Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Purple Hibiscus and Everything Good Will Come are set in postcolonial Nigeria, in the era of military governance. The former is set in the mid s to later s while the latter between the sands. These periods in Nigeria are historically marked by a series of military governments. In between the first republic of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa in 1966 and Alhaji Shehu Shagari in 1979, four military regimes took over in a battery of coups and countercoups. Between the second republic of Shehu Shagari and Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, five military regimes controlled Nigeria in the second wave of coups and counter-coups. 125 This period was affected by economic oil gains, losses, corruption, human rights abuses, and international sanctions against Nigeria among others. These were generally devastating effects in what the acclaimed Nigerian novelist, poet and essayist Ben Okri describes as an “abiku nation – where he uses the metaphor of a “spirit-child” to allegorise the young nation-state. The daughterhoods of Adichie‟s and Atta‟s protagonists, contextualised in the political history outlined above are therefore affected by militarised masculinities, and violent fatherhoods. The historical context delineated can be argued to have defined fatherhood, father figures and paternity in various ways. It is in this case instructive to examine how From January 1966 to 1979 Nigeria was under the military governance of Aguiyi Ironsi, Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo. From December 1983 began a second wave of military governance in the following order Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Ernest Shonekan caretaker civilian leader, Sani Abacha and Abdulsalam Abubakar. 192 the father figure, in light of the political and historical contexts above is constructed in Purple Hibiscus and Everything Good Will Come. In the postcolonial contexts of these texts, the father represents the patronymic continuity between the colonial and postcolonial nation-state. This stature is related to Nigeria‟s history of military governance, whose face is represented by father figures. These father figures feign magnanimity and religious belief in public while perpetuating human rights atrocities through bureaucratic back channels. This Janus-faced nature leads us to a second perspective of what constructed this father figure religion. Religion in Nigeria is an influential factor in the construction of identities, be they political, social or cultural. The regional politics in Nigeria that curved out geographies of violence as Toyin Falola (1998) discusses, were partly created at the altar of religion. The Northern, South-Eastern and South-Western regional blocks that have become dominant and normative political zones in Nigeria have been historicised in the consolidation of religious beliefs across time – before, during and after colonialism. Islam and Christian religions reinforced a patriarchal discourse of fatherhood. Moreover, because of political and economic turbulence caused by corruption, mass poverty created a convenient ground for the entrenchment of religious belief. Political protagonists also played upon this atmosphere by continuously embezzling funds for personal gains while appealing to divine intervention with messages of hope. Hence, the idea of the father comes with the legitimacy of religious practice and the selective demands of religion that provide political expediency and the consolidation of power. Religion becomes essential to defining the hold on power and its performance. This performance is aided by communal victimhood, a condition that helps to entrench the pursuit of religion as not only escape from the socioeconomic and political turbulence, but also reflective of a genuine hankering after human dignity. The military regimes, continuously seen as interim solutions to governance slowly got trapped by the allure of power and used whatever means at their disposal to legitimise their hold on power. Under the charade of a cleanup exercise, a repressive grammar developed. The 193 extrajudicial repressive state apparatuses crushed dissent through torture, public flogging, executions, and unexplained disappearances of dissenting individuals under the pretext of cleaning up the mess left behind by civilian governance. Rhetoric of discipline became, during this time, away to sanction the use of violence by the (military) state. The perpetual image of the state as the father and the citizens its children helped sanction the use of corporal punishment, public executions and torture while at the same time dispense wealth and property to specified elites to maintain the image of a magnanimous fatherhood. The state, represented by the military figure and his foot soldiers embodies a paterfamilias who clamps down on dissenting children for their own good and for the good of the nation From the above description of the political and historical canvas, Purple Hibiscus and Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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