The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara
Commissioned by BBC World Service
“Nobody has ever told a comprehensive story of what is going on there. This film really opened our eyes and I felt a very strong connection watching the piece.”
– Sony Impact Award for Current Affairs Jury
“The film has exposed the gravity of an almost unreported crisis: thousands killed, a million people displaced, hundreds of schools closed. It features mothers who’ve seen their kids slaughtered, schoolgirls who have survived captivity, a teenage girl who has been burned and slashed by vigilantes, and a teenage boy killed by Nigerian soldiers. It is an unflinching portrayal of a story that desperately needed to be told.
It has also put faces to the “bandits” who have been, until now, like ghosts in the Nigerian imagination. Nigerians can now see these men and listen to their accounts of their own motivations. Finally, the film has forced Nigerians to face a deeply uncomfortable reality: that this conflict contains an element of ethnic hatred.”
Biography
Yusuf Anka is a 26 year-old law student and journalist who grew up in Zamfara State in north western Nigeria. As an undergraduate he began reporting on the conflict in Zamfara for the Nigerian newspaper HumAngle and, in 2019, working with BBC Africa Eye on a documentary film about the violence. Over almost three years, at tremendous personal risk, Yusuf gained unprecedented access to protagonists on all sides of this conflict. The result was the documentary The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara—a film which revealed, for the first time, the true scale and horror of the violence that has engulfed the country’s north west and sparked a major national conversation in Nigeria. Yusuf is now working towards a master’s degree in international humanitarian law at Nile University in Abuja.