Since political independence in 1960, what has consistently framed and defined Nigeria’s postcolonial existence is her capacity to distil narratives that negotiate her largely uncertain and unassured destiny as a nation-state in a state of becoming. This condition of national narrativity with its constitutive representational sites participates in an agonistic history whose trajectory is woven around the pathology of the Nigerian state. Even though this narrative event possesses the capacity to rankle the festering wounds for national healing, it is not always imagined and interrogated as a galvanizing force for national re-imagining and re-invention. Rather, the narrative foreground is almost always invested with strands mediated by killer instincts and the deterministic will to a ruinous destiny and destination. This makes Nigeria a veritable narrative engagement with the trappings of a tragic plot as she routinely participates in a violent history and a history of violence.
