Ethics of Memory, Truth, and Reconciliation in Nigerian Literature: From Civil War Fiction to Contemporary Transitional Justice Narratives

This dissertation develops an original theoretical framework for the ethics of memory in Nigerian literature, tracing the literary treatment of truth, reconciliation, and historical reckoning from the Civil War fiction of the late 1960s and 1970s through to contemporary literary engagements with transitional justice, ethnic conflict, and democratic accountability in twenty-first century Nigeria. The question of how a society remembers, narrates, and seeks to come to terms with histories of collective violence is among the most urgent in postcolonial African studies, and literature has consistently played a central role in the complex politics of memory and forgetting in Nigeria. The dissertation constructs a theoretical framework drawing on ethical theories of testimony and witness, the politics of collective memory, transitional justice theory, and postcolonial ethics of representation. The framework is applied through readings of a chronologically organised corpus of Nigerian literary texts spanning five decades, from novels directly engaging with the Biafran war to recent fiction addressing communal violence in the Middle Belt, Niger Delta militancy, and the Boko Haram insurgency. Original contributions include a theory of the literary truth commission as a distinctive genre in Nigerian literature, an account of the ethics of fictional ventriloquism when speaking for voiceless victims of historical violence, and a comparative analysis of how memory politics differ across the Civil War, Middle Belt, and Delta contexts in ways shaped by the distinct political stakes of each history. Keywords: ethics of memory, transitional justice, Nigerian literature, civil war, reconciliation.