Interview: Eliza Griswold and the clash of civilisations

Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves on a couple of dollars a day — that’s to say nothing of the millions of unemployed vagrants. The government oscillates between inertia and rapacity, so competing religious organisations have emerged in its place. But while religious communities provide legal services and schools, they can also incite sectarian violence as Nigerians contest their country’s dwindling resources. An estimated 50,000 Nigerians, both Christian and Muslim, have been murdered in the last decade. Western governments have remained largely indifferent to the slaughter.

Griswold is an American journalist who spent nearly a decade reporting from the 10th Parallel, the faultline between Christianity and Islam that runs through Nigeria, Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.