Humanities and Social Sciences

Highlife songs often speak in the voice of an elder giving advice. This review surveys the advisory mode in Igbo highlife from the 1960s to the present, reading lyrics as moral philosophy set to music. It argues that the genre’s proverbs, warnings and blessings make it an important and neglected archive of popular ethics.

Official archives of the Nigerian Civil War remain incomplete, and much of what is known survives in family memory. This article analyses thirty oral testimonies collected in Enugu and Anambra States to show how survivors narrate displacement, hunger and return. It argues that oral testimony is not merely a supplement to written records but an archive with its own forms and silences, and it proposes protocols for its ethical use in historical writing.