Minority Representation of the Nigeria Civil War: A New Historicist Reading of Elechi Amadi’s Sunset at Biafra and Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy

Abstract

The Nigeria civil war has remained topical within literary scholarship as authors continue to centralize the historical phenomenon in their works in a bid to understand the socio-political dynamics in the country. A significant amount of critical scholarship on the war has also emerged, a natural response to the outpour of creative works. However, critical attention on the creative works on the civil war has been on the accounts of writers who dominated the discourse; writers who belonged to the seceding group, the Biafran section of the divide. The accounts of the war from the perspective of groups of people who were unwilling parts of the seceding Biafran divide has not enjoyed similar attention. The Niger-Delta minority ethnic groups within the larger Igbo ethnic grouping have not received commensurate attention. This has created a gap in the critical response to the depictions of the war experiences of the people from the Eastern region. This study, therefore, aims to investigate, from a New Historicist theoretical standpoint, the civil war experiences of the minority ethnic groups within the Eastern region during the Nigerian civil war. Using Elechi Amadi‘s Sunset in Biafra and Ken Saro-Wiwa‘s Sozaboy, the study revealed that while both the Igbo people and the other minority ethnic groups in the region suffered during the civil war, the sufferings of the minority ethnic group were intensified by lack of information, agency, and confusion regarding what their fate would be.