Leadership Question and the Writer’s Style: A Literary Stylistic Analysis of Adaobi Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You By Chance

Abstract

This paper interrogates some artistic positions taken by Adaobi Nwaubani in projecting leadership issues in I Do Not Come to You by Chance. The paper notes that in spite of the enormity of critical attention on leadership in African critical space, bulk of the critical materials center around the ineptitude of African leaders and its consequent underdevelopment of African societies and the suffering of the mass. Literary critics hardly pay attention to those artistic positions through which authors project leadership issues in their texts. It is against this backdrop that this paper is dedicated for interrogation of some aspects of literary techniques, through which Nwaubani addresses leadership issues in her text. The work reveals how the author uses characterization and setting to expose the corrupt nature of most political leaders in Nigeria, their gluttony, and the deteriorating nature of some public institution. It has also revealed the complicit roles played by former colonial masters, and world institutions in entrenching criminality in Africa, especially in the Nigerian leadership. The paper concludes that both contents and form are very critical in understanding a literary work and so, an analysis of one at the expense of the other may scuttle the totality of the import of the issues authors raise in their texts.