“Dictatorship, Myth, and Hope: A Rereading of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah”

Abstract

Chinua Achebe’s novels mostly bear the burden of a writer’s express desire to change or correct a social stance or inclination which to him appears wrong. Achebe has consistently used his works to present Africa, and Nigeria particularly, in dire straits with the aim of solving its slews of malaise. With his Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, he strives to present Africa as having a self-sustaining civilization less barbarous than the self-indulgent and nefarious colonialist white man would want all to believe. In No Longer at Ease, he turns his scathing searchlight on the new postcolonial society bedevilled with corruption and the misguided and culturally unbalanced new African elite who have the responsibility to run the affairs of the newly-independent countries. He continues in 1966 with the novel A Man of the People in a prophetic mode, exposing the ineptitude of leaders, the teetering destiny of the new African countries in unsparing satire. The novel ends with a military take-over, uncannily prognosticating a real-life military take-over in Nigeria. The military did not fare better. Violence was aggravated all over the country, culminating in the disastrous Civil War of 1967-1970. The sorrows of his defeated, Igbo-dominated, defunct Biafra homeland gave rise to his war poetry and short-story collection, Beware Soul Brother (1971) and Girls at War (1972) respectively. After a long hiatus, Achebe came back as himself in a straight-forward, matter-of-fact polemic The Trouble with Nigeria (1983); x-raying the political misadventures of the country’s Second Republic. He begins with a tone of magisterial authority and assuredness: