliance (SAMBA), who asserts that 102 communities in Plateau State have been annexed and renamed. 

His words cut to the heart of the matter: “When attacks happen, some say they were allegedly committed by herdsmen. They are not alleged herdsmen; they are Fulani herdsmen. Survivors know their identity, and when they come to attack, they shout “God is great” in Arabic. They kill women and children while mothers watch their daughters being raped. It is just pathetic. The killings have continued because the government allowed them. The annexed communities have increased to 102″. Governor Muftwang, speaking through his deputy at last week’s Senate Committee hearing in Jos, affirmed the renaming of these annexed communities. Nothing exposes the depth of exclusion, this systematic denial of belonging and identity, more forcefully than the testimonies of these Plateau indigenes.

Belonging is the first truth of humanity. It is also the first thing taken away when a people are marked for erasure. Every genocide begins with the quiet decision to unname and unroot a community. It begins with the refusal to see them as part of the moral circle of a country. It begins when their presence becomes negotiable. Today, in our country, Christians caught in the long war of extermination live inside that refusal. They live inside a wound that widens each year. They live inside a landscape where belonging is conditional and identity is fragile. The violence against them is not only physical. It is metaphysical. It tears at the meaning of who they are and where they stand in our country. So, in a way, the modern state often decides who may live and who must die. This is the stark truth that describes our condition with profound clarity. 

A people under repeated attacks, who bury their dead in mass graves, who flee from ancestral homes, and who plead for protection that never comes, live under the shadow of a state that doesn’t compel itself to act to protect or defend them. Their lives are marked as expendable in the quiet arithmetic of power. Their deaths are absorbed into a narrative of inevitability. Their suffering is folded into the bland language of clashes. Nothing is named. Nothing is remembered. Nothing is accounted for. In this erasure, identity itself begins to unravel. Identity is the story we tell ourselves about who we are and the story that others tell about us. For identity to flourish, these two stories must converge. For Christians under siege, that convergence has vanished. They tell themselves they belong.

They tell themselves they are citizens. They tell themselves their connection to the land is deep and unbroken. Yet the story the country tells about them is different. It casts them as having no exclusive claim to the lands they have long inhabited. It portrays them as obstacles to some imagined pastoral destiny. It reshapes their identity by stripping it of legitimacy. This is how erasure begins. It begins in language. It begins in the slow corruption of recognition.

Now I return to Francis Deng, the scholar of belonging and identity, who once warned that mass violence grows when groups are denied the security of cultural and territorial attachments. His insight is prescient. Christians in the Middle Belt and other conflict zones are denied both forms of security. Their cultural life is attacked when churches are razed, when rituals are disrupted, and when traditions are broken by displacement.  Their territorial attachment is attacked when their farms are seized, their villages destroyed, and their right to home is treated as a privilege that can be revoked. Without cultural anchoring and territorial grounding, belonging collapses. And when belonging collapses, identity sinks with it. 

The collapse is deepened by the politics of silence, elite silence that forms the spine of the machinery of erasure.  When governors like Reverend Father Alia of Benue State refuse to speak honestly about the motives behind the attacks, when religious leaders trade truth for access to power, and when influential voices avoid naming genocide because it might unsettle the patronage networks that sustain them, silence becomes a form of currency”, as I argued elsewhere recently. It buys alliances for political power. It secures positions. It shields careers. But it destroys the truth. It abandons victims. It fortifies impunity. Silence becomes the quiet accomplice of genocide.

The greatest loss a people can suffer is the loss of the right to have rights, insists Hannah Arendt. That idea echoes through our present tragedy. Christians under attack discover that their citizenship is not a shield. They discover that their right to life is negotiable. They discover that their appeals for protection vanish into mere press statements. They discover that their status as citizens is reduced to a line in a population register but denied on farmland where death stalks them. There is, in our country, a selective memory that bends only to the needs of power. When numbers are required to swell the fiction of national vitality, the dead are summoned as silent witnesses. 

But when a country is challenged to face the truth of its own violence, those same dead fade into a haze of official amnesia. Their bodies are useful for arithmetic. Their absence is inconvenient for conscience. So the state remembers them only in the abstract and forgets them in the particular. It lifts their shadows to strengthen its claims and buries their names to escape its guilt. This is a memory that measures without mourning, a ritual of acknowledgement that withholds accountability, a choreography of recall that keeps justice at a distance. In this practice, belonging is hollowed out. Identity is thinned. Humanity becomes something that can be measured but not honoured.

Violence reshapes identity in ways that statistics cannot capture. A village burned is more than a physical loss. It is a rupture in the narrative of a community. A church destroyed is more than a building gone. It is a disruption of memory and worship. A family scattered by fear carries fractures that last generations. Children raised in displacement camps inherit a sense of loss long before they understand its origins. Women and men who bury loved ones with trembling hands learn to live with a grief that becomes part of them. This reshaping of identity is slow. It is intimate. It is irreversible. It is part of the long shadow of genocide.

The denial of belonging produces another wound. It produces the wound of unbelonging. A person who is told he does not belong on his ancestral land begins to doubt the story of his place in the world. A child who grows up under attack learns early that his or her identity carries danger. A community that has to rebuild after each wave of assaults begins to see itself through the lens of survival rather than through the fuller lens of culture and continuity. Unbelonging becomes a condition. It becomes a way of seeing. It becomes a way of being. Still, communities resist this erasure. They resist through faith. They resist through memory. They resist through rebuilding. 

They resist by insisting on presence. In church compounds rebuilt from ashes, one glimpses a courage that refuses erasure. It is the courage that Reverend Ezekiel Dachomo embodies on the Plateau, and figures like Stephen Kefas and Zariyi Yusuf display as they give voice to the stories of the Middle Belt online. In the gatherings of women who pray for peace on land their families have tended for generations, one sees the insistence on belonging. In the stories passed among elders, one hears the determination to preserve identity. Faith becomes a form of defiance. Worship becomes an argument against erasure. Community becomes a shield against moral disappearance.

But moral courage at the grassroots cannot replace our country’s responsibility. Our country must recognise that belonging is not a favour. It is the basis of citizenship. It must recognise that identity is not a negotiable asset. It is the core of personhood. It must recognise that genocide is not avoided by refusing to speak its name. It is confronted only by naming it, investigating it, prosecuting it, and preventing it. Until our country names what is happening, it will remain captive to its own fear of truth.

Any country that denies belonging will eventually come to its own death. A country that strips identity cannot heal. A people that close their eyes to the sufferings of their neighbours cannot claim moral unity. The dead call to us. They call to us to remember them not as numbers but as citizens. They call to us to speak the truth that their killers hoped would remain unspoken. They call on us to restore belonging by restoring justice. They call to us to reclaim identity by reclaiming truth. Naming the dead is the first act of moral repair. Protecting the living is the next. Only then can we rebuild a country where belonging is secure, identity is honoured, and no community lives under the sentence of silence.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette