‘Only a tree stands still to be cut down’: discoursing legitimation in narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the IPOB movement (1967 to present)

Adeiza Isiaka

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2024, vol. 35, issue 3, 453-477

Abstract: At sixty years, the Biafran movement has evolved, with actors and narratives shaped by new demographics, discourse modalities, and ideologies. While its most compelling leaders – Ojukwu and Kanu — share a secessionist goal, Kanu’s rhetoric is widely perceived as diverging from his forebear’s. With frameworks in discourse studies, I explore wide-ranging topoi of legitimation in Ojukwu’s chronicles of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and a corpus ofliberationist narratives by Kanu, leader of the present-day IPOB. I show that the resurged movement remains a clone of the old, united by insurrectionism and the various propagandist tools that have become indexical of the secessionist struggle.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2024.2304902

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