POLITICS OF SUFFERING IN SAMUEL KOLAWOLE’S THE BOOK OF M

Abstract

The post independence Nigeria witnessed the incursion of military into politics. This invariably led to a politics appropriated on the threshold of despotism with its attendant suffering, disillusionment and privation. The politics of death brought about by the military intervention in Nigerian politics engendered a narrative of suffering, disorientation, moral atrophy, etc in the Nigerian state. The quotidian experiences of the masses during the military rule aptly depict the social, political and economic plagues that ravaged the nation. This paper explores the evils associated with military rule in Nigeria looking at the suffering and hardship that characterized it. Suffering was a common phenomenon that characterized the people’s experience during this reign of terror. This was appropriated across the population through the instrumentality of the soldiers and police, who were necropolitical machines that annihilated and plunged the masses into suffering and privation. This essay goes further from a necropolitical point of view to capture the horrendous predicaments of the people caused by the brazenness, tyranny and despotism occasioned by the emergence of the military in the arena of politics. Through this postcolonial approximation, the complexities of the suffering narrative are enunciated withcopious exemplification from Samuel Kolawole’s The Book of M. This essay, through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, a postcolonial assumption, reflects the different shades and colours of suffering perpetuated on the people through the political ineptitude, despotic tendencies, necropolitical machines, and failures of the military in the arena of politics.The submission here is that the military presence in politics was a blatant error, a misnomer and a misfortune that should not have taken place in the theatre of African history and development