Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism as Paradigms of Minority Discourse: A Literary Perspective to the Boko Haram Crisis in Northern Nigeria

Article Citation: Abubakar A. Othman & Markus Ishaku (2020). Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism as Paradigms of Minority Discourse: A Literary Perspective to the Boko Haram Crisis in Northern Nigeria. DEGEL: The Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Islamic Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2. ISSN 0794-9316

POSTCOLONIALISM AND MULTICULTURALISM AS PARADIGMS OF MINORITY DISCOURSE: A LITERARY PERSPECTIVE TO THE BOKO HARAM CRISIS IN NORTHERN NIGERIA

By

Abubakar A. Othman & Markus Ishaku

Abstract

This paper offers a literary perspective on the Boko Haram crisis in Northern Nigeria from the point of view of minority discourse. Using the concepts of Post-colonialism and Multiculturalism in literary criticism, the paper argues that the Boko Haram crisis, like that of the Niger-Delta insurgency, is a manifestation of the dissatisfaction of a marginalized group of people. Post-colonialism and Multiculturalism are identified as paradigms of oppression and marginalization of minority groups, and a continuation of the colonial legacy in Post-independence Africa. That Postcoloniality ascribes states and socio-economic privileges only to those Africans who are products of Western education, to the detriment of traditional scholarship and cultural integrity, is the underlying reason for the Boko Haram crisis as a minority social influence. Postcolonial literature with its focus more on Multiculturalism, and the over-determination to pursue the ideas and identities imposed on Africa by the neocolonial Western modernism, has affected negatively the social responsibility of the writer in Africa. The rather lackadaisical and low quality literary response to the Boko Haram crisis in Nigeria is a manifestation of this decline in the social responsibility of African literature. The paper thus concludes by saying that Postcoloniality requires a reconfiguration of ideas and identities to include other factors such as the diversity in precolonial cultures.

Introduction

Throughout history, the misrepresentation of cultures, the hatred of different cultures, coupled with an ignorance of cultures, have always been the underlying reason for human conflict.

- Cuccioletta (n.d)

Culture, the defining and differentiating heritage of every society, is the most valuable possession for all human groups. That is why colonialism at its inception first sought to undermine the African culture by not just denying its existence, but also by condemning its misunderstood practices as mere savagery. Therefore, African literature during the colonial era had the onerous task of defending African culture and tradition, even if only to debunk the European or, indeed, Western claim that Africans had to be colonized to be civilized. Chinua Achebe (1973:13) puts his defense categorically thus “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from the Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry, and above all, they had dignity”.

This dignity Africans lost to the onslaught of colonialism is what African literature had to struggle to restore, and to reassert the integrity of African people and their culture. Accordingly, post-colonialism as a form of neo-colonialism, thus gives the issue of culture a great importance. This is in an attempt to sustain and expand what Gikandi (2004: 385) calls cultural formations and configurations, established by colonialism which produced new subjects and nations. The conflict between traditional African values and the imposed and alienating cultural values of the West therefore takes the center stage in African literature. The most significant changes that Africa has experienced and which continue to trouble the continent up to now are the experiences of postcolonialism and multiculturalism.

Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism

Postcolonialism simply refers to what happens or exists after colonial rule, such as cultural diversity, otherwise called Multiculturalism. According to Ashcroft et al. (1989, p.2) “the term Postcolonialial covers all cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”. Post-colonialism criticism, therefore, is a form of anti-imperialism that stresses, among other issues, the need to develop or return to indigenous literary traditions so as to extricate cultural heritage from the grips of imperial domination. Hence post-colonialism theory, notes Habib (2011, p. 271) is predicated upon the imperial policy of subjugating and suppression of the African peoples with a claim to “bringing to a subject people the blessings of a superior civilization, and liberating them from their benighted ignorant.” Jeyifor (2003, p. 72) explains that, the term post-colonialism can be used to describe any form of experience of domination and exploitation of one group or community by another. He therefore concludes that:

Any instance or location of such exploitation or domination or marginalization is deemed paradigmatic of either the centuries of domination of the non-western world in the age of European colonial world hegemony or indeed of the present age neocolonialism.

This paradigm of Postcolonial domination uses the concept of cultural diffusion or diversity known today as Multiculturalism. The term does not just mean the multiplicity of culture; it also means an ideology or social system. According to Grosu (2012, p. 103), “Multiculturalism deals with the management of cultural diversity of all minority ethnic and racial groups…to assist minorities to retain and foster their identity”. This policy of Multiculturalism which obtains in Australia reflects a deep understanding of the importance of culture to people and society. Stressing on the importance of culture, Cucciolletta (2001/2002, p.86) notes that, “Throughout history, the misrepresentation of cultures, the hatred of different cultures, coupled with an ignorance of cultures, have always been the underlying reasons for human conflict”.

However, under the policy of Post-colonialism, Multiculturalism is aimed at annihilating ethnic minorities by suppressing their cultural beliefs and practices resulting in their marginalization and exploitation. In Nigeria, as rightly observed by Ejenavwo (2007, p. 26), “The dissatisfaction of marginalized ethnic groups was the trigger for the most tragic internal conflicts in Nigerian history”. These conflicts include the Nigerian Civil war of 1966-1969, the lingering Niger Delta crisis and the growing Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Nigeria spearheaded by the Boko Haram adherents. The Da’wah Institute of Nigeria (DIN: 2017, p. 100), thinking in tandem with the above assertion notes specifically that:

Colonial powers have definitely been very prejudiced against Islam and Muslims. They have done whatever they can to undermine many of the traditional Muslim political, economic, judicial and educational institutions and they have shown varying degrees of disregard for traditional scholars and scholarship.       

Consequently, post-coloniality promotes the discriminatory marginalization of Muslim scholars and scholarship in Northern Nigeria, reducing the majority Muslim population to the status of minorities in their domain. As Muslim scholars versed in Arabic and Islamic scholarship, postcolonial Nigerian government does not provide space for them in the socio-political, economic, and administrative structure of the country. Meanwhile, western education and its system of governance which the country elevates to suppress traditional administration and Islamic education, only breeds corruption in the system, promotes social vices and judicial injustice. This creates dissatisfaction and anger among the marginalised Muslims which engendered a tragic reaction in the form of Boko Haram.

Writing on education from Islamic perspective, Sheik Ahmed Lemu (DIN2017: preface) explains that:

The value of knowledge (or education) in Islam is not dependent on its geographical or cultural origin, but on the basis of its usefulness… Based on this and the urpose to which the knowledge will be used for, its acquisition could be an obligation fard or wajib), recommended (mustahab), merely permissible(mubah), discouraged (makruh) or forbidden (haram).

Hence to the marginalized Muslim scholars and their learned teachers, except for those of them who integrated their scholarship with Western education and, consequently, became part of the postcolonial enterprise, western education could be forbidden because it has not been put to useful purpose.

Boko Haram as a Minority Social Influnence

Boko Haram is the name given to a pseudo-religious minority group operating in Northern Nigeria, which started in 2009 in the North-Eastern city of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. The group actually calls itself by a long puritanical name in Arabic thus, “Jama’at Ahl Sunna Lida’awa Waljihad”. The name, however, is a modified version of a previous group known as “Izalatul Bidi’a Wa Ikamatul Sunna”, another puritanical Islamic group operating throughout Nigeria.

The movement started in Maiduguri as a group of Islamic cognoscente in discord with other Muslim scholars on Islamic jurisprudence. Members of the group were drawn mainly from Kano, Zaria, Kaduna and Maiduguri, most of them who studied in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and therefore profess the Salafist brand of Islam. But Nigeria being of predominantly Sunni Muslims, proves impervious to the Salafist ideology resulting in conflict of ideas about religion, society and secular authority. Although the conflict remained largely intellectual and very rarely virulent, systemic corruption, increased social vices, and government high-handedness, spurred the group to become aggressive in its attitude towards constituted authorities and the ruling elites.

Mohammed Yusuf, the most truculent but less educated among the group, denounced his little western education, severed relationship with the state government and declared jihad against the state. He carried in his fold a large number of jobless youths, barely educated Islamic preachers, street urchins and almajiri boys. He established his jihad headquarters at the railway area of Maiduguri and named the place Markas from where he launched his jihad. He preached openly against the government and the law enforcement agencies. However, the conflict remained at the level of mere skirmishes with the authority until his headquarters was attacked by the military.

After the incident, Mohammed Yusuf and his group came out in full force to declare war on the government leading to his arrest and detention. He was later killed in an extrajudicial manner by the police which earned them the ire of the Sect that was to transform itself into an anarchist militant group. From its new operational headquarters in Sambisa forest of Borno State, the group took over control of virtually the entire state, parts of Yobe and Adamawa States, and some areas in the neighbouring countries of Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

Since its emergence in 2009, Boko Haram has unleashed a reign of terror marked by the deaths of over a million people with triple the number rendered homeless and internally displaced. The war became a lucrative business and political game for agencies of the Nigerian government, some foreign countries sand a number of international organisation, while the country suffers horrendously. However, because of their zero respect for life and the belief that everything and everyone that does not bow to their fundamentalist “Islamic” principles is supposedly utterly useless and must be destroyed. Their version of social minority thus branded as nihilism.

Given their antics and activities, Boko Haram can best be described as postcolonial anarchism rather than anti –state nationalism. This is because in nationalism, the primary political unit is the local community. Book Haram does not seek to make Nigeria a political unit; rather it focuses on the segment of the nation which they see as a community of common cultural identity and faith, but which is now being systematically undermined by post-colonial /neocolonial power structure. Therefore, rather according to Fanon (1967, p. 18): “Every colonized people-every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality, finds itself face to face with the language of colonized nation that is with the culture of the mother country”.

Hence, the Boko Haram discourse largely centers on the minoritazation of people who culturally consider themselves a majority in their respective domains, but now made to feel inferior because of colonialism. What then is the literary response to this post-colonial attitude and the resultant anarchy of Boko Haram as a minority discourse?

Literary Resnponse to the Boko Haram Crisis

The Boko Haram movement sees the present Nigerian society in the same way contemporary Nigerian fiction depicts the country: “a society adrift and a people lost in the imbecilities of futile optimism, hoping that materialism and the pursuit of filthy lucre will compensate for the loss of the nation’s soul.” (Nnolim 2010, p. 207). To arrest the drift and provide the needful moral mooring, the group sees the need to repudiate the colonial legacies of materialism, domination, exploitation, and alienation by rejecting the very instrument that colonialism used to colonise Africa, that is western education and all that is associated with it. Book Haram is a reaction to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the decadence of multiculturalism, all embedded in what the group calls “abhorred” Western Education and its trappings. Like the Nigerian Civil War of 1966-1969 that elicited an outpour of literary responses, Boko Haram as a far more gruesome tragedy lasting longer than the civil war, should attract greater literary responses but it does not. This is similar to the environmental tragedy that rocks the minority tribes of the Niger Delta with devastating impact on their socio-economic and cultural existence, but which attracts slow and low literary response from Nigerian writers outside the region.

Minority discourse, it appears, hardly attracts the attention of Nigerian writers today the way issues of globalisation, trans-culturalism and genderism attract them. Consequently, gruesome human infractions continue to happen to the minorities in the society without adequate corresponding reactions from our writers. However, there are few literary attempts mainly by writers from the region. We have attempted here an overview of the novels of Elnathan John, Born on a Tuesday(2016), Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Seasons of Crimson Blossoms (2015), E E Sule, Makwala (2018), Habiba Alkali-Nur, The Phantom Army(2017), to illustrate the literary response in prose to the Boko Haram crisis as a post-colonial minority discourse.

Commenting on the literary quality of Born on a Tuesday, Taye Selasi, the author ofGhana Must Go, notes as follows " With brave, unflinching candor expressed through sparse unadorned prose, Elnathan John considers the use of Islamic extremism in Nigeria as experienced by one young man. Anyone seeking to peer beyond the media portrayals of Boko Haram must read this book, not because it offers a hopeful account, but because it offers a human one." (Back cover blurb).

The novel does not only offer a human account of the Boko Haram crisis, but also an incisive intellectual discourse of the crisis. Elnathan John in his own consideration of the Boko Haram crisis, depicts the group as a socio-economic minority. Dantala, the main character in the story, is not only from the fringe of the society, a village hardly accessible or visible, but also from an economically disadvantaged family, whose parents can hardly provide one decent meal in a day. Dantala has to leave his parents ostensibly to seek for Qur'anic education in another town, but actually to reduce the burden of feeding on the impoverished family.

But the Qur'anic school he goes to attend hardly equips him with the education that can set him free from his economic misery, and social status as an Almajiri. Instead, he graduates from Mallam Junaidu's Qur'anic school straight into the school of violence and crime, operated by the back street gangsters of Bayan Layi:

I have hardly prayed since I left my Qur'anic teacher...We only go to the Juma'at mosque in Sabon Garion on Fridays because there are people giving alms andlots of free food... We are not terrible people. When we fight, it is because we have to. When we break into small shops in Sabon Gari, it is because we are hungry, andwhen someone dies, well, that's Allah's will. (Elnathan 2016, p. 11-12).

That's all Dantala learned in the six years he spent in Malam Junaidu's Qur'anic school-blind acceptance of fate, that whatever happens 'that is Allah's will'. Hence, Dantala cannot differentiate good from evil deeds and bears no qualms for crimes committed because "Everything that happens is Allah's will, so why should anyone keep a grudge?" (Elnathan 2016, p. 3).

Therefore, because the Qur'anic school did not prepare him for any job or profession, and because the postcolonial policy of administration does not recognize his type of education, and being a minority in the socio-economic stratification of the society, Dantala after graduating from the Qur'anic school can only find immediate company, acceptance and semblance of livelihood among the hoodlums and scums of the society. He joins the criminal gang of boys who sleep under the Kuka tree in Bayan Layi who like to boast about the people they have killed.

Dantala represents thousands of his type honed through the almajiri system and let loose on society to swell up the numbers of jobless, ill-equipped, ill-educated, economically disadvantaged and marginalised minorities in society. Apart from the Kuka tree fraternity, Dantala was to meet more of such minority groups in his life as he traveled from Kaduna to Sokoto and to his village. That is how he comes to learn about social injustice, the insouciance of politicians and the high-handedness of the authorities in a corrupt and decadent system euphemistically dubbed "Democracy".

This is the mindset of the marginalised and oppressed minorities that religious bigots manipulate and exploit for their nefarious benefits to the detriment of society. These minorities, whose welfare is neglected by constituted authorities of democratic governance, now find solace and semblance of benevolent leadership under religious organisations such as the Shi'ites, the Izala, the Mujahids and, eventually, the most lethal: the Boko Haram group.

These religious sects have in their fold false Sheiks and Malams such as, Malam Abdul-Nur who " No one knows how he got the money he used to set up his foundation... All we know is suddenly, there are black-and-white banners, flags and stickers everywhere that read 'Mujahedeen' or 'Sunnah Sak'". (p.186). However, Elnathan John alludes to the involment of foreign countries that provided the funds for the setting up and sponsorship of religious groups such as the mujahedeen movement. Prominent among the countries are Saudi Arabia that sponsors Salafist religious group, and Iran that sponsors the Shi'ites, both of them extremist religious groups in Nigeria. While some African countries like Mauritania and Chad provide training in warfare. “Since Malam Abdul-Nur returned from the debate with Sheikh in Saudi Arabia, he has been making his people train in the bush as if they were going to war... and a man from Chad teaches them how to dismantle, assemble and clean guns. (p.195)”.

Elnathan John, in a carefully crafted debate between the extremist and moderate fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, exposes the "deliberate ignorance" of the religious leaders. Malam Abdul-Nur hides his ignorance behind sentiment to support his stance on violence against the state: “Nigerian government is kufr because democracy isdisgusting, anti-Islamic, western invention ... it is the obligation of every able Muslim to forcefully challengeand remove ungodly, infidel rulers”. (p.196).

These infidel rulers according to the group are the reason for their emergence, and execution of the Boko Haram crisis. Another significant literary response in prose to the Boko Haram crisis as a postcolonoial minority issue is E E Sule's Makwala. Set in the slum section of Kano, the novel describes with a sophisticated simplicity of language and a good blending of the comic and the tragic, the daily struggle of the individual in an oppressive and exploitative postcolonial Nigeria.

The society depicted in the novel is a rudderless one and ruthless. The physical description of Makwala is a fitting metaphor for the moral filth of the people. It is a community with "So many gutters, in front of houses, beside houses, behind houses... How they washed excreta of children, leftover food, used sanitary pads and innards of killed animals flowed from holes into gutters". In the streets of Makwala, standing side by side with these dirty gutters, “were shops, stalls, eating and drinking joints...". By late afternoon, the streets filled with workers returning home, most of them in factory work clothes. “Some of the women walked with their children, still in school uniforms, but there were more women without children, dressed stylishly, looking gay with generously applied lipstick. There were also long-limbed girls and teenage boys". (P.17-18). However, the moral import of the description comes out more glaring at night, when Hausa beggar-entertainers come around with their "kalangu" and "garaya" musical instruments, moving from street to street, where one sees,

Housewives... sat on low wooden stools, sipping drinks, cracking jokes, trading insults. Couples, clinging to each other, bottles in hands, staggered about, now and then barking at each other. Youngsters, in baggy jeans, roamed with bottles of dry gin and packets of Cigarettes stuck to their back pockets. (P.31).

Jackson and Ende, the two main characters in the novel, are among those youngsters growing up in the moral filth of Makwala in postcolonial cosmopolitan Kano city. Like most of their peers in the story, Jackson and Ende are products of immoralities and, therefore, not at par with children born in marriage. While Ende suffers a psychological trauma for not knowing his mother and the circumstance of his birth, Jackson, a biracial boy also called Lebanese pikin, is trapped in a deep self-hate resulting from his abhorrence of his mother's life of easy virtue.

Apart from Jackson and Ende, there are other characters in the novel with similar identities who are struggling to come to terms with their destiny. The Maitatsine and Bongie religious crisis in Kano, and the political Sharia Law in Zamfara, are the two major factors behind the emergence of Makwala as a slum city of the minorities. The argument of the novel therefore, is that, as a community of minorities with hardly any religious, cultural, political, and social ideologies, Makwala is a breeding ground for societal malcontents and potential recruits for insurgencies such as Boko Haram crisis. The fact that the novel ends without denouement of the various angst especially among the youths, is symbolic of an impending apocalypse. But even more disturbing than the apocalypse is the fact that Makwala falls under the weight of post-colonial tyranny represented by the Lebanese in Kano. That the novel ends with representatives of the Native Authority “Mai Angwa”, religious authority “turbaned men” and legal authority “men in black suits” leading the Lebanese to Makwala to take over the place and demolish it to build factories, underscores the point that, the minorities are fated to a life of continuous marginalisation and exploitation by the post-colonial social order.

As a minority discourse, Boko Haram presents an interesting scenario for the display of creativity in response to national tragedy. Both Elnathan John and E.E Sule, though northerners, are actually far from the epicenter of the crisis both physically and culturally. Nevertheless, owing to a common heritage of history and shared premodial consciousness of the concept of "The North" in Nigeria, these two writers brought their sense of empathy to bear on their creative ability in the depiction of the plight of the minority groups in North Eastern Nigeria. Using different settings in Kaduna and Kano respectively, the two writers underscored the point that "The North" is essentially monolithic in socio-cultural and human outlook and therefore, a tragedy in one part of the region can be interpreted in the context of any other part of the region.

However, there are other writers who also wrote from first and experience of the crisis and could not agree less with the views expressed by their compatriots writing from outside the epicenter of the crisis. They seem to have a consensus of opinion that the Boko Haram crisis is a conspiracy of national and international forces, a conflicting class interest, and a consequence of systemic failure brought about by greed and unbridled corruption of the ruling elites. This is the message that Habiba Alkali-Nur an insider-writer on the crisis expresses in her novel, The Phantom Army. The novel opens with a prologue that paints a picture of a serene, quiet, beautiful and peaceful city of diverse people and cultures living together in harmony, “The harmonious settlement was the axiom of the state and the people of Rebni. Majeria, it's state capital, a glorious land of desert and sand dunes located on the north of the large city, boasted of a population of three million people. The inhabitants, descendants from many different empires had sprung from diverse cultures and from distinct origins giving the ancient city a reach historical background. Harmony was the state's official signature.” (p.9).

In the foregoing description of the setting of her novel, Habiba Nur-Alkali shows that, the ancient city is a conclave of diverse minority groups living a prosperous life. But this peaceful state was to witness a sudden disruption of its harmonious life caused by injustice and corruption, and the emergence of an ailing leadership; resulting in slow economic progress, increased poverty and illiteracy. An impending apocalypse now looms over the serene state which no one could explain the underlying forces behind the hostile atmosphere:

...but a dark cloud was hovering, the ground was rumbling with Impending doom. The trees were swaying to the breeze of imminent danger. Voices were faltering from lurking fear. Hearts were restless with uncertainty of the unknown. Tears were brimming at the surface from anticipation of personal tragedy... No one knew what it was, who would deliver the darkness... (p.9).

In this state of anomie, Karudia, a man barely literate and inexperienced in politics, takes to the gauntlet to run for the survival of his people. But little does he know that, his action will lead to bloodbath and dystopia in the beautiful city of Mageiri and the country, Mageria at large. Thus, Karudia, the man from the district of the impoverished suddenly becomes powerful, promising the desperate and oppressed people a new dawn in their lives and the people felt great,

...It was what preoccupied their minds and eased their frustration as they went about their measly business of shining shoes or selling oil perfumes or scrapping the butt engine of a rich man's car. The low income earner was no longer satisfied with his status, the hungry man was no longer patient with his hunger pangs, the frustrated man was slowly letting the pot overflow, and that was how Karudia took the lives of so many men and women who needed something, anything to believe... (p.16).

That is how Karudia who was relatively unknown in the society, now became popular and powerful, talking about the ills of the society: social injustice, unemployment, corruption, marginalization etc, which fascinated the crowd. But that was also the beginning of betrayal, conspiracies, political power game, the emergence of national and international cabals looting the nation's treasury and bleeding the nation to death. Karudia has unwittingly became a pawn in the hands of political charlatans and the dubious international community. And, “while Karudia mentally struggled to adjust to how things had become or pursue how he felt things should be, he received the most peculiar visit from a man and the proposition he had for him, Karudia could only interpret in his own mind as a divine intervention (emphasis ours)” (p.17).

From this point, the author continues to note with dates, details of Boko Haram conspiracies by the state government, the presidency, the military, some international organisations, as well as the complicity of some African and European countries. Habiba Alkali-Nur wrote The Phantom Army with the precision of a physician and the circumspection of a detective, noting every critical incident with dates and details. She describes in Part One of the book under the heading "Fortification" how in 2008, the Boko Haram group was short-changed by the state government and its members attacked and killed by the military. Thus, throughout part one which is written in seven chapters, the author gives us details of the power play between Karudia and the state authorities with the disadvantaged and wrongly indoctrinated minorities of the society taking the brunt of the game and paying with their lives.

Political policies, statements and resolutions are made in words, blood and ink. Votes are cast and the country retains the same status that promised nothing, except more mayhem for the inhabitants of Rebni that seemed to have been cast away from the rest of the world (p.72).

Thus, in Part Two of the novel, attention now shifts to the Federal Government and their collaborators at the international level. Here, the author uses literary creativity to respond to the crisis as a minority discourse. She uses Azeef Kumo, a talented female writer and journalist to take over the narration of events surrounding the crisis, while the author records them in months, days and hours. But the more they try to decipher the logic behind the crisis, the deeper they get into the absurdities of human conduct. The novel, therefore, ends with the writer oscillating on the precipice of insanity "in the world that had blown into a blaze of madness". On that note, Habiba Alkali-Nur seems to say that, in the world of politics and power hungry politicians, who can trade anything for their material interest, the minorities are faggots for igniting and flaming up their war of greed, corruption and lust. Hence, the novel submits to the pessimistic view expressed by Tim O'Brien that:

A true story is never moral, it does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a story, you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from a larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (p.20).

These obscenities and evil of war are graphically captured in Helon Habila’s travelogue, The Chibok Girls. Written with the circumspection of a journalist, Helon Habia gives a true life account of his experience traveling from Yola in Adamawa state, to Chibok in the conclave of Boko Haram insurgents. His experiences with the local vigilantes, his encounter with the military and police, at the myriad roadblocks on his way to Chibok, and the human angle of his encounter with the people of Chibok, especially the direct victims of the kidnapped school girls, leave us in no doubt about the war as both obscene and absurd. We learn from his account that, the so-called religious fundamentalism ascribed to the Boko Haram crisis is a mere smoke screen to hide what is glaringly a social anarchy.

From the accounts of the people of Chibok and the insouciance and greed of the soldiers at the roadblocks, it appears that the kidnap of the Chibok girls was stage-managed by the evil actors in the crisis. Hence, the Chibok community remained undeceived and, therefore, undivided by religious sentiments as both Muslims and Christians in the community disowned the perpetrators of the crime. According to the Imam of Chibok, these people are not Muslims because, “they now even kill other Muslims; they throw bombs in mosques while people are praying. Islam does not sanction that. This is just a Sect with its own doctrine and its own way of thinking, but not Islam (p. 43)”.

Whatever the doctrine may be, and whatever the quality of their thinking, the consequences of their action is catastrophic, not only on them as some minority ideologues, but on the society at large, especially the socially and economically disadvantaged minority groups who fall easy prey to the baits set for them by these groups.

Conclusion

The Boko Haram crisis is a combination of religious hypocrisy, political and economic frustration and systemic failure that led to the alienation and marginalisation of a significant group of people in Nigeria. This marginalization is consequent upon the postcolonial mentality that ascribes authority, privilege and social status to only those products and promoters of Western education and culture. That Nigerian literature as a champion of cultural integrity and social justice, has itself been afflicted by the postcolonial mentality of subjugation of minority groups and the relegation of their plight to the background as minority discourse. This is evident in the slow and low quality literary responses by the Nigerian writers to the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria, and the environmental tragedy in the Niger Delta. Generally, African literature needs to reposition itself as a cultural icon and champion of minority voices; instead of following the whirlwind of globalisation and the reterritorializing fad of Afropolitanism that is currently confronting African literature However, perhaps, Nigerian writers have heeded to the recommendation of our vibrant literary critic, Ernest Emenyonu, who in a seminal article (1995) submits that

Where the commitment in political terms overwhelms the artistic vision, as has been the case with many of the novels so far produced on the Nigerian civil war, the writer comes out with less than his/her artistic best. In the present circumstances, the Nigerian writers on the war must allow a reasonable period of time to lapse before they can objectively write about the war, no longer as active combatants in the conflicts, but as writers who bring their imaginative vision to bear on the important events in the history of their people (p. 86).

Therefore, this article submits that, the Boko Haram crisis and its effects on the people of North-East Nigeria, is a catastrophe yet unfolding. Nigerian writers may not grasp immediately the social, political, cultural and economic consequences of the crisis so long as it remains a minority concern. However, as the crisis continues to unfold in various forms of minority discontents across the geo-political regions of the country, a new national literature may emerge.

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