Boko Haram Insurgency and the Kidnap of Chibok Girls: Through the Literary Lenses of Helon Habila

The abduction of Chibok girls on April 14, 2014, signaled the worse form of attack on any educational facility in Nigeria; an attack which was coordinated and carried out by the Boko Haram sect with the sole aim of instituting an Islamic form of governance in Nigeria. Amidst the outpouring of anguish and condemnation in Nigeria and around the world, the Boko Haram insurgents were quick to claim responsibility by stating “We selected the school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and friends,” “We want them to feel our pain” (THISDAY, April 16, 2014). The attack took a brutish trend from which a growing number of educational institutions have been targeted in terrorist attacks in recent times. Opinion leaders, legal experts, scholars, and other stakeholders reacted to the menace by outrightly condemning it. Helon Habila’s response was the crafting of a literary text title: The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram kidnappings and Islamic Militancy in Nigeria. This novel is a biting critique of the state of insecurity in Nigeria and a form of expose on the nation’s security apparatus. Therefore, this paper’s focus is to critically examine the novel from the perspective of language use, power play, and ideological projection. To achieve this aim, the research adopts the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis which focuses on the representation of ethnic groups and minorities by integrating general discourse into the discourse of news in the press to authenticate cases of news reports at both the national and international level. Data for the study were elicited from the novel and subjected to a thorough linguistic analysis.