Between the ethnic and the national

This study investigates the discursive construction and politicization of ethnic and other sub-national identities in Nigeria, starting from the post-WWII era up until the outbreak of Nigeria’s civil war in 1967. Adopting social constructivist assumptions about ethnicity and applying a selection of Critical Discourse Analysis tools, I will conduct an analysis of written and spoken discourse by the three foremost Nigerian political leaders during the period under study: Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello, commonly referred to in Nigeria as the ‘Founding Fathers’. Each of them was the most prominent political leader of one of the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria: the Yorubas, the Igbos and the Hausa-Fulanis. It is generally accepted all three engaged in ‘ethnic politics’ at various points in history with varying degrees of intensification. What has not been investigated in systematic manner is how they discursively constructed and politicized sub-national identities. This study aims to fill that gap by identifying and describing the various discursive strategies and narratives they employed in this endeavour.