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African Research Review by International Association of African Researchers and Reviewers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Military Dictatorship in Nigerian Novels: A Study of Helon Habila’s <i>Waiting for an Angel</i> and Chinua Achebe’s <i>Anthills of the Savannah</i>
Abstract
In all parts of the world, writers play very prominent and significant role in
the social re-education, re-orientation and re-direction of their societies.
Literature functions and helps to shape our attitudes to life which brings
change in the society. This function implies that a writer must have some real sense of vision and commitment to live up to expectations as a writer. Writers are the soul of a society, the voice of conscience whose role is to champion the goal and task of leading the people unto a glorious and prosperous future. Writers reflect the hard socio-political as well as religious and economic realities of the people. The aim is on one hand to re-direct the society unto its peace, unity, harmony and peaceful co-existence and on the other hand, to save the past events from a humanistic point of view for the generation yet unborn, unlike the historian who deals only with facts and figures. This will help to give the future generation a vision that will help them access their past and determine their future. This paper concentrated on one of the peculiar events in the history of our country, Nigeria, the era of military dictatorship. The works of Chinua Achebe and Helon Habila, Anthills of the Savannah and Waiting for an Angel respectively were selected and studied. The focus is to determine and explore how these writers captured and creatively documented their individual feelings during that era of blood, tyranny, oppression, brutal killing, terror and alarming rate of corruption, the era of military dictatorship in Nigerian politics.
the social re-education, re-orientation and re-direction of their societies.
Literature functions and helps to shape our attitudes to life which brings
change in the society. This function implies that a writer must have some real sense of vision and commitment to live up to expectations as a writer. Writers are the soul of a society, the voice of conscience whose role is to champion the goal and task of leading the people unto a glorious and prosperous future. Writers reflect the hard socio-political as well as religious and economic realities of the people. The aim is on one hand to re-direct the society unto its peace, unity, harmony and peaceful co-existence and on the other hand, to save the past events from a humanistic point of view for the generation yet unborn, unlike the historian who deals only with facts and figures. This will help to give the future generation a vision that will help them access their past and determine their future. This paper concentrated on one of the peculiar events in the history of our country, Nigeria, the era of military dictatorship. The works of Chinua Achebe and Helon Habila, Anthills of the Savannah and Waiting for an Angel respectively were selected and studied. The focus is to determine and explore how these writers captured and creatively documented their individual feelings during that era of blood, tyranny, oppression, brutal killing, terror and alarming rate of corruption, the era of military dictatorship in Nigerian politics.
