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At the height of its power, Boko Haram was among the most dangerous jihadist movements in the world. It attacked cities, overran towns, kidnapped schoolgirls, killed civilians, assassinated officials, and held territory across northeastern Nigeria. Its violence spread into the Lake Chad basin and drew Niger, Chad, and Cameroon into the conflict. By 2014, the group was seizing urban centres and transport routes, cutting communities off from the Nigerian state, and imposing its own rule where government authority had collapsed.

Boko Haram took shape in the early 2000s in Maiduguri, the largest city in northeastern Nigeria and the capital of Borno State. Maiduguri sits near the Lake Chad basin, closer, not just in geographic terms, to the borderlands of Niger, Chad, and Cameroon than to Nigeria’s southern centres of power, but also in cultural and linguistic terms. It lies roughly 250 kilometres from N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, but nearly 1 600 kilometres from Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria and the country’s economic and cultural capital. Politically and culturally, it had long looked towards the countries of the Sahel region rather than the rest of Nigeria.

It was in this frontier city that Muhammad Yusuf built the following that became Boko Haram. Yusuf was a Salafi preacher. Salafism is a purist current within Sunni Islam that seeks to return Muslim belief and practice to what it regards as the example of Islam’s earliest generations. In northern Nigeria, Salafi preachers had long challenged older Sufi scholars, traditional Muslim authorities, and practices they viewed as corruptions of true Islam. Maiduguri was an important arena in that struggle. It was a stronghold of the Tijaniyya Sufi order, but Salafi networks had been gaining ground through mosques, schools, preaching, radio, and links to businessmen and Saudi-trained scholars.

Yusuf emerged from that contested religious world, but pushed its language further towards the extremes. His mosque-based following grew through sermons, religious study, welfare, discipline, and anger at the Nigerian state. Between roughly 2001 and 2009, the movement operated mainly through open preaching, growing more and more openly confrontational towards traditional authorities and engaging in sporadic acts of terrorism and banditry.

After Yusuf was killed by police in 2009 after a failed regional uprising by Boko Haram members, it returned under Abubakar Shekau as a clandestine insurgent movement. By 2013 and 2014, it had moved from terrorism and raids into territorial conquest.

As a regional centre, Maiduguri had government offices, police stations, schools, markets, wealthy residents, mosques, and old religious institutions. However, it also had poor neighbourhoods, a growing community of poorer migrants that spoke different languages, unemployed young men, overstretched services, and a growing sense that neither the old order nor the modern state could reliably provide advancement or justice.

The city had been transformed over the twentieth century. British administrators made Maiduguri the capital of Borno Province in 1907. The city grew from an estimated 10 000 people in 1910 to between 60 000 and 80 000 by independence in 1960. By the mid-1990s, it was estimated to have 850 000 residents. While the city expanded, its markets grew, its religious networks deepened, and its population surged, it was afflicted with unplanned settlement, administrative weakness, weak economic growth, and pressure on older forms of authority.

Maiduguri was a city of sharp contrasts. A young man could worship at the Mohammed Indimi Mosque, a Salafi stronghold built in the early 1990s by Mohammed Indimi, a Borno-born oil tycoon. The mosque had money behind it, a central location, and the prestige to attract major preachers. It also offered free meals during Ramadan, helping it pull in young worshippers from across the city.

A poor young man could leave that world of wealth-backed religion and return to neighbourhoods where housing, sanitation, unemployment, disease, and insecurity showed the limits of public authority. Poor migrants arrived from rural Borno and other nearby states, from failing farms and overstretched households, and from drought-hit regions in Niger and Chad. Some came looking for work. Some came for religious learning. Some came because the countryside could no longer sustain them.

The city did not absorb these arrivals into stable urban life. Some migrants found patrons, work, and neighbourhood protection, but many entered Maiduguri as marginal people in a city already struggling to govern its own growth. In Maiduguri, only 3.3% of workers were in administrative, professional, or managerial occupations, only 1.4% were business or trade merchants, and only 7.9% were in skilled services or building trades. The rest of the city’s population lived in desperate squalor.

This was not only a question of poverty or employment. It was a question of social anchoring. In rural communities, a young man’s place in the world was usually shaped by family, lineage, village authority, patrons, Islamic teachers, and traditional rulers. Those ties could be restrictive, but they also provided supervision, protection, discipline, and belonging. In Maiduguri’s expanding outer neighbourhoods, many of those ties weakened. Migrants could arrive without the full protection of kinship, without elders close at hand, and without a clear route into stable work or public life.

By the mid-1970s, nearly half of Maiduguri’s population had been born somewhere else. Maiduguri was no longer simply a traditional Kanuri urban centre. The Kanuri are the main ethnic and linguistic community historically associated with Borno and the Lake Chad region. Their language, ruling families, religious institutions, and political traditions had long shaped Maiduguri’s older patterns of urban life.

Those structures still mattered, especially around the palace of the Shehu of Borno. The Shehu is Borno’s traditional Muslim ruler, a hereditary figure whose authority reaches back to the old Bornu empire (a polity that once governed much of the area around Lake Chad from the 8th century to the early 20th century). His palace was not just a residence. It was the symbolic centre of the old order, tied to district heads, neighbourhood leaders, religious scholars, family networks, and the inherited structures through which Maiduguri had long been supervised.

But that authority no longer reached every part of the city with the same force. The newer neighbourhoods were more diverse, more crowded, and harder to govern through the inherited tools of traditional rule. Migrants from surrounding areas brought new languages, loyalties, backgrounds, and needs into the city. That did not make radicalisation inevitable, but it created spaces where new preachers, new networks, and new forms of authority could gain ground.

The Nigerian state did not replace the old order with stronger institutions. Local government had wide responsibilities, but limited capacity. It was expected to manage public order, health, sanitation, schools, markets, local development, and civic life. It could not keep pace with the scale of urban change. In Maiduguri, overlapping local authorities created confusion over development and regulation. The result was unplanned sprawl and the weakening of the mechanisms through which hereditary rulers and local intermediaries had once monitored the city.

Education became one of the central points where expectation turned into resentment. Schooling was presented as the route into work, status, national unity, and participation in modern public life. In Borno, that promise repeatedly outran the institutions meant to sustain it. More children were drawn into school, but classrooms, teachers, textbooks, language support, and employment opportunities did not keep pace.

The result was not simply poor educational outcomes. It was a stunting of social expectations and class mobility. A young person could be told that education was the path out of poverty, then pass through overcrowded classrooms, weak instruction, scarce materials, and examinations that the education system had failed to prepare many pupils for. If they left early, they could be treated as a failure. If they completed school, they could still find that jobs were scarce and that advancement depended less on merit than on patronage, connection, or access to political power.

In northern Muslim society, Western-style schooling carried a double meaning. It could lead to office, salary, influence, and social advancement. It also carried the memory of colonial rule, anxiety over Christian missionary activity, secular bureaucracy, and the rise of Western-educated elites who governed Nigeria but failed to deliver justice or prosperity.

Maiduguri’s religious world was also changing. The older Muslim establishment still mattered, especially the Shehu of Borno, the district and neighbourhood leaders beneath him, the Sufi scholars, and the inherited institutions that had long shaped religious life in the city. But their authority was no longer uncontested. Urban growth had carried new people into Maiduguri faster than the old structures could absorb them. The adoption of nominally democratic politics in Nigeria had weakened the authority of traditional rulers. In the poorer and newer neighbourhoods, moral supervision was thinner, religious authority was more competitive, and a preacher with energy, certainty, and a message of rupture could find an audience.

Yusuf did not arrive as a solitary outsider. He emerged from within this Salafi world, initially linked to Ja’far Mahmud Adam, one of northern Nigeria’s leading Salafi preachers. Religious lectures at the Muhammad Indimi Mosque drew large audiences and helped make the mosque a major Salafi platform in the city.

Yusuf gained standing in that environment because he translated Qur’anic Arabic into local languages such as Hausa and Kanuri, answered religious questions, and reached audiences in the languages of ordinary listeners. That made him dangerous. He had enough learning to sound authoritative, enough local fluency to sound familiar, and enough radicalism to turn a contested religious field into the base for a breakaway movement.

By the early 2000s, Yusuf had found the conditions a radical preacher needs. Maiduguri had young men cut loose from older forms of protection, schools that raised expectations without delivering advancement, traditional authorities whose ability to preemptively deal with troublemakers had weakened, and state institutions that many experienced as corrupt, distant, or violent.

The city did not create Boko Haram on its own. But it left open the space in which a man like Yusuf could build something that looked, at first, like religious discipline and social repair, but later grew into one of the most dangerous and bloodthirsty terror movements the continent had yet seen.