The Labour of Our Heroes Past Shall Never Be in Vain: Lessons from Obafemi Awolowo's Rhetoric as a Nationalist

Abstract

This ex-post facto rhetorical analysis examines the extent to which Awolowo's political utterances, during the agitation against colonial rule in Nigeria, are determined by his nationalistic zeal and concludes that contemporary politicians in Nigeria have a lot to learn from this sage. The study is an integral part of a developmental analysis of Awolowo's political speeches from the period of agitation against colonial rule to the end of the second republic (1951-1983). While the purpose of the whole study, spanning 32 years, was to see the extent to which Awolowo could be described as a social democrat and prophet, judging by the ramifications of his political speeches, this particular one (1/4/51-30/09/54) was to determine how nationalistic Awolowo was, as a fighter against colonialism with its attendant injustice. Forty political speeches, which represent six phases in Awolowo's political career, were selected, through the proportional stratified sampling technique, for content analysis. Five of these speeches were in the corpus for the period of focus. Although measures of five broad issues (Categories A – E), within six political periods, were employed to test the entire study's 7 hypotheses, through the One-way ANOVA and Newman Keuls' Method of Multiple Comparison, this article concentrates only on the results obtained from the first hypothesis. The study categorized the issues into 5: the economy, politics, socio-cultural milieu, international relations and education and measured their relative salience using a logical scale comprising 25 themes. In a nutshell, findings from the study corroborated the prediction that the concept of choice would make Awolowo's treatment of the salient issues to differ markedly within the period under investigation.