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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Nigerian literature and the search for socio-political alternatives: the relevance of Nigerian war fiction |
Author: | Nwahunanya, Chinyere |
Year: | 1987 |
Periodical: | Nigeria Magazine |
Volume: | 55 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 50-55 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Nigeria |
Subjects: | social conditions civil wars novels Nigerian-Biafran War |
Abstract: | Nigerian war fiction reveals aspects of sociopolitical life in Nigeria that have contributed to the seeming intractability of the country's present predicament. The author looks at those sections of some Nigerian war novels that focus on the social situation in both Nigeria and Biafra during the war and discovers an initial zeal and idealism among Eastern Nigerians after the announcement of secession. Against this background, he examines the novelists' record of what they saw actually happen in Biafra, and the social vision that emerges from that record. Competition and corruption among the men in power and authority led to cynicism and disillusion among the common people. The pattern of power profiteering, witch-hunting and the exploitation of the weak by the strong depicted in the Biafran accounts took almost the same form in Nigeria. Ironically, the ending of the war reunited the same old group of exploiters in a new alliance. It follows then that the solution lies not just in seeking new political alternatives on paper, but in identifying those elements in Nigerian social ethics that have contributed to Nigerians' inability to achieve effective socioeconomic and political takeoff. Ref. |