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
Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
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
Nation states are analogous to human beings; they are conceived and are born after an appropriate gestation period. Thereafter, their parents and well-wishers watch them with keen interest as they grow from infancy to adolescence in the hope that the young nations will survive to mature old age. Unfortunately, sometimes tragedy befalls the nations and they teeter on the brink of collapse. Such is the misfortune of the nation, which is portrayed in Sunset at Dawn, a historical novel that is based on the Nigeria/Biafra civil war.
Like a human being, the nation state of Nigeria was conceived during the Berlin conference of 1884/85. It was at this meeting that various European states allocated to themselves portions of the continent of Africa as their colonies. In this manner, Britain was allotted the territory that she later named Nigeria. The gestation period lasted 29 years, that is, from 1885 to 1914, during which time Britain ruled the Northern and Southern sections (protectorates) of Nigeria as separate entities. The date of birth of Nigeria as a nation state was 1914, since that was the year when the British colonial government amalgamated the two protectorates into one entity. Yet, the colonial government did not institute one administrative system for the entire nation. Rather, it administered the two units differently. In the South, it encouraged Christian missionaries to establish churches and schools as Westernizing influences, while in the North it established a system of indirect rule that operated through the existing feudal organization.
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- Chapter
- Information
- War in African Literature Today , pp. 33 - 48Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008