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In this special episode of Outlook, as part of our Lagos series, Helen Oyibo has been hearing remarkable testimony from three people whose lives have been affected by the confraternity system in Nigerian universities, student societies which have morphed into violent criminal gangs.

Roland, who is speaking under a pseudonym, unwillingly joined a confraternity on campus in an attempt to find protection from a rival confraternity. He told us about the violent initiation ceremony he had to endure, and how he found himself trapped in the society, unable to leave.

Professor Wole Soyinka is a revered writer in Nigeria, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He knows more about the history of these societies than most – he was a founding member of the first Nigerian confraternity in the late 1960s, ‘The Pyrates’, a light-hearted social group which originally had no hint of the criminality that permeates these societies today.

Finally, we hear from Nigerian journalist Omoyele Sowore. In the early 1990s he was president of the student union at the University of Lagos, and decided to stand up to its confraternities and the violence they were inflicting on campus. For his resistance he was targeted and brutally attacked, but returned to campus to defy the gangs and sit his final exams.
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