IIARD International Institute of Academic Research and Development

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES (IJELCS )

E-ISSN 2545-5702
P-ISSN 2695-2157
VOL. 9 NO. 1 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56201/ijelcs.v9.no1.2024.pg30.45

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Discursive Strategies in Achebe’s There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Olubunmi Funmi Oyebanji (PhD)

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Abstract

Achebe’s There was a Country became controversial due to the author’s recount of the civil war story. The text has been criticised for its bias by different people. However, these kinds of explorations, mainly literary reviews, have merely focused on its bias in terms of ethnicity and the civil war story, with little attention paid to the linguistic strategies used by the author in emphasising certain ideologies. This study, therefore, seeks to unearth the different discursive strategies used in the ideological representations of social actors and actions in the text. Wodak’s approach to discursive strategies is found helpful for this study for its ideological and contextual approach to the use of language. Data are randomly selected from the different parts of the text and subject to content analysis and critical discourse analysis. The study reveals the ‘us and ‘them’ dichotomy and provides concrete linguistic evidence as to the author’s bias in representing social actors and actions.

keywords:

Discursive strategies, Achebe’s There was a Country, Ideologies, Ethnic bigotry, Nigerian Civil War

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References:

Achebe, C. (2012). There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. London: Penguine.

Adichie, Chimamanda. (2012). “We Remember Differently” Retrieved November, 28, 2014 from
www.Vanguagrdngr.com/category/topstories.

Benard, D. and Kinggeorge, O. P. (2014). History, Memory and the Politics of National Unity in
Adichie’s half of a Yellow Sun and Achebe’s There was a Country. International Journal
on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL), 2, 5: 81-89.

Chinedu, F. (2014). There Was a Country: Achebe’s Ijele. Okike: An African Journal of New
Writing, 51, 01: 198-213

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