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Volume 9, No. 2, December 2009
The African Symposium (ISSN# TX 6-342-323)
The African Symposium: An On Line Journal Of African Educational Research Network efforts at conflict management have not been particularly effective or efficient in overcoming the disasters that have brought them to the continent. Therefore, due to the limitations of the efficacy of previous conflict management processes, African writers are exploring the possibility of utilising literature to manage and resolve conflicts in their societies. There is, thus, the necessity for evolving ―more creative and contextual approaches to conflict resolution in Africa‖ (Osaghae, 2000:20). While some writers are particularly interested in explaining the deterioration of the conflict situations in Africa, others have focused on the thematization of management of conflict. Nigerian literature has become an instrument for the mass political education of the people. It continues the traditional role of providing a means for pedagogy – that war is an ill wind that brings nobody any good. Mazrui (1980), in his discussion on African condition, singles out ethnicity as one of the problems facing new states. In his words: In the ultimate analysis, ethnicity is a more serious line of cleavage in black Africa than religion. Africans are far more likely to kill each other because they belong to different ethnic groups than religion (69). For instance, resource agitations and conflicts in the oil rich Niger Delta region of the country, ―which were once and originally civil and communal, have since been transformed into armed struggles conducted by disparate youth militia groups‖ (Ikelegbe, 2006: 87). Unfortunately, the region is now inundated with a bewildering amalgam of crime, violence, insecurity, state militarization, ethnic militarization and communal and ethnic wars. The country has also witnessed many other ethnic and religious strives, including the Ijaws and the Urhobos, ZangoKataf, Junkun-Ijaw, Ijaw-Itsekiri, Junkun-Tiv, Ife-Modakeke, Ijaw-Ilaje, Ogoni-Andonis and the like. Apparently, conflict management and resolution has become a vexatious issue in the field of social sciences. Indeed, it is the prime concern of social scientists, but it is a subject too vast and vital to the social scientists alone. Surprisingly, one of the little probed values of African literature is its ability to intervene in the management and resolution of the legion of conflicts in the continent. It should be stated that although social sciences have provided this essay with some of its most valued counsel, the discursive space is still literary and critical. One of the central assumptions of the discourse is that the future of a mind that doubts the decisive role of genius, courage and chance in the past that literature gives seems warped. Therefore, it is pertinent to aver that peace builders in the continent must not be blind to the utilitarian values of our literature which is one of the perennial sources of human triumphs. This is because, literature, to be ultimately relevant to the human condition, must have a moral content that makes conflict resolution and transitional justice practically possible. This utilitarian relevance of Nigerian literature is important now that the country's value system and peaceful co-existence have been traduced by a frightening near-collective obsession with expediency, violence and the ephemeral. According to Achebe (1983), the problems with Nigerian society include tribalism, absence of patriotism, social injustice, indiscipline and corruption which originate at the top of the political order and work their way down. Specifically, Achebe believes that tribalism is the greatest problem confronting national integration in the country: Nothing in Nigeria's political history captures her problem of national integration more graphically than the chequered fortune of the word tribe in her vocabulary. Tribe has been

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