Volume 22, Issue 2 (September 2022)

This study re-reads Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda through the interconnected concepts of colonial Othering, fractured identity, dehumanisation, memory, and reconciliation. It argues that Tadjo’s representation of the 1994 Rwandan genocide challenges explanations that reduce the violence to primordial ethnic antagonism by drawing attention to the historical processes through which colonial administration racialised and institutionalised distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi. Drawing principally on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theorisation of the Other, and supported by Edward Said’s account of colonial representation, Frantz Fanon’s analysis of psychological alienation, and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the article examines how colonial categories of difference became embedded in social consciousness and were subsequently mobilised to produce fear, exclusion, dehumanisation, and violence. It further examines the psychological and communal fragmentation produced by genocide, particularly the loss of trust, belonging, familial bonds, and a stable sense of self. The article argues that Tadjo does not represent memory merely as an act of preserving the past but as an ethical response to historical violence. Through survivor testimony, memorial spaces, writing, and the recovery of suppressed experiences, the narrative transforms witnessing into a form of resistance to historical erasure. Drawing on the scholarship of Pierre Nora and Paul Ricoeur on memory, the study finally argues that Tadjo locates the possibility of reconciliation in the confrontation of historical truth, the preservation of collective memory, and the rejection of inherited structures of Othering. The article therefore presents The Shadow of Imana as a text that connects the historical production of difference to the destruction of human relationships while also imagining memory and witnessing as foundations for the recovery of shared humanity.

Generally, linguistic scholarship on Christian sermons has used discourse-analytic and pragmatic tools to explore rhetorical appeal, participants involved, and patterns of metaphorisation, reference assignment, and speech acting in the discourse. However, it has not accounted for how stance acts enhance the identities constructed in sermons. To fill this gap, Christian video sermons involving three popular Nigerian preachers were obtained from YouTube between January and February 2020. The preachers are Bishop David Oyedepo from Living Faith Church, Pastor Paul Enenche from Dunamis International Gospel Centre, and Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah from the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto. Relying on field observation to understand the contexts, six sermons were purposively selected from a larger pool, transcribed, and subjected to content analysis, incorporating insights from interactional identity construction and stance theories. The findings reveal six opposing identities constructed in the sermons: perpetrators versus victims of insecurity; supporters of insecurity versus adversaries; violent versus peaceful religion; marginalised versus privileged citizens; terrorists versus the terrorised; and predictors versus the condemned. These identities, jointly constructed by Christian preachers from different denominations, inform their use of stance-taking elements such as modal verbs, stance adverbs, and to- and that-complement clauses. In addition to bridging gaps in the existing literature on Christian sermons, the findings provide metalinguistic insights into the underlying messages behind Christian responses to Nigeria's insecurity, which is alleged to be perpetrated by Fulani (Islamic) bandits. Overall, these insights reveal the ideological processes that contribute to Christian-Muslim distrust in Nigerian politics.

This study examines the pragmatic acts performed in selected Nigerian online discourses surrounding the #EndSARS protest of 2020. The study is motivated by the need to extend pragmatic analysis of #EndSARS discourse beyond written social-media posts and placards to spoken online video discourse. It adopts Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts Theory as its analytical framework, with particular attention to the contextual strategies of shared situation knowledge (SSK), reference (REF), relevance (REL) and voice (VCE). A qualitative research design was employed, using six audio-visual recordings purposively selected from four YouTube channels and covering the period from 9 to 21 October 2020. The audio portions of the recordings were transcribed, and fifteen excerpts were selected and analysed according to the pragmatic acts they performed and the contextual resources that shaped their interpretation. The analysis reveals a range of pragmatic acts, including requesting, reporting, questioning, insisting, informing, accusing, lamenting, reminding, encouraging, deciding, warning and narrating. The findings further show that SSK, REF, REL and VCE were particularly prominent in interpreting the selected expressions. These contextual strategies enabled speakers to establish common ground, identify persons and institutions, connect utterances to the protest situation, and express forceful positions. The study concludes that the meanings of #EndSARS online discourse are shaped by the interaction between linguistic expressions and the socio-political context in which they occur. The study contributes to research on Nigerian protest discourse by demonstrating how pragmatic acts in spoken online material function to communicate demands, express dissatisfaction, encourage collective participation and articulate expectations of governmental action.

This study investigates the influence of Gbagyi phonotactic constraints on the pronunciation of English consonant clusters among Gbagyi-English bilinguals in Niger State, Nigeria. Twenty-seven participants were purposively selected based on native Gbagyi proficiency, English as a second language, regular use of both languages, and absence of reported or observable speech, hearing, or language disorders. The study adopted a descriptive phonological design supported by acoustic analysis. Data were elicited through a controlled word list, reading passage, and semi-structured interviews, with selected tokens analysed in Praat. The findings reveal systematic vowel epenthesis in onset clusters and coda deletion in word-final clusters. Epenthesis occurred in school, speak, splash, and street, while coda deletion was frequent in hand, cold, test, text, and next. Acoustic evidence confirmed the presence of intervening vowel intervals in epenthetic forms and the loss of expected final consonantal cues in reduced forms. Within Optimality Theory, the findings suggest that markedness constraints against complex syllable structures outrank faithfulness constraints preserving English clusters. The study highlights community-specific patterns in Nigerian English pronunciation.