Sociopolitical Consciousness and the Anxiety of Literary Influence: Boko Haram and the Herdsmen Versus Farmers Crisis in Yerima’s Pari and Hendu

Abstract

Ahmed Yerima’s Pari (2016) imaginatively addresses the Boko Haram insurgency, while Hendu (2019) responds to herder-farmer violence. Although existing studies have examined religion, language, insurgency, balanced representation, mutual culpability, and reconciliation in Yerima’s drama, they have not adequately explained how his representation of contemporary violence combines sociopolitical criticism with a conciliatory approach that revises the confrontational tradition of earlier Nigerian playwrights. Through comparative textual analysis, this article examines Pari and Hendu as dramatic responses to religious insurgency and herder-farmer conflict. It argues that Yerima’s sociopolitical consciousness emerges from his engagement with the dramaturgies of Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, and Olu Obafemi; his religious orientation; and Nigeria’s sociopolitical conditions. Sociopolitical consciousness illuminates how the plays identify power structures, distribute responsibility, and imagine responses to injustice, while Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence explains how Yerima retains the social commitment of Nigerian political drama but revises its confrontational strategies. The study demonstrates that the plays’ conciliatory resolutions neither protect political authority nor abandon social commitment. Instead, they expose political complicity, recognise the suffering of antagonistic communities, and distribute culpability among political elites, perpetrators, victims, and communities without denying the asymmetries of power. By foregrounding dialogue, religious accommodation, mutual accountability, and coexistence, the plays demonstrate that political commitment need not be confined to revolutionary representation and offer an ethical framework relevant to responses to communal violence.