Nigeria | The Broomstick Brief

A grey-haired woman in a tweed jacket sits at a candlelit desk, lifting the corner of a parchment war map drawn with red arrows and marching figures and looking through a brass viewer on a stand. Under the map lies a model landscape: a river, a stone bridge, timber houses, barrels, boats at a quay, and crowds of tiny figures. A quill and inkwell, a wax seal and a compass lie on the desk; a clock and a globe stand on books by a leaded window onto a rain-dark city of spires.

Reading the substrate

In November 2025 the American president gave the killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt a name: a “mass slaughter” of Christians. The name says who died. It says nothing about a north grown hotter and drier, or herds moving south in search of pasture and water. Stories about a conflict are often told as complete explanation…