Nigeria's political experience: 1960-1997 in Duro Adeleke's Aso Igba
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Date
2012
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Department of history & International Studies, Kogi State University
Abstract
This paper addresses Nigeria’s political experience since the country’s independence in 1960 to the military administration of General Sanni Abacha, using Dúró Adélékè’s poetry book, Aṣọ Ìgbà (1997) as illustration. The poems for analysis are selected based on their thematic preoccupation and discussed within the socio-semiotic approach. Socio-semiotics examines semiotic practices, specific to a culture and community, for the making of various kinds of texts and meanings in various situational contexts (i.e., field, tenor and mode of discourse) and contexts of culturally meaningful activity. The findings in the work are that the poet’s field of discourse centres on the plight of the Nigerian masses that requires the attention of the Government, imbalance and marginalization of some groups in governance. The tenor of discourse exhibits unpalatable social relations between the government and the citizens. The mode of discourse is the rhetorical mode of warning, advising and the use of metaphorical expressions couched in wordplay. The context of culture portrays the use of cultural symbols, folktale, proverbs and song. The study concludes that the employment of the contexts of situation and of culture to analyse the text gives an opportunity of decoding the selected poems exhaustively to mean what the poet has used the language to mean in a given situation.
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Sociosemiotics,, Political experience, Nigeria
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