Fundamentalism, Terror and Discourse of Wantonness in Obinna Udenwe’s Satans & Shaitans and Helon Habila’s The Chibok Girls

Abstract

For close to two decades now, Nigeria has been faced with a worrisome security challenge as orchestrated by the faceless Islamic fundamentalists known as "Boko Haram", a sect driven by the desire to Islamise Nigeria such that Nigeria will be governed by Sharia laws. To achieve their set objectives, the Islamic sect has continued to launch series of attacks on schools, churches, markets, barracks, parks, mosques, and other public infrastructures; creating mayhem, destroying properties worth billions of naira and killing close to a million Nigerian citizens since their emergence. Since Nigerian writers (novelists in particular), have remained ardent chroniclers of the socio-political realities of their country, this paper examines how Obinna Udenwe and Helon Habila use their literary imaginations in Satans and Shaitans and The Chibok Girls respectively to recreate spectacles of the bloodletting footage and their repercussions on the citizenry. This paper analysis the trajectories of the issues imagined in the select texts that are connected with the lingering fundamentalism and traumatising experiences of terror victims as well as the colouration of power hegemony in Nigeria. It concludes that Boko Haram and other insurgencies are part of postmodern fragmentations which violate and contradict the very ethos of what religion represents.