Alexis Okeowo — A Moonless, Starless Sky
29 published claims from this book.
- Al-Shabaab’s constraints on women extend beyond territory it controls
- Authoritarian rule silenced genuine public dialogue in Siyad’s Somalia
- Being captured by the LRA brought relief from the terror of hiding
- Biram publicly burned Islamic legal texts to shock Mauritania out of complacency.
- Boko Haram lined up the girls’ sandals as a deliberate taunt
- Boko Haram self-funded through robbery and arms trafficking
- Boko Haram started a war by promising redemption through insurrection
- Children carried one in five Boko Haram suicide bombings
- Empathetic journalism requires telling subjects’ intimate life stories
- Everyday living itself constitutes a form of resistance against extremism
- Extreme circumstances can force survivors to abandon their former morals
- Haratin and Afro-Mauritanians together form over 70 percent of Mauritania’s population
- Haratin identity was forged by culture and language, not race
- Kidnapped child soldiers still sought family bonds within the LRA
- Mauritania ethnic-cleansed Afro-Mauritanians using Haratin soldiers
- Mauritania’s slavery produced a hereditary caste system of White Moors and Haratin
- Northern politicians initially employed Boko Haram to intimidate opponents
- Outsider status enabled clearer journalistic observation
- Pity and bewilderment distort rather than enable reporting
- Slavery formed the demographic and economic backbone of precolonial West African states
- Somalia’s fragile governance masks enduring militant control and repression
- Somalis practiced moderate tolerant Islam with open romance before militancy
- State collapse corroded trust even between intimate acquaintances
- Survival under extremity can require moral transformation
- The LRA forced abducted children to kill and desecrate their own parents
- The LRA’s camp layout used concentric rings of fighters to prevent escape
- The military falsely claimed rescue and undercounted missing girls threefold
- The Nigerian military falsely claimed it had rescued the Chibok girls
- US counterterrorism policies radicalized disaffected Somali youth into insurgency