ABRAKA HUMANITIES REVIEW VOLUME 14, NUMBER 1, 2024

An Ethnopragmatic Analysis of Sam Ukala’s Iredi War

Benita Ukwajunor

Abstract
Sense relation is an important linguistic component used in the literary analysis of
texts. The choice of words by a writer creates a distinct meaning that reveals the
writer’s message to the audience. The meaning associated with these lexical choices
helps to communicate the message and the cultural views of the people in the society
the work reflects. The linguistic parameters that cater for cultural meaning in
language use are ethno-pragmatic. An ethno-pragmatic analysis of Iredi War by Sam
Ukala is carried out to demonstrate his adroit manipulation of linguistic choices to
create novel aspects of cultural meaning in the play. To accomplish the aim of the
research, Hymes's ethnography of communication is selected as the theoretical
framework. The data selected are 10 dialogues from the play with ethno-pragmatic
features. These selected data are analyzed to show how they reflect the Owa and in
essence African culture. The study finds that an understanding of the cultural meaning
of the words and sentences in the play helps the audience to understand the text easily
and at the same time comprehend the socio-cultural views of the people.

Keywords: Ethnopragmatics, Lexical choices, Culture, Ukala

Introduction
In communicating ideas, language uses forms written and spoken form. The spoken
form is the oral form which is mostly used in face-to-face conversation, it is usually
for immediate interaction between two or more people; the other form of language is
the written form, and both are used as means of communication. One distinct activity
language is used for is literary writing which includes drama, prose, and poetry. While
it is true that literature can be realized through spoken language, written literature has
gained more publicity and thus has been given more priority over one age. Jantas
(2006) defines “literature as written works, especially those considered of artistic
merit” (71). Thus language serves as the crux of literary expression, and so
understanding it also requires understanding the properties of language and how they
are used in the field of literature.

According to Tulas (2006), perceiving the meaning of a literary text requires studying
and understanding the language of the text. He encourages readers to interact with
textual structures and linguistic parameters to infer meaning. Indicating the
relationship between linguistics and literary studies Jakobson (1997, p. 174) states
that “if there are some critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace
the field of poetics, I privately believe that …linguists has been mistaken for an
inadequacy of the linguistic science”. He further argued that ignoring the function of
language in literary texts is an equally flagrant anachronism. Carter (1998, p. 75) also
posits that “a process of literary texts analysis which starts from a basic assumption
that the primary interpretations procedures used in the reading of a literary text are
linguistics procedures”. (cf: Awhefeada, 2014; Emama, 2022; Awhefeada, 2010)

Language analysis of literary texts focuses on learning about the workings of

language in literature and on developing the confidence to work systematically toward

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the interpretation of literary text. This technical approach to meaning emphasizes the
objectives and avoids the subjective view of meaning. African writers manipulate the
English language to fit the African experience sociocultural world views, beliefs, and
purpose. Their choice of lexical items has been well constructed to portray meaning
beyond the conceptual meaning of words but have used peculiar words to create
meaning that reflects the sociocultural context in which they write. The discipline that
helps in such linguistic creativity is ethno-pragmatics.

The word "ethno-pragmatic" is used to describe explanations of speech practices that

start with culture-internal ideas, such as the speakers' shared values, norms, priorities,
and assumptions, rather than any universals of pragmatics that are assumed to apply to
all situations. The focus on cultural particularity also known as cross-cultural
pragmatics is the crux of ethno-pragmatics (Wierzbicka, 2002).

Ethno-pragmatic allows for the connection to be made between language and the
cultural ideas and practices of the society and sees culture as playing a major
explanatory role. The goal of ethno-pragmatics is to provide room for the
understanding of culturally internal perspectives while language is being used. It deals
with explaining and describing speech patterns in terms that are understandable to the
target population, taking into account things like their cultural ideas, values, attitudes,
social categories, and feelings. In terms of its meanings that are understood and
shared by members of a particular community, it is based on cultural norms
(Wierzbicka, 2003).

Ethno-pragmatics emphasizes the idea that there is a causal relationship between

indigenous values, social models, and indigenous speaking practices. Finding the
participants' “socio-cultural viewpoints” is one of ethnopragmatics’ main objectives.
This entails navigating and interacting with regional categories and cultural
vocabularies – not in terms of complex English and technical concepts, but rather in
terms that are familiar and approachable to the individuals in a given society.

Statement of Problem
Among the African literary writers, Sam Ukala stands out as a prolific playwright.
However, a great deal of studies on his works have focused on the literary features,
thereby neglecting the linguistic aspects. For instance, Bola (2020) is a folkloric study
of the aesthetic of Sam Ukala’s Akpakaland and Iredi War while Ezeugo (2020) is
based on historical realities in Sam Ukala's Iredi War. However much attention has
not been paid to the linguistic dexterity of Ukala as it concerns his lexical choices and
how they reflect socio-cultural meaning. This aspect is very crucial for a detailed
interpretation of Ukala’s plays. It is this gap that this study is meant to fill through an
ethno-pragmatic analysis of Sam Ukala’s Iredi War.

Methodology
The methodology adopted for this study is textual analysis. The literary text Iredi War
by Sam Ukala serves as data for the study. To extract data for the analysis, lexical
items with ethno-pragmatic features are selected and analyzed. In the data
presentation, the data are written as dialogue, and the lexical items with socio-cultural
meaning are thereby highlighted. The choice of text for this study is purposeful as
Sam Ukala’s Iredi War possesses elements of folklorism thus language of culture is
evident in the choice of diction. The selected data are gathered from the dialogue of

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several characters in the play and analyzed using Dell Hymes's ethnography of
communication.

Theoretical Framework
The theory adopted for this study is Hymes's ethnography of communication. Hymes
proposed the term ‘ethnography of speaking’, later amended to ‘ethnography of
communication’, to describe a new approach to understanding language in use
(Hymes, 1962, 1964). Hymes according to Farah (1998) argues “…that the study of
language must concern itself with describing and analyzing the ability of the native
speakers to use language for communication in real situations (communicative
competence) rather than limiting itself to describing the potential ability of the ideal
speaker/listener to produce grammatically correct sentences (linguistic competence)”
(25). Speakers of a language in particular communities can communicate with each
other in a manner that is not only correct but also appropriate to the sociocultural
context. This ability involves a shared knowledge of the linguistic code as well as of
the socio-cultural rules, norms, and values that guide the conduct and interpretation of
speech and other channels of communication in a community.

Hymes (1968) believes what speakers can and do say, and the communal context in
such speech occurs in correlates. Speech does not occur in a vacuum, but rather within
a specific context, and ‘when the meaning of speech styles are analyzed, we realize
that they entail dimensions of participant, setting, channel, and the like, which partly
govern their meanings’ (Hymes, 1989). Thus Hymes offers a theoretical basis for
language study that accounts for both linguistic variation from individual to individual
and relative linguistic coherence across the social realm, while also offering a
methodology for investigating communication, often represented in terms of the
SPEAKING mnemonic.
The eight components of the SPEAKING mnemonic are: (S) Setting including the
time, place, and physical aspects; (P) participant identity including personal
characteristics such as age and sex, social status, and relationship with each other; (E)
ends including the purpose of the event itself as well as the individual goals of the
participants; (A) act, sequence or how speech acts are organized within a speech event
and what topic/s are addressed; (K) key or the tone and manner in which something is
said or written; (I) instrumentalities or the linguistic code i.e. language, dialect,
variety, and channel i.e. speech or writing; (N) norm or the standard socio-cultural
rules of interaction and interpretation; and (G) genre or type of event such as lecture,
poem, letter (Farah, 1998).

Literature Review
The term “ethnopragmatics” designates an approach to language-in-use that sees
culture as playing a central explanatory role, and at the same time opens the way for
links to be drawn between language and other cultural phenomena. This approach
involves a threefold alignment of objectives, methodological tools, and evidence base
(Goddard 2006: 21). The objective of ethno-pragmatics is to articulate culture-internal
perspectives on the “how and why” of speech practices in the diverse languages of the
world. It is the quest to describe and explain people’s ways of speaking in terms that
make sense to the people concerned, i.e., in terms of indigenous values, beliefs and
attitudes, social categories, emotions, and so on. Its methodological tools according to
Wierzbicka (1996), are based on decomposing cultural notions and capturing cultural
norms in terms of simple meanings that appear to be shared between all languages.

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Goddard (2011), notes that ethno-pragmatics pays particular attention to linguistic

evidence, for example; routine ways of thinking, and life writing, of cultural insiders
themselves (216).

Ethnopragmatics is compatible with the insight from cultural psychology (Shweder

1991, 1993, 2004) that people in different cultures speak differently because they
think differently, feel differently, and relate differently to other people (Emama, 2020).
As Clyne (1994) puts it: “cultural values constitute ‘hidden’ meanings underlying
discourse structures” (83). Before the rise of generative linguistics in the 1950s and
1960s, the study of languages was integrally connected with the humanistic tradition
and with cultural and historical studies Under the influence of Chomsky, mainstream
linguistics, especially in North America, disavowed its links with culture studies and
sought to define itself first as a part of cognitive psychology and later as a branch of
biology (biolinguistics). Interest in cultural aspects of language survived in
anthropological linguistics and the newer field of ethnography of communication, but
it would be fair to characterize late twentieth-century linguistics as largely culture
blind. This was the context into which ethno-pragmatics emerged, in the late 1980s, in
a series of studies by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka argued, with unprecedented
attention to matters of linguistic detail, that the then prevailing approaches to
pragmatics, especially Grice’s account of conversational implicature (Grice 1975).
Brown and Levinson’s (1978), Politeness Theory, and Searle’s (1969) aspects of
speech-act theory, were descriptively inadequate and profoundly Anglocentric. She
called for a new approach, one that would ground conversational practices in cultural
values: “Interpersonal interaction is governed, to a large extent, by norms which are
culture-specific and which reflect cultural values cherished by a particular society”
(Wierzbicka 2003). She further insisted that cultural values should be accessed via
semantic analysis of actual words in the language of the people concerned. A major
advance in the development of ethnopragmatics occurred in the mid-1990s when
Wierzbicka articulated what became known as the theory of cultural scripts
(Wierzbicka 1994). These papers drew on contrastive examples from English,
Japanese, Polish, Malay, and Russian. Others followed on a variety of other languages,
by a growing community of researchers. In 2004 there came the publication of the
edited collection Cultural Scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004), followed by
Ethnopragmatics (Goddard, 2006), and Semantics in/and Social Cognition (Goddard,
2013).

There are two main methodological tools of ethno-pragmatics, namely: semantic

explications and cultural scripts. A semantic explication is a reductive paraphrase of
the meaning of a word, phrase, or lexico-grammatical construction. It is an attempt to
say in simpler words what a speaker is saying when he or she utters the expression
being explicated. Explications have to make intuitive sense to native speakers when
substituted into their contexts of use and to generate the appropriate entailments and
implications.

According to Wierzbicka (2007) cultural scripts are not paraphrases of word

meanings: but they are “representations of cultural norms which are widely held in a
given society and are reflected in the language” (93). Cultural scripts exist at different
levels of generality and may relate to different aspects of speaking, thinking, feeling,
and acting. Some scripts capture cultural beliefs that are relevant to interaction

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(Goddard 2009). Importantly, cultural scripts are not about actual behaviors but about
participants’ shared understandings and expectations, that are about social cognition.

Maledo (2020) is an ethnopragmatic study of Sam Ukala’s The Slave Wife and The
Placenta of Death. The study focused on proverbs in the plays, with emphasis on how
they are reflections of the socio-cultural knowledge of the Owa people. It applies
Brown and Levinson‟ 's (1987) politeness theory with insights from Dell Hymes's
ethnography of communication. The main goal was to clarify how, while paying
attention to the ethnographic aspects of proverb usage, politeness elements were
appropriated to direct proverb usage in the selected plays. Ten proverbs were chosen
from the texts on purpose to conduct a thorough and qualitative examination. Findings
demonstrate that the appropriate use of proverbs in the sociocultural setting of the
plays is guided by politeness routines and ethnographic elements of speaking, which
also ensure that there is no breakdown in communication. While Dell Hymes'
speaking reveals that the employment of proverbs in the texts complies with the
social-cultural norms of the interaction of Owa people, the politeness elements
inherent in the proverbs are face-saving tools that serve to reduce tensions in their
mitigating roles. The study thus demonstrates the value of linguistics' role in
understanding Sam Ukala's plays.

Data Analysis and Interpretation

This chapter will analyze the selected data for this study. The data are selected from
Sam Ukala’s Iredi War. The analysis will employ the Hymes ethnography of
communication which focuses on how the meaning of the lexical items are reflections
of the culture of the Owa people.
Excerpt One (1)
Narrator II: Okay. (To audience). People, we have this proverb;
“one does not sit in his own home and crush his scrotum in
the process”, but our story tonight belies that proverb.
Narrator I: Yes. Obi Igboba of Owa was sitting in his place
and he crushed his… say if it you dare. (12)
From the expect above the proverbial saying depicts the care a man takes in sitting
down to avoid accidentally causing injury to his scrotum. While this means the need
to show care, ethno-pragmatically it connotes a deeper sense, as the use of the
expression shows, Obi Igboba has crushed his which in its denotative meaning has not
happened. Therefore, the connotative meaning of one sitting and crushing his scrotum
contextually means one does not sit down and allow his house, dignity, or life to be
destroyed without taking any action. This lexical expression employed by Ukala is
easily understandable to the readers based on the context of the white men's
oppression against the blacks as represented by the people of Owa. Culturally,
Africans in a sense are sitting in their own home without offending the white men
only to be oppressed and see their taking away from them. The reader thus has to
view the expression from a cultural perspective to deduce its connotative meaning.
Excerpt Two (2)
Igboba: (Amused) Oh, yes, we do. When tortoise was asked to
visit the lion; who was ill, he said, “I saw the footmarks that
went into the lion’s den, but didn’t see any that came out of it.
Until I see footmarks returning from the lion's den, I am not.
(18)

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In Igboba’s statement, the lexical item “footmark” carries an ethnopragmatic meaning.

In the analogy by Igboba, the tortoise depends on the returning footmarks to be sure if
it needs to go greet the lion also. If viewed denotatively, the analogy would mean that
the tortoise needs to rely on ordinary marks on the soil to decide whether to pay a visit
to the lion or not. But culturally, the footmark of a man depicts his being alive. The
returning footmark would mean that the animals who visited the lion were not killed
by the lion. The cultural undertone of this analogy is easily understandable to Africans
who believe the lion as the king of the jungle does not spare any animal alive. It also
shows the cultural perspective of the Nigerian fable of the tortoise being the wisest in
the animal kingdom. The footmark thus goes beyond the print on the soil but signifies
the life of the animals who had earlier visited. In the context in which Igboba made
use of the lexical expression, he meant he could not send more men to Crewe-Read
unless he saw the men he had sent to him earlier as carriers. The use of these
significant lexical items helps portray the cultural beliefs and views of the Owa
people and as such also helps its African readers to easily understand the text's
message.
Excerpt Three (3)
Nwobi: No, you haven’t (To Iwekuba). Indeed he has never.
And it’s all getting clearer now…. (To Igboba) My brother,
what the white man is saying is that you should come down
from the throne the throne of your father, because (pointing at
Crewe-Read) he does not recognize you as the king of Owa!
Because the throne you sit on now belongs to one Eduwardu,
whose bottom spreads like the clouds over a thousand thrones,
thrones of both Oyibo and African ancestors Ikuru-Iredi say
Obi Agun should climb down the throne. (20)
One prominent lexical item that requires ethno-pragmatics understanding is
the word “bottom”. In Nigeria pidgin the word “bottom” is used synonymously with
anus. This is thus a case of semantic shift, the “bottom” which is the lowest part of
anything is used to represent one’s anus. But Nwobi’s use of the word goes beyond its
physical sense of a man’s body part. The term in the cultural usage depicts kingship –
one sitting on a throne. Since kings sit down on their elevated Palace-chair controlling
the vie affairs of the community, the bottom (anus) of a king is thus viewed as
representing kingship. As such, Nwobi asks if the king of England Edward VII
(Eduwardu) bottom (Kingship) also extends to Africa in particular Owa kingdom. The
use of these lexical items by Ukala creates social meaning in the text and also shows
his linguistic aesthetics as it helps the African audience to easily grasp the meaning of
the text with the help of the ethnopragmatic features.
Excerpt Four (4)
Iwekuba: Ask him, my brother. His been arguing with me.
Iyase. If a stranger climbed your wife on your own bed in your
presence and you did nothing, whose fault would it be? The
strangers or your wife’s? ... It’s our fault, Iyase. We shouldn’t
have the face of a word and speak its back. (26)
“We shouldn’t leave the face of a word and speak it back”. This clause entails cultural
meaning. A “word” is an abstract noun that does not possess the human feature of a
face or a back that needs to be spoken to, thus the expression cannot be taken literally.
To comprehend the sense of the expression it has to be taken into an ethno-pragmatic
context. To leave the “face of a word and speak its back means avoiding the facts of a
case. In Nigeria, it is a common belief that people speak ill behind someone in power.

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But when one is courageous enough to tell an individual directly if his actions are
right or wrong, it is speaking to the face. This is the idea portrayed by Ikewuba’s use
of the word “We shouldn’t have the face of a word and speak its back”. In essence, the
reason the white men could destroy the shrines and the gods is the fact that they did
not fight to protect their land. Using a lexical expression that connotes cultural beliefs
helps the African evidence to easily understand the message beyond a surface level to
a deep and better understanding of the message.
Excerpt Five (5)
Igboba: Rise, loyal ones, rise. The fart that would disgrace a
man doesn’t come through the middle of his anus; it escapes
through the side. Rise (they rise.) Like a treacherous snake, the
white man has struck and slid off. We won’t let him take us
unaware again, would we? (29)
Igboba’s comment is based on the attack of the dies shrine and the gods by the white
man. The word denotes the Owa’s unpreparedness during when the attack. To make
his point Igboba says “The fart that would disgrace a man doesn’t come through the
middle of his anus”. Culturally, to fart in public is offensive and when one is caught in
the act it brings disgrace. Since the anus is not known to have sides such as which fart
can come from the expression has to be viewed from an ethno-pragmatic angle. To
reduce the sound associated with farts individuals commonly adjust their sitting
position which brings the fart from the side of the anus; in this way, the sound is
reduced and can thus conceal the offender from being identified. But when it is done
indiscreetly it might produce sound that makes it easy to identify the individuals who
did it. Using this cultural context, Igboba describes the attack on their shrines as being
done secretly to avoid instant retaliation from the villagers. Thus an understanding of
the cultural context of the lexical expression helps to gain a more comprehensive and
deeper understanding of the dialogue.
Excerpt Six (6)
Iwekuba: you see what I mean? People don’t win wars with
stories and paths only. I’ll take these ones along to have them
bathed and cooked while you bury the dead. Where will they
meet you? (42)
From its surface, the lexical item “cooked” creates a misunderstanding of the message
in Iwekuba's speech if taken literally. To get something cooked means to prepare food
for eating; to cook the warriors would mean to kill them and offer them as food. But
within the cultural context, the lexical item cooked entails a deeper meaning. Ethno-
pragmatically, the word cooked when used alongside a human in the Nigerian context
means enabling one to have certain supernatural power, using charm or amulets as a
means of being protected from danger. The word cooked is given a new meaning
which conforms to the African cultural belief.
Excerpt Nine (9)
Igboba: That’s me! Let the white man come. My blood is
boiling kutunku like the deadly soup of the dead. Let the white
man come. He calls us barbarians. So I will kill and eat him up!
(50)
Language is best understood, when the context of usage is put into account. Within
this usage, it is vital to understand the socio-cultural views that influence certain
lexicons. In Igboba's dialogue with his other chiefs, he declares he is waiting for the
white man and their soldiers, in his anger he states his “blood is boiling”. This
assertion in a literal semantic view is impossible as human blood cannot be heated in

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his own body to a point of boiling. It thus encompassed a cultural meaning. The
expression “my blood is boiling” is from Nigerian Pidgin which means being very
angry. This expression employed by Ukala enables readers to grasp the degree of
Igboba's anger at the white man.
Excerpt Seven (7)

Ekome: When you appreciate the great farmers his cutlass gets sharper. (64)
The expression “cutlass gets sharper” when used in the context of a farmer with a
cutlass denotes an object used in sharpening irons such as the mentioned cutlass. But
in this excerpt Ekome attributes the cutlass being sharp to the appreciation bestowed
on the farmer. This must be understood within cultural context as praises do not make
an object sharper in itself. But in Nigerian cultural belief when one is praised they
tend to do more because of the commendation. Using this analogy Ekome meant the
farmer would do more in cutting the grass or the wood. The expression “sharper” thus
refers to the farmer doing more because of the commendation received. In this context,
the warriors of Owa deserve gifts after performing well in their first battle so that they
can do more for the community.

Discussion and Conclusion

In analyzing ethno-pragmatic features in Sam Ukala’s Iredi War, the study encounters
different findings. The study finds that ethnopragmatic deals with the cultural views
and beliefs of a society and thus affects the linguistic meaning of words and sentences
used in society. The study also finds that words and sentences that portray cultural
meaning both share denotative and contextual meanings. For instance while
“footmark” literally means a mark on the soil, it connotes being alive in the cultural
usage.’

It is noticed in the study that the use of certain lexical items helps create cultural
meaning. It is also observable that Ukala’s lexical choices such as “juju” are cultural
terms that help to portray the cultural beliefs of the Owa people and also help the
audience fully understand the text. From this research, it can be deduced that the
reader or listeners need to possess cultural knowledge of the community or society's
beliefs and ways of life to easily comprehend ethno-pragmatic words and sentences.
For instance, to understand the term “white man’s dog”, the reader would have to
depend on existing knowledge of African history with the colonizers. This research
also shows that the use of cultural lexical items creates an easy understanding of the
text against its cultural background.

Conclusion
The study has focused on ethnopragmatic analysis of Sam Ukala Iredi War to show
how the culture of the Owa people is linguistically represented in the play. The study
employs Hymes's ethnography of communication as the theoretical framework for its
analysis. Ten dialogues are carefully selected based on their possession of ethno-
pragmatic features in the dialogue. These data were then analyzed to show how they
reflect the culture of the Owa people and Africa at large. The study finds that shared
knowledge of the culture of the Owa people would make it easier to understand the
meaning of the words and sentences that possess these cultural features. The study
also shows Sam Ukala’s dexterity in language use. In addition, it also linguistically
explores African folklore and Sam Ukala’s dexterous exploration of African folkloric
features in his modern African plays.

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