A Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Mustapha Bulama’s Cartoons on Armed Banditry

The paper critically analyses selected cartoons from a Nigerian newspaper, the Daily Trust, covering four purposively selected cartoons between September 2020 and June 2021 on the subject of armed banditry in northern Nigeria. Specifically, the study explicates these visual images to understand how they are intentionally represented as linguistic tools to communicate and disseminate points of view, values and judgments in the Daily Trust, one of the national print and online newspapers in Nigeria. The study draws upon Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA), and particularly employs Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework of Visual Grammar in examining these cartoons. The study finds that through the deployment of multimodal texts, artists and news media entities are able to inscribe their perspectives regarding societal problems such as insurgency, insecurity, bad governance and so on. By utilizing these approaches, they also depict their stances on these specific news matters, thereby clarifying their motives and as a consequence, contributing to the national discourse on these issues as well as fortifying their relationships with their target audiences. Bulama’s cartoons specifically present the regional crisis of armed banditry in a historical fashion and with a democratic flair, challenging government to do more through a power-centric focus that also presents some level of hope that the crisis could be eventually surmounted. The study concludes with recommendations that include a call to the cartoonist to include victim-centric representations in his work, and to other artists to engage in projects that collect these cartoons from across editions of Daily Trust and other newspapers to give nuanced insights into the subject of insecurity in Nigeria.