Search on the Chinese food-delivery app Meituan for ejiao, and all sorts of goodies pop up. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor’s court, valued as a traditional remedy taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep, and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 vials; eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts, and black sesame at $7 for a tin of 30; or snack on ejiao-coated dates at just under a dollar a packet.

There’s just one problem: The collagenous substance is extracted from donkey hides. China’s domestic donkey population has plunged precipitously, and now the nation’s mass taste is stripping African farms of one of their most essential and valuable assets. In countries as far-flung as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Botswana, animals that are the mainstays of many small farms—where donkeys are used for plowing, hauling crops to market, and many other purposes—are instead being slaughtered for the cash value of their skins.

The drain has become so damaging to Africa’s rural economy that in February the 55-member African Union approved a continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their skins at its heads-of-state summit. Whether the governments of Africa can implement such a ban remains to be seen. If they do, they could seriously pinch the Chinese ejiao industry.

China’s rulers have done nothing to address the issue. On the surface, their inaction is bewildering. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has expended huge sums of political and financial capital on wooing the countries of the developing world, especially in Africa. Given that context, stepping in to regulate the ejiao trade and help preserve the African donkey would seem an easy, low-cost way of proving China’s willingness to be a constructive partner.

[Read: China’s latest food scandal: fox-tainted donkey meat]

“Leadership comes with responsibility,” Oscar Meywa Otele, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, told me. African countries would like to see China play “a more meaningful and acceptable role,” but the donkey issue is a big enough problem that it “may undermine [China’s] ambitions to be the leader of the Global South.”

Xi’s grand goals can conflict with China’s short-term economic and political interests. When this occurs, it opens a window onto Beijing’s true attitude toward its putative partners and raises doubts about China’s readiness to assume that leadership. That matters in Washington. As the developing world becomes a battleground between the United States and China, with both eager to gain adherents to their competing visions for a reformed world order, the contradictions of Xi’s approach could damage his efforts to portray Beijing as more sympathetic to the interests and needs of poor countries. The humble donkey has thus taken on geopolitical significance.

China’s consumption of ejiao has increased with the country’s wealth. Back in 1990, ejiao makers in China required some 200,000 donkey hides annually. Now they are believed to consume about 4 to 6 million skins a year. That amounts to approximately 10 percent of the world’s estimated donkey population of 53 million—a rate of attrition that is clearly unsustainable. The demand from ejiao producers outstripped domestic supplies years ago and led to a brisk import business.

Exactly how many hides come from Africa is unclear, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the world’s donkeys, so it’s safe to assume that African exports account for a large share. Because donkeys breed slowly—a jennet typically produces a foal only every other year—the drain is rapidly depleting Africa’s herd. One study suggests that South Africa’s donkey population declined from 210,000 animals in 1996 to 146,000 in 2019. On current trend, the donkey could completely vanish from the continent over the next two decades. In addition, the rising value of pelts has encouraged the illicit slaughter of donkeys, the bypassing of regulatory controls, and the widespread theft of donkeys from poor farmers.

Beijing could do much to alleviate the problem. Better regulating the donkey-skin trade on its end could assist African governments in monitoring and controlling exports, as well as ensure a more sustainable supply to China’s ejiao producers. Why Beijing has not bothered to react is a matter of speculation. One factor could be that the government likes to promote traditional medicine, at home and abroad, as a way of highlighting China’s ancient science and civilization; in that respect, it may see any restraint on the industry as counter to the national interest. Or the welfare of donkeys and the plight of African farmers may simply be below Beijing’s attention threshold, compared with its more pressing geopolitical concerns.

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China’s abusive donkey trade is part of a wider pattern of Chinese exploitation of the global South’s resources. Chinese fleets have long been accused of aggressive overfishing, from the West African coast to the South Pacific. In the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters, Chinese vessels block fishermen from neighboring countries from traditional fishing grounds, which is a significant point of contention among governments of the region.

China’s commercial interests are also at odds with Beijing’s effort to promote itself as a champion of the world’s poorest nations. A lending binge by state banks, much of it to support Xi’s global infrastructure-building scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative, has been touted as a sustainable-development program and proof of China’s superiority as an economic partner. But these loans, which turned China into the world’s largest official creditor to the developing world, have contributed to a debt crisis in the global South as some low-income countries have become overburdened and unable to make repayments.

Yet Beijing has shown its debtors little sympathy, and the state banks have been squeezing poor countries hard. They have resisted writing down some of the loan principal—a common practice in debt restructurings that is aimed at speeding a return to solvency—and typically insist on cutting deals in secret to beat other creditors to what’s left in the depleted coffers of debtor countries. When, for instance, Angola had to restructure a $15 billion loan from China in 2020, the state-owned China Development Bank first began paying itself interest from a mandated escrow account. Then, anticipating the exhaustion of that source, the bank demanded that the cash-poor government replenish it.

Developing countries “are getting to know China in a different role,” Bradley Parks, the executive director of the research lab AidData at William & Mary, told me. Less for its largesse, and more “as the world’s largest debt collector.” And he added: “Debt collectors don’t win a lot of popularity contests.”

At the same time, new lending from Beijing has all but dried up over the past five years. As a result, the flow of funds that once went from China to the global South has reversed. A 2023 study of China’s lending program published by the American Economic Association revealed that developing countries are now paying more to Chinese banks to service their debts than they are receiving in new loans.

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Chinese leaders’ approach to developing-world debt “is in direct tension with their desire to enjoy influence with the general public and with governing elites within the developing world,” Parks said. Throughout this push for influence, Chinese leaders have been at pains to portray themselves as selfless partners, interested in the global good, in contrast with the West. “In promoting its own development process, China always insists on mutual support with the countries of the South, complementing each other’s strengths, and jointly building a modernized Global South,” Liu Jianchao, the influential head of the Communist Party’s international department, recently reiterated in a top ideological journal.

Yet the reality is that China’s ascent presents as many risks as benefits to emerging economies. Xi still appears to believe that he can lead the rising voices of the global South in a struggle against their former colonial masters in the West. But China’s actual policies toward the developing world are beginning to echo that old colonialism: the exploitation of resources to benefit the center, the metropole’s self-perception that its superior civilization confers special rights, the use of capital to extract more wealth from the less fortunate.

“It’s African governments that need to be much more proactive. You can’t afford to let China dictate to you,” Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South Africa–based think tank, told me. “That’s been the big challenge, the difficulty, in this relationship.”

The African Union donkey ban is a sign that the continent’s leaders are deciding to act in that more proactive way. Implicit in the ban is a strong message that China can’t have all it wants, on its own terms, from the global South. If the African Union succeeds in shutting down the trade in donkey hides to China, Beijing will no longer be able to pretend that its actions have no detrimental effect on African countries or its reputation on the continent. The ejiao industry is already damaging China-Africa relations, Lauren Johnston, a China expert at the University of Sydney, told me. “It’s making people hate China.”

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When I first interviewed Yama Bullum and his wife, Falmata, in 2015, they were desperate for the safe return of their daughter Jinkai, who was one of the 276 girls abducted from their school in Chibok, in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno, by the terrorist group Boko Haram.

In the years following the 2014 kidnapping, I spoke with many of the teenagers’ parents. The raid was part of an extended campaign of violence by Boko Haram—whose name roughly translates to “Western education is sin”—to create an Islamic state in Nigeria. The kidnapped girls, most of whom were Christian, were taken to Boko Haram’s stronghold in the Sambisa forest, where they endured harsh conditions and were subjected to Islamic instruction sessions lasting up to 11 hours a day.

The #BringBackOurGirls campaign rallied celebrities and activists around the world, yet rescue attempts were largely unsuccessful. With few other options, the Nigerian government turned its focus to negotiating with the militants. Mediators helped broker a deal, and in 2016 and 2017, Boko Haram agreed to hand over a total of 103 of the abductees. Controversial amnesty programs began allowing Boko Haram members to reenter society after serving time at rehabilitation camps. The Chibok girls faded from the headlines.

[Read: When America couldn’t bring back our girls]

One reason is many of the women who remained with Boko Haram had married into the group. Although the women now say they were not forced, they faced intense pressure. Those who complied were granted privileges such as access to more and better food, and even possession of slaves. At times, those slaves were chosen from among their own classmates. Married women were usually moved away from the other Chibok captives, deeper into the forest. They were hard to locate, and even if they were found, it wasn’t always clear that they wanted to leave.

In the past couple of years, some of those missing women have finally emerged, but they are not the same girls who were taken into the forest a decade ago. Twenty have been rescued since 2021, and they have brought with them 31 children. (Almost 100 of the Chibok captives are still missing; about 20 may have died during childbirth, from illness or snakebites, or in joint Nigerian and American military air raids targeted at Boko Haram.) Most of the freed women are widows, but seven—including Jinkai—came out with their husbands or partners. They all moved into a large house in Maiduguri, where the government provides for them. In other words—in a decision that has angered the women’s families and baffled many Nigerians—taxpayers are supporting these former militants to live with the very women they kidnapped.

It is difficult to overstate how famous the “Chibok Girls” are in Nigeria. When the military finds one, it usually summons the media, positions the woman in front of the cameras, and marks her name off the list circulated by the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Occasionally, the freed captives recount their experiences—describing the hardships of captivity and lavishing gratitude on the armed forces for liberating them.

So I was not surprised, when I first met Jinkai and the other recently freed women on a Sunday afternoon in January, to find them somewhat bored to be going through the routine once more. Sitting in their hijabs under a tree outside their house in Maiduguri, they told me the usual things about being thankful for their freedom. But when I tried to probe them about their feelings on the transformations they had undergone, the narrative got more complicated.

In 2022, Jinkai and her three children left the forest and surrendered to the Nigerian military. She told reporters that her husband, Usman, had given her permission to go, and planned to follow: “I just hope Usman surrenders as soon as possible. I can’t wait to reunite with him,” she said. She was transferred to a rehabilitation camp in Bulumkutu, along with the other recently freed women. After several weeks, they were released and granted permission to return home to visit their families in Chibok.

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“The day she returned, we were all so happy and rushed to hug her,” Jinkai’s father, Bullum, told me. They celebrated with a thanksgiving service at church. She’d brought her children, and her family allotted her a portion of their farmland where she could start growing peanuts. But soon, she left for the house in Maiduguri, where, to her family’s surprise, Usman was waiting. “She was a Christian, but when she went into the forest, they turned her into a Muslim,” her father, Yama Bullum, told me. “I sent her to school and now she doesn’t want to go to school again. The girl is not even talking to us.”

Jinkai got married a year after she was abducted, and had her first child by the age of 22. She’s 29 now. When I spoke with her on a video call after our first meeting, she told me, “In terms of religion, I am happy with the one I am doing now, which is Islam.” When I asked her about the tensions with her family over her husband and religion, she said, “How I feel about my family is not anybody’s business,” and hung up.

“How do you deal with the issue of agency of women who were abducted as children?” Aisha Muhammed-Oyebode asked me. She organized the Bring Back Our Girls activist group and is the CEO of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, which supports the women and their families. “We left the girls too long in that place. The longer we left them, the more they changed.”

Boko Haram husbands were not always treated so generously. In 2016, the Nigerian military discovered one of the Chibok girls, Amina Ali, roaming the forest with her baby and a man who claimed to be her husband. She said he’d helped her escape, and yet he was swiftly taken into custody by the Nigerian military and labeled as a criminal. I conducted one of the first interviews with her, during which she said she missed her husband. “Just because we got separated, that does not mean that I don’t think about him,” she said. “I’m not comfortable with the way I’m being kept from him.”

The state government is only trying to protect the women’s welfare and mental health by supporting them as they stay with their husbands, the governor of Borno and architect of the policy, Babagana Umaru Zulum, told me. But it is also a tactic. By speaking publicly about the treatment they receive upon returning, the women can play a crucial role in persuading others to come out of hiding.

[From the May 2021 issue: A kidnapping gone very wrong]

Besides, Governor Zulum said, the women were interviewed and “they said this is what they want. And even before they came out of the forest, some of them gave us conditions that for them to come out, they will come with their husbands. We want to see if we can get more.”

It’s true that the couples seemed determined to reunite. Last year, one of the freed women, Mary Dauda, was visiting her family in Chibok when a former militant arrived, seeking to discover her whereabouts. “He was arrested by vigilantes,” Yakubu Nkeki, the chair of the Chibok parents’ group, told me, and barred from seeing Mary. Nevertheless, she ran away from her family to join him. They’re now living together in Maiduguri.

Many spoke fondly of their husbands. Aisha Graema has had two children and been married to the same militant for eight years. She told me they agreed together on their escape: “I first came out of the forest and then he followed me,” she said. “There in the bush, we had no relative, no brother, no sister. That is why we decided to come out. He finished deradicalization before we were allowed to stay together. The government welcomed us well, gave us food, shelter, everything.” She added, “All my prayers are that I just want my husband to get a good thing to do in life.”

A street in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State (Sally Hayden / SOPA Images / Getty)

But the women’s parents have a very different view. Many of them think the government is sacrificing their daughters for the sake of stability, to appease Boko Haram, an accusation that Governor Zulum denied.

Dauda Yama (no relation to Mary—many of the families have similar names), whose daughter Saratu is among the recently released women, told me, “I would prefer the girl to come and live with us.” He said people in Chibok are talking; one said to him, “‘Your daughter has been rescued but she is still with Boko Haram?’ I am very pained. It’s not right.”

“I am not happy with what the governor did,” Jinkai’s father said. “The girls managed to come out of the forest and the governor married them off again.”

Over multiple conversations with the women, I struggled to know for sure how they felt. I had trouble connecting with Jinkai because every time I called, Usman answered her phone and promptly hung up. When I asked different women in the house to deliver my messages to her, they hesitated and appeared fearful, mentioning the presence of her husband.

All of the women I interviewed that first day, and in phone calls that followed, at times repeated what sounded like Boko Haram propaganda. “I am happy that I was taken. I was not happy at the beginning, but as they started teaching me Islamic religion, that is when I became happy,” said Mary, who is pregnant with her second child. Dauda Yama’s daughter, Saratu, told me, “When they took us from school, I was sad, but when they started teaching me about Islam, I was happy.” When Jinkai and I finally talked, she said, a bit defensively: “I have completely forgotten about the kidnapping.” They expressed few goals for the future beyond nurturing their children, the success of their husbands, and getting into paradise.

How, many people wonder, could these women want to stay with their tormentors after all they’ve been through? I asked Somiari Fubara, a Nigerian American psychologist, if she could make sense of it. She worked for two years with former captives from Chibok studying in a special program at the American University of Nigeria in Yola. She emphasized how traumatized the women had been. They did not know “if they were ever going to be released.” They bonded with these men in part because they had to in order to survive. “The girls didn’t even know that the world was looking for them. The information they were getting was solely what they were fed by Boko Haram.”

I asked the same question of Fatima Akilu, the director of a crisis-response group, Neem Foundation, and a psychologist who has worked to deradicalize wives of Boko Haram commanders and other freed captives. She said it can take a long time to undo women’s ties to the militants’ ideology; after all, “Boko Haram have taken their time to indoctrinate them.” The women may also be struggling to reintegrate into society. They don’t fit in, they are ostracized, and as a result they may say to themselves that they were better off “in the group, where I had a sense of belonging.”

Akilu said she encourages the women to think for themselves and ask questions like “If they are really working for God, why are they killing children?” She said that these women “have been told what to believe all their lives”—first by their parents and community, and then by Boko Haram. But, she said, “when you try to teach some to figure it out for themselves, they usually are quite good at understanding what they’ve been through, what it’s meant.”

Most of the women who were stolen from Chibok have gone on to live relatively normal lives, Fubara said, reunited with their families and continuing their education. But they spent far less time in the forest than the women now living in Maiduguri. Most remained unmarried, living with other captive women, with fewer chances for deep radicalization.

The house in Maiduguri is really more like a mansion—each couple has a room to themselves, and the children romp through its extensive grounds. I was given a tour by Kauna Luka, a 26-year-old widow. We settled in her room, where a photo of her before the kidnapping, unsmiling in a white dress, hung on the wall. The room was bright and airy, with blankets, clothes, cooking utensils, and suitcases piled up in one corner.

About a dozen of the women crowded into the room to talk. Some told me about their husbands who died in the forest, speaking matter-of-factly. Others mentioned that they were dating militants they’d met at Bulumkutu. Governor Zulum has promised the women that they will not lose government support if they choose to marry now—the state will also provide accommodation to their spouses. The women cheerily described how the government meets all their needs, giving them pocket money every month and bags of rice.

[Read: Lessons from a kidnapping]

Every weekday, a bus ferries them to a “second-chance school,” where they learn skills such as tailoring and computer literacy. State security agents closely observe their movements, and they must obtain permission before going anywhere or receiving visitors.

None of the husbands was home when I visited (and despite repeated attempts to contact them, I found that their phones were always switched off). Some of the women told me that their spouses had traveled as far away as the southwestern city of Lagos or Cameroon, saying they were looking for work. I was struck by the fact that the former militants enjoy the freedom to move about as they please. Having completed their rehabilitation, they are treated like ordinary citizens. The women, however, are under strict monitoring.

The government says it has its reasons. “Our main objective is to protect them,” Zulum told me. “We are very much afraid that if we allow these Chibok girls to go back to Chibok, these useless people will come and abduct them again. We are also afraid that if we allow them to roam anyhow, even within Maiduguri, maybe some culprits may attack them. We receive complaints from parents and others that we don’t want to allow these Chibok girls to go back to their communities, but we also see the dangers inherent in allowing them to go anywhere they want.”

The Borno government is following a policy similar to one implemented by the federal government. The 103 girls freed in 2016 and 2017 were kept in custody in Abuja, the capital, for up to a year. Even when they were permitted to visit Chibok for Christmas, they were confined to the house of a local politician, for fear that they might be kidnapped again.

But the house in Maiduguri may be another kind of captivity. One of the women who originally lived there, Hauwa Joseph, has since left it behind to start a different life. I spoke with her mother, Esther. “My daughter tried to return to Christianity while in Maiduguri, but being with the others made it difficult,” she told me. “She refused to put on the hijab, and the other girls called her an infidel.” They told her that she would never find a man who wasn’t a militant to marry her. When the women were permitted to visit Chibok in December, Hauwa’s uncles connected with a Christian charity that took her away to a different town and is working to send her abroad to study. She’d changed her phone number, and her family asked me not to reveal her location, so no one can pressure her to return. (I tried multiple times to reach her directly.)

Yakubu Nkeki, the chair of the parents’ association, told me he was torn between the grievances of the parents and the rights of their daughters, who may have been teenagers when they were kidnapped but are now grown women. “Our culture in Chibok, even a 50-year-old woman, you are still under the control of your parents” until you marry, Nkeki said. “But by the constitution of Nigeria, when you are 18 years, you can think on your own.”

What these women really think remains a mystery, at least to me. When I left the house in Maiduguri that Sunday, a security guard was shouting at the women, warning them not to wander too close to the gates. Seeing these women who had been through so much scurrying to obey left me simmering. Was this the liberation Nigeria had promised them?

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

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