CHILDREN’S LITERATURE FOR CULTURAL INTEGRATION IN NIGERIA: AN APPRAISAL OF SOME SELECTED WORKS OF FATIMA AKILU

Thesis Abstract

In the Nigerian state lies the problem of unity ever since its existence. Overtime, the literary artists alongside other sectors have joined their voices in the search for an answer. The NYSC Scheme, the Unity Schools, the Federal Character Principle and State Creations are examples of some policies intended to achieve national unity. In addition to these measures, the research proposed the option of Children‟s literature because of its inherent integrating potentials. To this extent, the research employed textual analysis to examine scholarly potentials on cultural integration and Children‟s literature. In the process it specifically focuses on four of Fatima Akilu’s Millennium Development Goals series Timi’s Dream Comes True, Preye and the Sea of Plastics, The Red Transistor Radio and Aliyyah Learns a New Dance. The stories are fore grounded in Nigeria‟s vision 2020 project and help in advocating these governmental policies in a new aesthetic dimension through the child character. In addition, the books provide a lens through which ethnic and racial superiority can be interrogated thereby enhancing cultural integration in Nigeria which is the bedrock for unity. The research used the New Historicism theory in its analysis of the primary texts. New historicism investigates how social structures, in this case, political and cultural, are represented in literature. The theory also shows how the texts reflect the time and society within which they are produced by narrating the historical, socio-economic and other aspects of life within the society they emanate from and the multiple viewpoints embedded within the texts. However, some aspects of Reader Response criticism is deployed in the analysis to complement the short comings of the New Historicism theory. The research concludes that a major cure for ethnicity and tribalism in a heterogeneous society like Nigeria is a medication of cultural integration injected in Children‟s literature.