In 2006 I worked as an intern for a pharmacist at a state-run hospital in Asaba, a town on the banks of the Niger River, which loosely divides southern Nigeria into east and west. The cases we attended to usually involved pregnancies, tropical illnesses, and an alarming number of domestic assaults. Then one day we received a flood of men and boys with machete wounds to their heads and limbs. They were migrants from northern Nigeria who had come south, as many do, to work as traders and laborers in Onitsha, the sprawling market town across the river from Asaba.
They were mostly Muslims, victims of a wave of sectarian violence that swept Nigeria after a Danish newspaper published cartoons deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. In the North, Muslim mobs had vented their fury on Christian ethnic Igbos from the southeast. The arrival of Igbo corpses in Onitsha had set off reprisals. Igbo mobs set upon all the northerners they could find. Many fled to Asaba, and in the days that followed we heard rumors that the Onitsha mobs would soon be coming after them. Fortunately, they never came.
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