‘Only a tree stands still to be cut down’: discoursing legitimation in narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the IPOB movement (1967 to present)

At sixty years, the Biafran movement has evolved, with actors and narratives shaped by new demographics, discourse modalities, and ideologies. While its most compelling leaders – Ojukwu and Kanu — share a secessionist goal, Kanu's rhetoric is widely perceived as diverging from his forebear's. With frameworks in discourse studies, I explore wide-ranging topoi of legitimation in Ojukwu's chronicles of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and a corpus ofliberationist narratives by Kanu, leader of the present-day IPOB. I show that the resurged movement remains a clone of the old, united by insurrectionism and the various propagandist tools that have become indexical of the secessionist struggle.