Previous scholarship on ritual oath-taking in Africa has largely been from the perspective of anthropology, history, religion and philosophy, whereas its linguistic representation in African literary discourse and imagination has received comparatively little attention. Working within the tenets of the systemic orientation, this study examines the linguistic representation of culture and indigenous justice in the Abakaliki ritual oath in Obinna Udenwe's Years of Shame. The ideational and interpersonal components of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) show how linguistic resources enable language users to encode and construct tenor, express their social experiences and their knowledge of the natural world and the inner world of their own consciousness. Adopting a qualitative descriptive design, selected oath-taking expressions from the novel were purposively selected and analysed within the framework of the grammatical resource of transitivity and mood. The analysis explores how linguistic choices reflect indigenous conceptions of justice, morality, truth, authority, and communal responsibility. Findings reveal the dominant deployment of material, relational and verbal processes, and mood which collectively construct the ritual as a culturally sanctioned mechanism for establishing truth and administering justice. The study further reveals that the ritual functions not only as a communicative medium but also as a symbolic resource for preserving cultural knowledge and legitimizing communal values. The study signifies that the linguistic representation of the Abakaliki ritual oath offers valuable insights into how language serves as a vehicle for the enactment of culture and justice in traditional Igbo society. The study contributes to the existing body of knowledge in literary linguistics, discourse studies, and SFLbased analyses of African literary texts.
