Multimodal Communicative Strategies in the Cartoons Depicting Environmental Despoliation in Niger Delta, Nigeria

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria is blessed with abundant natural resources; the most prominent of which is petroleum which has become a form of curse to the residents of the region. Every year, there are reported cases of environmental despoliation leading to the destruction of human and aquatic lives as well as farmlands. The people of the region are mostly agrarians and because of the level of devastation carried out by the multinational oil corporations, they are incapacitated. For this reason, a lot of academic fireworks have been conducted to draw the attention of both the Nigerian government and the international community to the plight of the Niger Delta people. Such academic research ranges from legal, economic, and environmental to sociocultural milieu. However, no attempt has been made to examine the role of cartoons depicting the plight of the Niger Delta people. This paper, therefore, is carried out from the perspective of multimodality using cartoons as sources of data to capture the message of environmental degradation in the Niger Delta region. Multimodality is adopted as a platform to describe and interpret the data because it covers a wide range of signification elements in communication by bringing together a gamut of hidden meanings in a particular image. Such meanings can reveal a whole lot of communicative strategies. From a theoretical perspective, we adopt Charles Sander Peirce’s theory of signification which focuses on Icon, Index, and Symbol by depending on the universally acclaimed six pillars of character counts as the criteria of positivity and negativity to conduct the research in a tabular form as a product of categorization. The study reveals that negativity is predominant in the cartoons on the Niger Delta environment due to the negligence of the oil corporations during oil exploration.     Received: 15 April 2025 / Accepted: 21 June 2025 / Published: 08 July 2025