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- Title
Ethnic Conflict and the Politics of Greed.
- Authors
TEMBO, NICK MDIKA
- Abstract
The African continent today is laced with some of the most intractable conflicts, most of them based on ethnic nationalism. More often than not, this has led to poor governance, unequal distribution of resources, state collapse, high attrition of human resources, economic decline, and inter-ethnic clashes. This essay seeks to examine Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun through the lens of ethnic conflict. It begins by tracing the history and manifestations of ethnic stereotypes and ethnic cleavage in African imaginaries. The essay then argues that group loyalty in Nigeria led to the creation of 'biafranization' or 'fear of the Igbo factor' in the Hausa-Fulani and the various other ethnic groups that sympathized with them; a fear that crystallized into a thirty-month state-sponsored bulwark campaign aimed at finding a 'final solution' to a 'problem population'. Finally, the essay contends that Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun anatomizes the impact of ethnic cleavage on the civilian Igbo population during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. Adichie, I argue, participates in an ongoing re-invention of how Africans can extinguish the psychology of fear that they are endangered species when they live side by side with people who do not belong to their 'tribe'.
- Subjects
NIGERIA; HALF of a Yellow Sun (Book); ADICHIE, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977-; ETHNIC conflict in literature; IGBO (African people) in literature; NIGERIAN Civil War, 1967-1970; CIVIL war in literature
- Publication
Matatu: Journal for African Culture & Society, 2012, Vol 40, Issue 1, p173
- ISSN
0932-9714
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1163/18757421-040001011