They sang Amazing Grace, then one was shot
Held hostage in a Nigerian swamp, British missionaries witnessed their colleague’s killing
Stuck in a kidnap gang’s hideout in Nigeria’s lawless Delta area, missionaries David and Shirley Donovan and their two companions were trying their best to keep up morale.
The night before, they had been dragged from their beds near the Donovans’ bush clinic by men armed with AK-47s. Ignoring their pleas that they were missionary medics, not wealthy oil workers, the gang whisked them by speedboat to a shack on stilts in a remote swamp.
Then, as the kidnappers unexpectedly handed back a few of their looted belongings, the captives saw a chance to raise their spirits.
Among the items returned to them was an acoustic guitar belonging to fellow missionary Ian Squire, the clinic’s resident optician. Sitting on the shack’s broken TV set, he launched into Amazing Grace.
It was the only song Squire, 57, could play without music sheets. But it chimed with the occasion. Written by John Newton, an 18th-century slave trader-turned-preacher, it tells how a brush with death caused him to find faith in God and forsake his old profession.
For the Donovans, it was a reminder of how their own religious awakening brought them to Nigeria. And with the gang after a one billion Naira (two million pounds) ransom, it also underscored how in this part of West Africa, men and women have long been traded for money.
“It was the perfect song, and at that point things began to look not quite as bad,” said David Donovan, 57, in an interview with his wife last week at their Cambridgeshire home.
“But then, after Ian finished playing, he stood up, and a salvo of gunshots killed him instantly. We didn’t see who did it, but it was obvious that someone in the gang had shot him. It was terrifying to see.
“We jumped out of the shack and into the water as we thought they were coming for us next, but a member of the gang came and put us back in there with Ian for the rest of the day.”
The gang refused to say why their companion was killed. David speculates one gunman panicked, fearing the sound of the music drifting across the water would give away the foreigners’ presence.
It was a horrifying start to the missionaries’ three-week ordeal, during which they lived as much in fear of dying from malaria or dysentery as at the hands of their kidnappers.
So what on earth were white British missionaries doing in one of Nigeria’s most dangerous corners?
David worked as a GP in Cambridge. Shirley, his Scottish wife, 58, taught children excluded from school.
“We had good jobs, our two sons in private schools, and a big house in Cambridge, and pretty much everything we wanted,” David Donovan said. “But we realized it didn’t satisfy us, and that to be true to the Gospel, we had to realign our lives.”
In 2003, they sold their house for a smaller one, moved their children to a state school, and used the proceeds to start a medical charity, New Foundations.
Then, in response to a talk they heard by a Nigerian pastor about infant mortality in the Delta region, they set up a clinic in Enekorogha, a Delta community poor even by local standards. There was no electricity, clean water or roads.
It was also on a Foreign Office no-go-list, as it was plagued by robbers, pirates and militants. Early on, two motorboats the Donovans bought were stolen, the thieves stabbing their watchman on one occasion. In 2009, David was nearly kidnapped for a first time. Locals rallied to his protection, concealing him and a colleague in a priest holestyle hiding place underneath a sofa.
Even the locals, though, lived in fear of the “Egbesu Boys,” a cultlike gang named after an ancient war god in local Ijaw tribal culture. It was an Egbesu faction that abducted the Donovans and their friends on Oct. 13, led by a ferocious, bearded commander known as the “General.”
After Squire’s death, the group were moved to another stilted shack, a cramped 16x10-foot building. The gang, who dined off roasted monitor lizard, brought noodles and clean water for the missionaries.
Both Shirley and her fellow female missionary, Alanna Carson from Fife, feared sexual assault, “but thankfully the gang leader told his men that if they so much as touched the women, he would kill them personally,” David said.
The captives used the Bible to build a rapport with their guards.
“They justified their actions by saying that they’d grown up with nothing, and that we were privileged, but we pointed out that some of our own clinic workers had also come from troubled backgrounds,” said David, who also offered his captors medical help. “There was a bit of a silence about that at first, but by the end two of them were asking for lessons on the Bible.”
The Donovans had no kidnap and ransom insurance, having been told premiums would cost 1,000 pounds per week. David braced himself for having to call his brother and ask him to liquidize what was left of the family’s assets in Britain, only to realize the “General” had no idea how to organize international ransom transactions.
The hostages were eventually freed after the kidnappers told them a ransom from the Nigerian government had been paid. The gang blindfolded them and dropped them at a rendezvous where two SUVs were waiting with a Nigerian army escort.
Today, the Donovans’ phone still rings regularly with well-wishers from Enekorogha, who turned out in their hundreds earlier this month for a mourning parade in Ian’s memory.
In a more lasting tribute, a local child born during the missionaries’ captivity was named “Ian” in his honour — as have two others since they were freed.
— The Daily Telegraph