Tribal Concealment: A Nomenclatorial Analysis of Herdsmen Discourse in Nigeria Media

Abstract

AbstractThe Fulani herdsmen are nomad who settled in different locations throughoutthe country peacefully. The peaceful coexistence between the Fulani herdsmenand farmers/villagers have been tampered with in the recent time due to theconstant quarrel and attack between and among the sects. The attack issomewhat monopolised by the Fulani herdsmen. This has make it look like aFulani herdsmen attack on their host.Playing their oversight role in thesociety, the media is reporting the conflict between the sects and arrogating theattack to the Fulani herdsmen. Tactically, media has dropped Fulani from thephrase "Fulani herdsmen" and conceal the tribes ' name while reporting theconflict. There are existing works on the study of herdsmen/farmers ' conflict inthe academic but there is none that studied tribal concealment in the discourse.This work therefore considered this a huge vacuum that needs to be filled bystudied different strategies used to conceal Fulani as a tribe in the discourseand examine the implication of such concealments. Data are collected from twomajor Nigerian newspapers, the Vanguard and Punch newspapers. The work iscontent based analysis. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is adopted as themodel and the work is analysed qualitatively. Concealment strategies likelexical replacement, nominalization, passivisation, hedging, use of pronounsand name dropping are identified. The work also discovered that theconcealment has social, political and academic implication.Key words: Fulani, concealment, nomenclatorial, herdsmen discourse, media