CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

On the flip side,ChidiAmuta (1988) puts it, the Nigerian common war writings speak to a ―noteworthy step towards the politicization of the Nigerian conceptual creative energy.

In the same way, the Second World War in addition continued to draw in scholarly talk mostly African Scholars on the pretended as a result of Africans in its indictment. Such treatises have frequently scrutinized the method of reasoning behind the investment of Africans in a war that was not theirs. On the other hand, analysts of the international political system such as Louis J. Halle (1984) and K.J. Holsti (1972), have dubbed the Second World War as ‗the war to end all wars‘on accounts of its gruesome devastation. The depiction of the horrors of Second World War has further fuelled the resentment of African intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, AimeCessaire against the involvement of Africans. The two war situations provide the setting for writers to accentuate and articulate the devastation suffered by individuals and societies. As evidenced by historical records and literatures, the two wars occasioned physical suffering and psychological dislocation. However, despite these gruesome effects, the two wars serve as platforms for Africans and Nigerians respectively to reassess their conditions and the means by which they contribute to nation-building, world peace and progress.

Years back fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was trainee to a thrash-wielding blacksmith in his rural birthplace. It was in 1944 were winter showed up, the war is ingoing it’s most critical phase and Ali is a clandestine in Thunder Brigade. His unit has been offered requests to go behind foe lines and wreak destruction. In any case, the Burmese wilderness is a mud-riven, deceptive spot, loaded with Japanese marksmen, madness and malady.

Burma Boy is a horrendous; vividly comprehend record of the franticness, the penance and the dull funniness of the Second World War’s most horrible battleground. It’s likewise the moving story of a kid attempting to live sufficiently long to wind up a man.The innermost stature Bandele tells his story around is Farabiti Banana, who is only thirteen when the story begins, having lied about his age when he joined — which he did largely so he could remain with his friends. He makes it to India, but a case of chickenpox means he has to stay in hospital as the rest of the 12th Battalion, Nigerian Regiment, go on ahead to Burma. The chap is resolved to make it to the war-theater too, be that as it may, and in the end he does.
Bandele’s novel moves along in strangely jerky manner, starting with an inquisitive Prologue set in Cairo, in which the man who later leads the Nigerian troops attempts suicide. He plays a role in the rest of the novel too, but without being better integrated into the remainder of the story this beginning sticks out oddly. Somewhere else, as well, Bandele is preferable in exceptionally limited scenes over making any account stream: Banana’s babbling as he presents himself and tells his stories is engrossing, as are a hefty portion of alternate scenes, however they don’t fit extremely well together into any kind of bigger story past the basic one that war dependably bears (of individuals falling by the wayside as they get executed off).
Burma Boy does offer an interesting (and often amusing) picture of the experience of African soldiers in Burma in World War II — and Bandele is particularly good at quickly sketching out the different backgrounds of the Nigerian characters –, but it does not hold together as a novel particularly well.

It is known that, Shimmer Chinodya is one of the small numbers of Zimbabwean authors whose works explore the fight for autonomy from the contenders’ outlook and the general beat of the country at the time and has the capacity give pertinent contention for it without questioning, gratuitously, the human cost. Not that he expect that all the dark Zimbabweans at the time were in backing of the war; he recognizes the human hardship yet Chinodya presents his work in a way that make the fight more gigantic, for the colonizer won’t permit adaptability to the colonized without a fight and there is no fight without its human disaster and if you expect by and large at that point you truly don’t comprehend what you require.

The mutiny that ended white minority rule in Zimbabwe that was previously known as Rhodesia is seen mainly via theBenjamin Tichafa’s eyes, a young revolutionary. The story shows that his parents were devoutly religious couple, his father who was a black man with submissiveness work under his white superiors as a government messenger. Infuriated by the treatment of blacks, a young Benjamin turns from his guardians’ un-opinionated religion. In the wake of being captured in an exhibition, he decides to join the revolution. The work of fiction is enriched by the standpoints of black Rhodesians through out of fright or for economic causes do not fully support the struggle. Which also shown that, over the past years estimated to be 32 years, human rights in Zimbabwe have been deliberately desecrated by a black government that masquerades as a champion of peace and democracy, as a result the Mugabe regime has eroded all norms of 21st century development. The massacre of a tyrannical white homestead proprietor frightens his foreman, whose occupation is presently undermined. The lethal beating of a lady who reluctantly educated on the guerrillas brings second thoughts up in Benjamin’s outfit. In spite of the fact that in the end depicting the triumph as beneficial, Chinodya likewise demonstrates the cost paid in lives, battered families and lost traditions. The result is a humane and penetrating look at a vicious government and a bloody revolution.

Most black Zimbabweans would however prefer Ian Smith as leader to Robert Mugabe—despite the fact that the human instinct of freedom remains high on the agenda. The Mugabe government has perpetrated stern crimes against its own people—black-on-black.

Immediately after Zimbabwe’s independence there materialized a novelistic custom that concentrated on portraying the Second War of Liberation in Zimbabwe. The way, nature and timing of the conception of this fiction plainly exhibit that it was an unleashing of voices that had been smothered for a really long time and were longing to be listened. The largest parts of these novels are comparable in that they depict an impractical and indistinct picture of the liberation war in Zimbabwe. They depict battles that are generally won by guerrilla warriors, pungwes where individuals sing, move and serenade mottos, and mutilate setback figures with the goal that they don’t consider reality the ground. Perusing a large number of these books abandons one with the feeling that this war was a sort of cookout. One gets the feeling that the war was a walk around the recreation center, but then the individuals who experienced it essentially know extremely well that it was not fun by any means.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM:

Despite the fact that there is a plenty of basic works, for example, ChidiAmuta (1988), FunshoAiyejina (1988), AkachiEzeigbo (1991), Christopher Anyokwu (2008), and Hugh Hodges (2009) on Nigerian common war written works, none of these uses entirely the basic point of view of historicism.

At the end of the day, this study adjusts the substance of these writings to the principles of historicism with a specific end goal to legitimately arrange their talk in authentic, non-anecdotal settings. This is a noteworthy commitment to the group of basic written works on war particularly the underlining customs or recorded connections that traversed reproduction of occasions that formed the writings. In the main, this study is premised on the proposition that BiyiBandele‘s Burma Boy rely on archaeological sources to reconstruct the experiences and the battles waged in the Second World War thereby building a sense of history through representation of their human scale.

The texts are overt thematisation of the processes of historical representations offering literary contextualization of the events during the Second World War. In this context, the texts achieve a heightened historical significance marked by their historical distance on one hand, and fictionally fulfilling a progressive rationality which connects the present with the past. In other words, the contexts which are embedded in the texts signify the referential past, while the texts as presently constituted are the present of that past. This is allied to the proposition that the texts, in addition to being reconstruction of the past, are also the textualization of the present of that past. This makes the stories not true or false, but intelligible, coherent, consistent, and persuasive. After all, what can be more truth-revealing than fiction in the guise of history? This is more so for the fact that the issues of imperial and primordial tribal power relations which constitute the contextual and textual basis of the texts are still a present reality in Nigeria and the world respectively. This means that as a putative and crafted conversation with the past, or the verbal structure that is a model of the past structures and processes, the novels no less perpetuate traditions which ensure the historical negotiation between past and present.

Political developments in Zimbabwe in the post 2000 period require one to search for an understanding of forces shaping the twenty-first century epoch with a firm conception of the dynamics of local forces at play.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVE OF THE RESEARCH 

The research problem outlined below can be approached through a set of research objectives. The research hopes:

• To describe war literature of BiyiBandele’s and Shimmer Chinodya’s on harvest of thorn so as to bring out its characteristics.
• To point up the discourse of historicism with war literatures as a way of authenticating their distinctiveness within the economy of other texts and thus presents an analytical discourse on the constitutive process of war literatures as a continuum in the search for identity, stability, and the true meaning of good and evil by individuals and societies.
• To explore Shimmer Chinodya’s harvest of thorn writers perspectives on the Second War of Liberation in Zimbabwe.
• To explain the elements or factors that were responsible for producing Burma boy war literature and harvest of thorn in the state in which it is.
• To lead to an understanding of the influences that moulded war literature writers perception of the Second War of Liberation in Zimbabwe and Nigeria as well.

Research question

It has been accepted for over times now that, research question is the methodological purpose of departure of academic exploration in both the natural and social sciences. In this case, it triggers the following question for conceptual development of a research goal.

• What effect do war play in Nigerians and Zimbabweans Psychological state?
• To what extent do the two characters relate in terms of the study?
• Do war influences human health as in the case of this study?
• Do economy of a nation affected by war as discussed in this study?

SCOPE OF THE STUDY:

This study covers the spectrum of the Second World War and the War as enunciated by BiyiBandele, in Burma Boy, Zimbabwean Second world war by Shimmer Chinodya’. These novels showcase the historicity of the war as well as the concomitant effects of the war on Nigerians and Zimbabweans. Valid examples can be found in these novels which illustrate the historicity of the texts. It is thus accepted as given by this researcher that the novels under study belong largely but not exclusively to the tradition of world‘s war literatures which are circumscribed by their distinctiveness within an economy of other texts.

The scope of this study is not expected to grasp in detail all that may have been needed to develop the topic of the study in view of its wide and its natural troubles associated with obtaining data because of time constraints – which will obstruct a useful detailed development of the research topic.

JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY:

This study is justified by the must to give a base for the history explanation of the texts on the Second World War. War is a complex concept that is increasingly difficult to understand, particularly in an age that allows for live images of combat to be beamed around the world. This is all the more so for the way that historicism has started enthusiasm for the procedure of investigating so as to find again the past the additional printed wellspring of the truth spoke to in verifiable stories or scholarly messages. This concern has continued to create disputes into which this study will give some insights.  spaced out from sustaining concern in, and continuing the dispute on, the request of historicism to the texts under study, this study advances Nigerian, Literature with its systematic representation of the talk of historicism, and by this extend comprehension of this type of social generation in this some piece of the world.In order to create a memory, the brain releases chemicals “that etch these events into its memory bank with special codes”. However, when one experiences a traumatic event, the memory becomes vivid because the context surrounding the event is so significantly different from anything the victim has ever experienced before.No genuine exertion has been made by the individuals who have mulled over war Experimental writing to clarify the variables that impacted writers to portray parts of the war in the way they delineate it.

Apart from sustaining interest in, and continuing the debate on, the application of historicism to the texts under study, the study enriches Nigerian, nay African, Literature with its analytical representation of the discourse of historicism, and by this fact widens understanding of this form of cultural production in this part of the world.

On the other hand, no serious effort has been made by those who have studied war

Creative writing to explain the factors that influenced authors to depict aspects of the war in the manner they depict it. War literature represents a literary variety of its own kind that can be separated from mainstream literature.

METHODOLOGY:

In this study, the library strategy is embraced for its suitability and convenience. This methodological methodology entails data collection from secondary sources such as serious works, treatises, and documented materials usually from the library, the internet, and the book stores for the purpose of interpreting the primary texts. This relates to the qualitative research methodology used mostly in the Humanities disciplines as a means of collecting a variety of empirical data on case studies, individual encounters or contemplation, life story, interviews, observation, historical narratives, visual texts, which describe routine and problematic moments and meaning in the life of an individual. This means that the qualitative research methodology is concerned with the translation of ideas and thoughts and the importance individuals bring to them. Hence, this approach is not totally scientific in the sense of trying to prove the truth claim of any particular argument, but instead study things in their natural settings and adopt a multi-method approach to its subject matter. This, therefore, means that reference materials on the general and particular ideas of historicism, surveys and investigation of the essential writings and also treatises on war literary works by and large will be depended upon.