The Fulani herdsmen attacked at 6:00 am, just after morning prayers in Nimbo, an idyllic village in southeast Nigeria where farmers grow yams and pawpaws.
At first the villagers thought it was a joke. The nomadic cattle rearers, who have clashed with farmers over grazing rights in central Nigeria for decades, had never come this far south.
But then they saw 20 young men descend from the hills and emerge from the palm tree forest, shooting AK-47 assault rifles in the air and waving machetes.
“We started hearing the sound of gunshots everywhere. They shot so many people,” Kingsley Oneyebuchie, a 31-year-old civil servant, told AFP.
“They shot one of my brothers, they used a knife on my dad, they killed so many,” he said from his hospital bed in the nearby town of Nsukka, bare-chested and wearing only red athletic shorts.
Oneyebuchie ran his fingers tentatively over a 20-centimetre (eight-inch) track of blue surgical stitches at the base of his scalp.
“They used machete on me. After using machete on me, they thought that I died,” he said.
Oneyebuchie was lucky to survive the attack on April 25. At least 10 people are thought to have been killed and scores of others injured.
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