Purple Hibiscus Response

One of the most interesting things to me in Purple Hibiscus is the fact that they are living in a very unstable Nigeria. I have previously learned about Nigeria before, but my knowledge is still very basic and limited in the fact that I never really knew much about the politics of Nigeria until just recently. In Purple Hibiscus, we see that the recent military coup is extremely oppressive in nature. We see people being jailed for criticizing the government (like Ade) and we see people being killed for nonviolent crimes such as drug dealing.

I began to research so that I could understand just what coup occurred in the time frame of this book. I thought that if I could understand the government of Nigeria more, then I could better understand what exactly is happening to the people of Nigeria. One of the first things that came up whenever I searched about this topic was oil. Oil was the essential driver of these military coups. Each coup was driven by the greed for money and power. It was completely profit driven. Every single government that ruled because of oil in Nigeria did everything in their power to silence the media and stay in power for as long as possible so that they could make as much money as possible. That is why we see the new military government take away Ade and later execute people publicly.