Orphans of the nation: Transitional justice practices in third generation Nigerian child soldier narratives

Abstract

I argue that the hasty armistice following the Nigerian Civil War moved to reunification without reconciliation creating a lacuna that haunts Nigeria still. I consider how the child soldier narrative grapples with and processes that untreated wound left by the war, participating in a form of transitional justice. I examine three third-generation Nigerian novels, Abani’s Song for Night (2007), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) to illustrate the various approaches, spiritual, historical, and psychological in the processing of post-conflict trauma.