The home of Boko Haram’s founder is to be turned into a museum as part of plans to chart the deadly Islamist insurgency in northeast Nigeria, a government official said on Tuesday.
Muhammad Yusuf, a charismatic Muslim preacher, founded the group in 2001 from his base in the Railway suburb of the Borno state capital, Maiduguri.
His followers at the time were disgruntled young people, who met at Yusuf’s “Markaz” (centre in Arabic), which comprised a mosque and his living quarters.
Yusuf conducted fiery sermons from the mosque calling for jihad (holy war) against what he perceived to be a corrupt, secular government.
The Borno state information commissioner, Muhammad Bulama, said converting the building into a museum would be a way of “documenting, preserving and archiving our history”.
“The Boko Haram insurgency is a turning point in the history of Borno state and the northeast. Our history cannot be written without reference to Boko Haram,” he said. “We want to document it for posterity to have a clear and correct picture of what happened.”