FRAGILE NATIONHOOD: ETHNIC MISTRUST AND PEACE-BUILDING IN SELECTED POST WAR NIGERIAN MEMOIRS

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of ethnic mistrust in Postwar Nigerian memoirist genre. It argues that there is evidence in post-war Nigerian non-fiction that the Biafran question is one factor that complicates the quest for national unity. While the Igbo locate the origin of their marginalization in colonial history and the attempt by the British to punish them for challenging the colonial project of domination, other ethnic groups in Nigeria lay claim to their own marginalization and the attempt by the Igbo to dominate them.  Relying on Bhabha’s theory of mimcry as menace and the concept of fragility of peace in its interrogation of these controversies, the article examines three postwar memoirs by authors from each of the three ethnic formations,  Wole Soyinka's The Man Died: A Prison Memoir (1972), Chinua Achebe's There Was a Country: A Personal History of the Nigeria-Biafra War (2012) and Ayuba Mshelia's Araba Let's Separate: The Story of the Nigeria Civil War to show how postwar Nigerian non-fiction has engaged with the question of ethnic mistrust, the fragility of peace and the prospects of inter-ethnic reconnection in Nigeria.