Abstract
The audacious declaration “Big for nothing” in Kevin Echeruo’s propaganda poster during the Nigerian civil war offers illumination to the forgotten undercurrents that drove the 30-month war which in the last fifty years has contributed to the setting of agenda for separatist polemics in the Nigeria nation-state. Using largely the iconographic approach to visual description and interpretation, this study examines the cultural codes and representational conventions that inform contemporary artistic representational style as a cultural practice. The illustration not only approximates to one of the early visual indicators on the divisive national challenge rendered in highly coded visual and linguistic rhetoric of hegemonic power struggle by the elite class, but also a significant metaphor of contemporary frustration on nationhood and nationality for most Nigerians. Accordingly, this article broaches on the parameters of patriotism, nationality and self-determination to posit that the illustration represents the extremes of citizen dissatisfaction couched in a radical artistic narrative of a caricature. It submits that the strength of national allegiance and cohesiveness is a function of the reciprocity to its citizens.
Highlights
Nigeria gained political independence from Great Britain on October 1, 1960, and became a republic within the British Commonwealth in 1963 with great expectations and euphoria of forging the most populous black nation into a strong regional power in Africa
The compromises derived from conciliatory arrangements for the actualisation of independence amounted to the marriage of convenience, which became all too glaring as the realities of the new republic began to emerge. This conscious recourse to and perpetuation of separatists’ tendencies have tended to govern the political space and influenced the post-independence developmental strides in Nigeria. These tendencies triggered the competition for control and patronage leading the political elite of the major tribes to jockey for domination of the federal bureaucracy and political space
This paper offers an analytical study of Kevin Echeruo’s 1969 Biafra propaganda illustration and the attendant issues it raises in today’s mainstream national discourse
Summary
Nigeria gained political independence from Great Britain on October 1, 1960, and became a republic within the British Commonwealth in 1963 with great expectations and euphoria of forging the most populous black nation into a strong regional power in Africa. 20 – 41 based on already instituted regional sentiments and anchored on a tripod of three major ethnic groups in little or utter neglect of more than 300 hundred ethnic groups in the country These major ethnic groups were, and still remain, Hausa/Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba, respectively dominant in the North, South East and South-West Nigeria. The compromises derived from conciliatory arrangements for the actualisation of independence amounted to the marriage of convenience, which became all too glaring as the realities of the new republic began to emerge. This conscious recourse to and perpetuation of separatists’ tendencies have tended to govern the political space and influenced the post-independence developmental strides in Nigeria. These tendencies triggered the competition for control and patronage leading the political elite of the major tribes to jockey for domination of the federal bureaucracy and political space
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