A Thematic Treatment of Violence in Jeremiah Essien’s In the Shadow of Death and Adewale Ademoyega’s Why We Struck

Abstract

The geographical entity called Nigeria was borne out of the amalgamation of the Northern, Southern Protectorates and the Lagos colony by Frederick Lord Lugard in 1914. Three major groups – Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba were given prominence over other tribes tagged as minorities. The dissenting views of the populace and extreme flamboyance of the First Republic political class and riot in the then Western Region led to the first military coup d’état in Nigeria on January 15, 1966, a counter coup on July 29, 1966, of all which culminated into a full-blown Civil War which was waged for 30 months between July 1967 and January 1970. Against this background, this paper attempts to put forward the thematic preoccupations of torture, imprisonment and murder in Essien’s In the Shadow of Death and Ademoyega’s Why We Struck. These themes form the kernel of punishment which was meted out to the coup conspirators of January 15, 1966 and undue sufferings of some minority groups in the Biafran enclave. Both books are memoirs written in the first person narrative technique as the writers lived as participants prior to, during and after the Biafran War.