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

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.

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