Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: War in African Literature: Literary Harvests, Human Tragedies
- ARTICLES
- The Muted Index of War in African Literature & Society
- ‘Life in the Camp of the Enemy’: Alemseged Tesfai's Theatre of War
- Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
- Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
- Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
- Politics & Human Rights in Non-Fiction Prison Literature
- Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
- The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni
- History, Memoir & a Soldier's Conscience: Philip Efiong's Nigeria & Biafra: My Story
- Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry
- REVIEWS
- Index
Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: War in African Literature: Literary Harvests, Human Tragedies
- ARTICLES
- The Muted Index of War in African Literature & Society
- ‘Life in the Camp of the Enemy’: Alemseged Tesfai's Theatre of War
- Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
- Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
- Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
- Politics & Human Rights in Non-Fiction Prison Literature
- Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
- The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni
- History, Memoir & a Soldier's Conscience: Philip Efiong's Nigeria & Biafra: My Story
- Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry
- REVIEWS
- Index
Summary
It is around 40 years now since the civil war in Nigeria ended, yet its ugly scars on the Nigerian mind and soul remain visible and glaring. The defective healing process of the wounds on the Nigerian psyche from the war has resulted in an extensive gulf between the people of the defunct Biafra and Nigeria, the two parties in the war that lasted from 1967 to 1970 and the implications of the war are manifested in diverse ways and degrees in the contemporary Nigerian body politic. Biafra comprised mainly the people of the Eastern part of Nigeria, who, led by Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, attempted to secede from the federation of Nigeria on account of several grievances prominent among which was acute marginalization. According to Atofarati (2003),
Under normal circumstances the amalgamation [of the three regions in Nigeria in 1966] ought to have brought the various peoples together and provided a firm basis for the arduous task of establishing closer cultural, social, religious and linguistic ties vital for true unity among the people. [Rather] There was division, hatred, unhealthy rivalry and pronounced disparity in development.
The apparent bitterness and discontent of the people of Biafra about the way they were treated, and the total waste that the Nigeria–Biafra war portended, come alive in the fiction on the war. Nigerian fiction on the war, written mostly by scholars and intellectuals from Eastern Nigeria, specifically the Igbo, who directly suffered and still bear the pains of the war, reveals that the war was avoidable.
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- Information
- War in African Literature Today , pp. 49 - 59Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008