Since her escape, Rebecca Ishaku has been haunted by nightmares of the moment Boko Haram stormed her school in Chibok, snatching nearly 300 students. As she awakes six months to the day after the abduction, things are no different.

“I still cried about them this morning,” the 18-year-old said as she attended a protest in the capital Abuja in support of her 219 classmates who remain in captivity. Among them were her best friends Hauwa, Saratu and Monica, who had been too scared to run when the gunmen burst in and began rounding up the girls.

“I dream my friends have come back, but when I greet them, they don’t answer me. I wish I could help them,” the teenager said, her voice almost drowned out by the surrounding chants of “bring back our girls, now and alive!”

About 50 protesters decked in red shirts tried on Tuesday to march to the presidential villa under an ominous, sweltering sky, but were repeatedly diverted by phalanxes of riot police, who formed a ring around them as they approached the president’s home.

“No arrests, no intimidation will keep us from finding out the truth. We have a right to know what is happening,” said Obi Ezekwesili, a former education minister who has spearheaded the #BringBackOurGirls movement.

The protests have waned both in Nigeria and abroad, but those gathered seemed re-energised as they sought to draw attention back to a campaign that has been repeatedly hijacked in the runup to presidential elections in February.

Stick-wielding youths have descended on the campaigners to insist it be renamed #releaseourgirls – putting the onus on the Islamists rather than the government. In recent days, campaigners for the president, Goodluck Jonathan, surrounded the park where the small, daily protest takes place waving posters declaring #BringBackGoodluck2015.

One woman, covered head-to-toe in a red dress and hijab, wore a huge poster with the slogan: “We elected [president Goodluck] Jonathan, he has our mandate, not [Boko Haram leader] Shekau, so we can only ask our president to #BringBackOurGirls.” But hopes of speaking to the president – who agreed to meet with the families of the missing girls for the first time in July following a visit from Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai – were dashed on Tuesday. Instead, the minister of land and housing was sent to appease the crowd.

“The president will do something … by the grace of God the girls will be brought back home,” she said, before hurrying off as the crowd booed.

“What kind of response is that?” said Ibrahim Morocco, a protester wearing a red bandana. “They say they don’t want to go in and rescue the girls because Boko Haram will kill them, but then they don’t want to negotiate. So what is the alternative? There’s no plan B, no plan C. These girls are our future, so definitely we can’t just forget about them and all the others.”

Boko Haram’s campaign to impose a medieval Islamic caliphate on Africa’s most populous nation has killed more than 3,000 this year. Yet, as is so often the case in African conflicts, the death toll has become just another statistic and activists are fighting to keep the sect’s atrocities in the public eye through online projects and art.

Cartoonist Mike Asukwo has an unusual take: dark humour. “If you laugh it can give people hope and make the situation seem less gloomy. And then beyond the laughter, people can start thinking,” said Asukwo, who switched from fine art to political satire seven years ago.

There is little to laugh at in a group whose methods include burning sleeping schoolchildren, but absurdities abound. The sect, who sometimes slit victims’ throats to save on bullets, is against western education, “along with the ideologies of America, England, France, China and the whole world,” its leader Abubakar Shekau said in his most recent video .

Choosing his words carefully, Asukwo said: “For any normal person, this should be disturbing. But once in a while you run into people who look at the situation from a very different angle. We’re not fighting this as one people, we’re not seeing Boko Haram as everybody’s enemy, and that’s partly why they’ve been able to make so many incursions.”

Campaigners face both public apathy and intimidation. “Part of the reason people tune off is they’re always hearing ‘60 people were gunned down in their school’,” said Nigerian rights campaigner Saratu Abiola, whose Testimonial Archive Project is an ever-growing collection of harrowing stories from survivors of the mass murders. “You don’t hear that Ahmed was killed. And Ali was killed. Saratu, Joseph and Amina were killed. What did ordinary folk see? What did they feel?”

Three months after Abiola’s project began, Boko Haram was propelled into global infamy when it kidnapped the schoolgirls. Last month, gunmen from the sect are believed to have opened fire in a college in Kano, killing 20 students.

The news rarely makes official bulletins. “I sometimes wonder, do we just not allow ourselves to be angry anymore because it’s too much,” said artist Tayo Ogunbiyi, who was angrily accused of perpetuating “a hoax” when she launched an exhibition celebrating both the Chibok girls’ lives and the horror they were enduring. Her work was inspired by some of the teenagers’ diaries and personal belongings, which were shot by another photographer, Glenna Gordon.

“The comments have been out of this world. Yesterday somebody said to me, no girls are missing, and you people should stop insulting my intelligence,” Ogunbiyi said.

Despite a vibrant arts scene, few artists risk exploring the thorny subject of sectarian violence. “I know some who have said, ‘I don’t want to do anything that may bring me face-to-face with the government.’ But what’s art if you can’t actually speak for the voiceless?” said Chris Nwobu, a Lagos-based photographer whose collection captures the agonising silence of the Chibok girls amid the media frenzy that initially surrounded their abduction. “This is part of our history. We can’t just sit back, fold our arms and allow this bullshit to continue going on.”

Nigerian historian Max Siollun believes the Biafra civil war, which left more than 1 million dead but did not directly affect some parts of the country, fostered a reluctance to document conflict. Censors recently tried to ban the film Half of a Yellow Sun based on the 1967-70 conflict.

“After the war, the ‘forgive and forget’ mentality encouraged conflict issues to be swept under the carpet. Except the phenomenon was not limited to Biafra only and spread across all controversial national discourses in Nigeria,” explained Siollun, who runs a rare archive of Nigerian historical footage.

A tiny minority of officials are also looking towards the arts for healing. Increased sports, poetry and music in northern schools, and the introduction of art programs for suspected Boko Haram detainees is part of a new educational drive from the National Security Office. “These are all things Boko Haram say Islam is against. They’re the aspects of education that allow you to be creative and think,” Fatima Akilu, director of behavioural analysis at the NSA, told the Guardian.

Meanwhile, some say that they are duty bound to keep the group in the spotlight. Abiola said: “A lot of Nigerians ask, what’s the north’s problem? Well, we were all walking by when their problems were being created, and we didn’t do anything because it wasn’t happening to us.”

• This article was amended on 15 October 2014. It originally stated that it was the six-month anniversary of the abduction. Anniversaries are annual events. This has been corrected.

