Books like Anthills of the Savannah

Anthills of the Savannah see Achebe returning to similar territory as his last novel, A Man of the People – politics of post-colonial Africa. Whereas A Man of the People saw events leading up to a coup, Anthills of the Savannah is post-coup. A charismatic young Sandhurst trainer army officer, known only in the novel as Sam or His Excellency, has been swept into power in the troubled state of Kangan. After he is defeated in a vital referendum, his role as dictator becomes unsteady, and there can be no other response but more violence.The novel follows three characters through this maelstrom. Chris Oriko, the Minister of Information and Ikem Osodi, a poet and editor of a newspaper, and Beatrice Okoh, a Minister of Finance and Chris’s girlfriend. These characters, drawn together under His Excellency’s web, have to fight for their very survival as the state of Kangan is plunged into chaos.Whereas A Man of the People allowed us to witness the build-up to a coup through the eyes of just one figure, the naive Odili, Anthills of the Savannah’s greatest strength is its disparate view points and experimental style. As I noted in a previous review, A Man of the People was Achebe’s first attempt at a first person narration. Anthills of the Savannah takes this one step further – three first person narrations that fill the first half of the novel and then a switch to third person. This experimental form proves a great advantage for Achebe, as it allows him the power to oscillate between contrasting viewpoints, and proves a great tool for heightening this already tense novel. At one point we are inside Chris’s head, desperate to know what it is Beatrice is really thinking. It is this mastery of the form that earned Anthills of the Savannah a Booker Prize nomination in 1987 (beaten by Penelope Lively for Moon Tiger).Achebe concerns himself with the questions of how such situations are allowed to arise in Africa. Chris Oriko poses at the opening of the novel:“…looking back on the last two years it should be possible to point to a decisive event and say: it was at such and such a point that everything went wrong and the rules were suspended. But I have not found such a moment or such a cause…” (P.2)If Chris Oriko has not found it, the rest of the novel is an exposition that would seem to indicate that it is not there to be found. Events are caused by a confluence of other events, many times simply trivial, sometimes even apparently unconnected. And yet the characters in this novel strive to find a meaning. Ikem Osodi, the poet, seeks his meaning in words.“Chris keeps lecturing me on the futility of my crusading editorials. They achieve nothing. They antagonise everybody. They are essays in overkill. They’re counter-productive. Poor Chris. By now he probably believes the crap too… The line I have taken with him is perhaps too subtle: But supposing my crusading editorials were indeed futile would I not be obliged to keep on writing them? To think that Chris no longer seems to understand such logic! …Perhaps I should learn to deal with him along his own lines and jog his short memory with the many successes my militant editorials have had.” (P.38)But Ikem is silenced; the newspaper is taken away from him. Words do not explain or justify the actions committed in and against Kangan and its people. Beatrice opens his eyes by telling Ikem that his politics and his knowledge:“I tell him he has no clear role for women in his political thinking; and he doesn’t seem able to understand it.” (P.91)This accusation shakes Ikem’s world view to its very foundations, though he does admit:“I can’t tell you what the new role for Woman will be. I don’t know. I should never have presumed to know. You have to tell us.” (P.98)This is important. When the words and actions of Ikem and Chris have failed, it is the words and actions of Beatrice that will alter civilisation in Kangan. Ikem’s girlfriend gives birth to their child, and Beatrice organises the naming ceremony. Ordinary the naming of a child would be a man’s task, but with their men dead or still fighting the women name the child. A male guest responds:“Do you know why I am laughing like this? I am laughing because in you young people our world has met its match. Yes! You have put the world where it should sit…” (P.227)The men of Kangan have fought and died, but it is the women that shall inherit this earth and have to rise upon it. Here we see the role of woman in the world, something Ikem could not see or express with words, and what Chris, the man of action, would never have fought for.In the middle of Achebe’s novel there is an extract from David Diop’s poem Africa:“Africa tell me AfricaIs this you this back that is bentThis back that breaks under the weight of humiliationThis back trembling with red scarsAnd saying yes to the whip under the midday sun” (P.134)We are bought full circle, back to the arguments Achebe has been making since Things Fall Apart. That Africans accepted the subjugation from the west too readily, that they did not put up a fight. And now, with a back still trembling with red stars, they allow this to continue, under dictators and tin-pot rulers. They are complicit in their own shame. Achebe at the end of this novel seems to be saying that African society needs to be integrated, with women as important as men, as the poor as level as the rich. It is an idealist view that brings about “The bitter taste of liberty” David Diop’s poem concludes with.Anthills of the Savannah still remains Achebe’s last novel, twenty-one years after its first publication. It took him twenty-one years to write (though he wrote poetry, essays and children’s stories in that time), and so by this reckoning we should be about due his next novel. Last year in the Guardian newspaper he admitted to writing one, but following a car crash that left him paralysed in 1990 he stated that it was difficult to write for very long each day. The five novels Chinua Achebe has published so far have been deep, intelligent novels, engaged with Africa’s history and political life, and one wishes to hear his view on the way that country, and particularly Nigeria, has lived in the past twenty years. It is a safe bet to say that it will be damning, political, and relevant. Chinua Achebe is a writer of immense standing, and reading his five novels I have been struck again and again at the depth and poetry of his language, and the insight he provides into, for me, an otherwise unknown culture. He is fully deserving of the title of “The Father of Modern African Writing” which was bestowed upon him when he was awarded the 2007 Man Booker International Prize.