Ethnic Dissonance and the Futility of Nationalism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and James Ile’s Verses of Uncharted Heaven: The Second Coming of Biafra

Abstract

The plurality of ethno-cultural nationalities constitutes an indelible architectural and ontological feature of modern postcolonial African states. Rarely does an African state exhibit organic ethno-linguistic homogeneity; instead, the arbitrary cartographic demarcations orchestrated during the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference yoked disparate, historically sovereign civilizations into centralized, artificial polities. In postcolonial Nigeria, this unresolved heterogeneity has persistently yielded structural friction, institutionalized inequality, regional hegemony, and catastrophic civil conflicts.