Has this house fallen? Fragile nationhood and the Fulani herdsmen’s genocide in Nigerian poetry

Abstract

The paper evaluates the prevailing anxieties gnawing at the Nigeria nation-state, deriving from the Fulani herdsmen’s genocidal campaign. These anxieties are painstakingly reflected in insecurity, chaos, violence, banditry, and uncertainty that have built up in recent times to complicate the Nigeria nation-state’s fragile sovereignty. Embedded in the poetics of the selected poems is the repudiation of the postcolonial contradictions, which highlight egregious inequity as foreshadowed in the northern Caliphate’s domination of the middle-belt and the southern federating units. The emergence of varied ethnic nationalisms becomes a political fallout from a rejection of the northern Caliphate’s domination. Years of accrued resentment against this domination will be contextualized in the paper, to explicate the possibility of ostensible Nigeria nation-state’s disintegration. Frenzied calls for the country’s disintegration culminated when middle-belt and southern Nigeria are being continually plundered by the Fulani herdsmen to perpetrate the most horrendous genocidal killings on a daily basis. The paper intends not only at drawing attention to possible causes of Nigeria nationhood’s failure thematic but to also interrogate the Fulani herdsmen’s killings within the context of a genocide framework. Further, the paper foregrounds a condemnation of the insidious pressures of Fulani-inspired ethnic cleansing in the poetry of diverse Nigerian poets.