As the media fervour around the kidnap of Nigerian schoolgirls subsides, what was the impact of the Twitter campaign?
Imagine if a single teenage girl was abducted from her boarding school dormitory in the UK. There would have been a Madeleine McCann-style media frenzy as soon as the news broke, with 24-hour live feeds from the school gates complete with pundits scrambling to TV studios to pontificate. Images of the victims would have flashed worldwide and politicians would have been forced to respond.
The comparative silence surrounding the original kidnapping of hundreds of girls from Chibok, in north-eastern Nigeria, might have seemed surprising, except that it happened in Africa. As a consequence, it was at first treated like so much other news from Africa or at least news with no celebrity angle the story was ignored or just told in a cursory and often inaccurate way. For the first week or so, there were some occasional mentions but it was all the usual vague confusion; the numbers of girls kept changing and there was a muddle about who was actually present. Was it only the girls from the science block that had been counted, or were the arts students also in the missing total? Did they include the extra exam candidates visiting the school? Even today it is uncertain whether the figure of 223 abducted pupils is correct.
