Volume 21, Issue 1 (March 2021)

The paper critically analyses selected cartoons from a Nigerian newspaper, the Daily Trust, covering four purposively selected cartoons between September 2020 and June 2021 on the subject of armed banditry in northern Nigeria. Specifically, the study explicates these visual images to understand how they are intentionally represented as linguistic tools to communicate and disseminate points of view, values and judgments in the Daily Trust, one of the national print and online newspapers in Nigeria. The study draws upon Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA), and particularly employs Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework of Visual Grammar in examining these cartoons. The study finds that through the deployment of multimodal texts, artists and news media entities are able to inscribe their perspectives regarding societal problems such as insurgency, insecurity, bad governance and so on. By utilizing these approaches, they also depict their stances on these specific news matters, thereby clarifying their motives and as a consequence, contributing to the national discourse on these issues as well as fortifying their relationships with their target audiences. Bulama’s cartoons specifically present the regional crisis of armed banditry in a historical fashion and with a democratic flair, challenging government to do more through a power-centric focus that also presents some level of hope that the crisis could be eventually surmounted. The study concludes with recommendations that include a call to the cartoonist to include victim-centric representations in his work, and to other artists to engage in projects that collect these cartoons from across editions of Daily Trust and other newspapers to give nuanced insights into the subject of insecurity in Nigeria.

The activities of separatist campaigners which have intensified, especially in the Southern part of Nigeria, have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Most of the studies particularly on the media construction of these secession campaigns have largely focused on coverage, reportage and framing. However, it appears much attention has not been devoted to the discursive strategies and stance of the public on the secessionist agitation. This study, therefore, examines the discursive strategies and ideological approaches of non-social actors to the secession campaign of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in online news comments. Hundred (100) comments in response to news articles on IPOB agitation and government counter-agitation activities reported between July and September 2021 were purposively selected for analysis. Guided by the ideological strategies of van Dijk, the analysis indicates that the ideological stance of commenters is revealed through strategies such as actor description, polarization, self-glorification, lexicalization among others. The strategies embody ideological prejudices of positive self and negative other presentations which enable the commenters to assert ethnic and regional affiliation, express commitment and justification for self-determination, present grievances and depict wide-ranging attitudes towards the government.

In recent times, the conflict between herders and farmers in Nigeria has escalated, with an increased threat to national peace and security. In a bid to arrest the fast-deteriorating situation, the Federal Government of Nigeria has proposed a number of policies, one of which is the establishment of cattle colonies across the country. However, the idea of cattle colonies has received mixed reactions from Nigerians. This paper examined the metaphorical construction of cattle colony in newspaper reportage of farmer-herder clashes in Nigeria. Specifically, the study aimed to uncover how cattle colony has been constructed metaphorically in selected Nigerian newspapers, as well as explain the rhetorical functions in the metaphorical construction of cattle colony. This qualitative-descriptive study drew on corpora from two Nigerian news dailies, and adopted Charteris-Black’s (2004) semantic tension criterion to identify the metaphors, as well as his pragmatic approach to the study of metaphor to discuss the corpora. The analysis revealed 13 linguistic metaphors and four conceptual metaphors in the Daily Trust newspaper, and 19 linguistic metaphors and six conceptual metaphors in The Nation newspaper for constructing cattle colonies. The findings suggest that all the metaphorical constructions in the papers have the underlying rhetorical purpose of persuading Nigerians to either embrace or reject the policy.

Humans are social beings that love to dwell in groups. These groups, however, do not always share the same ideologies or beliefs; hence conflicts are bound to occur. Humankind’s attempts at conflict resolution have been known to take turns more precipitous than the conflict they were trying to resolve: more battles, destruction of property and the loss of even more lives. The conflicts in J. P. Clark's Ozidi are born of revenge and justice, hinged on the interconnectivity between murder and revenge on the one hand, and innocence and guilt on the other. Although Ozidi Junior is the actual avenger, his grandmother, Oreame, is the undisguisable force behind his success. She engages her wit, mental stamina, and superhuman powers towards the success of her grandson's conquest. This paper, using Motherism, one of the subdivisions of African Feminism, explores the mother figure in relation to plot development while highlighting Clark's prejudiced assessment of the female characters in the play. Since Motherism sees the mother as a spiritual backbone, I argue that Oreame in Ozidi is a perfect embodiment of this figuration of motherhood.

This paper examines the archetypal construction of a messianic-cum-anti-messianic image in Mohamed Mboughar Sarr’s The Brotherhood. It is a character study of Abdel Karim Konate, the Chief of the Islamic Police, who believes he is the saviour sent by God to bring sinners to salvation, a good shepherd in search of lost sheep. Using Northrop Frye’s theory of archetype, this paper explores the similarities between Abdel and the messiah, as well as his anti-messianic role in the religious conflict between moderate Islam and radical Islam and the implication of his anti-messianic role on the Kalep people at personal and collective levels. I argue that Abdel Karim Konate is an anti-messianic figure insofar as his claim of messiahship is undermined by certain acts that negate the qualities ascribable to the Archetypal Messiah, Christ Jesus.