topics: |  fiction | nigeria | africa

Book Review

i look upon this as one of the defining novels of the non-western world.
it evokes life under close to a dictator with chilling vigour and emotional
clarity.  i can't think of a more powerful depiction of the culture of
sycophancy in any literature, anywhere.

despite it's grim modern storyline, the telling is infused with myth, as in
the storie of the tortoise who, even as it is dying, wishes to present a
false image for posterity.  At one point we are suddenly presented with the
hymn of the sun, which enters the main story, taking up several pages:

    Great carrier of Sacrifice to the Almighty: Single
    eye of God! ... Single Eye, one-wall-neighbour-to-Blindness...

    The birds that sang the morning in had melted away even before
the last butterfly fell roasted to the ground.  And when songbirds
disappeared, morning herself went into the seclusion of a widow’s
penance in soot and ashes [...]
    You have nothing to sell? Who said so? Come! I will buy your
mother's cunt.	[p.29]

keen observation and multiple perspectives infuse the story with a power
that is simply breathtaking.  it is amazing that although it was considered
for the booker, this novel of most startling originality didn't make it -
perhaps because it didn't fit into any paradigms.

-Background: Nigerian History

The novel was composed in a period of turmoil in Nigerian history.

After independence in 1960 the Northern Hausa/Fulani groups, became the
most powerful group, to the extent of setting up shadow rulers for the
Yoruba-dominated western region.  Christian missionaries had been more
active in the south, so that the Igbos who were a majority there, had had
more exposure to western education, and had more exposure to christianity.

In the mid-60s, Achebe wrote Man of the People (published 1966), where he
portrays a military coup in a west african nation.

Coup and Biafran war

That same year saw the first military coup in Nigeria, and the resulting
military rule which was to continue for thirteen years.  The coup led to a
government perceived to be favouring Igbos.  A subsequent counter-coup
reinstated northern dominance. A number of ethnic massacres resulted in
considerable bad blood, and eventually the east-southern region with a
majority (65%) of Igbos, seceded, calling itself the republic of
Biafra.

Achebe joined the breakaway republic and became an ambassador for the nascent
republic.  Wole Soyinka was jailed in the North for espousing liberal views.
This period of turmoil is vividly portrayed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
Half of a Yellow Sun.

In the end, the Biafran side lost, and the civil war ended in 1970.
Achebe joined the university at Nsukka, visiting several universities
1972-76.

The military rule continued another nine years before another coup, and an
assassination, followed by the ascent of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo who
gave up power and organized elections in 1977.

Nationalist ideology

Meanwhile, a number of African intellectuals had been reformulating
nationalist ideologies.  Achebe's 1958 novel Things fall apart had
highlighted the possibility of expressing an African consciousness in an
imperial language, and Achebe kept expanding the idiom of English to
encompass more of Igbo experience in his pathbreaking Arrow of God (1964).
In 1975 he launched his pioneering attack on Joseph Conrad, Albert
Schweitzer, and other benevolent figures of the colonial era.

However, his intense focus on Africa also resulted in a flirtation with
politics.  In 1982, he joined the left-leaning People's redemption party
(PRP) and became its deputy vice-president.  But the widespread rigging in
the elections and the mendacity and greed disillusioned him.  In the early
80s, he gave up politics.

In 1983, another coup ushered in another ten years of military rule, that
was to last till 1993.

It was in this period, when Nigeria was under military rule for
one-third of the years of independence, that Anthills of Savannah was
published.  It reflects years of close contact with the circle around the
dictator, and in many ways is similar to the Latin American Dictator novel.

Excerpts

    'You are wasting everybody’s time, Mr. Commissioner for information . I
will not go to Abazon. Finish! Kabisa! Any other business?'
    'As Your Excellency wishes. But…'
    'But me no buts, Mr. Oriko! The matter is closed, I said.
How many times, for God’s sake, am I expected to repeat it?'
    'Why do you find it so difficult to swallow my ruling. On
anything?'
    'I am sorry, Your Excellency. But I have no difficulty
swallowing and digesting your rulings.'
	 	[p.1, opening lines - establishing the power relation]

On my right sat the Honourable Commissioner for Education. He is by
far the most frightened of the lot. As soon as he had sniffed peril in
the air he had begun to disappear into his hole, as some animals and
insects do, backwards. Instinctively he had gathered his papers
together and was in the very act of lifting the filecover over them
when his entire body suddenly went rigid. Stronger alarms from deeper
recesses of instinct may have alerted him to the similarity between
his impending act and a slamming of the door in the face of His
Excellency. [p.3]

He had drawn his upper arms tight to his sides as though to diminish his
bulk; and clasped his hands before him like a supplicant.  [p.3]

We all stand stock-still. The only noise in the room comes from his own
movements and the continuous whirring of the air-conditioners which have
risen to attention in the silence of a deferential Cabinet waiting with
bated breath on the Chief...

The Attorney-General was perched on the edge of his chair, his left
elbow on the table, his neck craning forward to catch his Excellency's
words which he had chosen to speak with unusual softness... As he
watched his victim straining to catch the vital message he felt again
that glow of quiet jubilation... As he savoured this wonderful sense
of achievement gained in so short a time spreading over and soaking
into the core of his thinking and his being like fresh-red tasty
palm-oil melting and diffusing over piping hot roast yam he withdrew
his voice still further into his throat and, for good measure, threw
his head back on his huge, black, leather chair so that he seemed to
address his words at the high, indifferent ceiling rather than to the
solicitous listener across the table.
	Suddenly suspicious like a quarry sniffing death in the air
but uncertain in what quarter it might lurk the Attorney-General
decided to stall. [p.20]

Cliché is but pauperized Ecstasy.
 - Chris, in the context of how ordinary readers were delighted by the columns
    of reggie okong -
	He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have
	never heard it before; and our ordinary reader clearly had not and so
	was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have
	produced when it was first coined.
	...
	And so he was number one on my list and His Excellency appointed him
	Commissioner for Home Affairs. He had his day and then went into
	partial eclipse. But I hardly think he is due for prison, yet.

Your Excellency is not only our leader but also our Teacher. We are always
ready to learn. We are like children washing only their bellies, as our
elders say when they pray. ...
    But Your Excellency, you are too generous. Too generous by half! Why does
every bad thing in this country start in Abazon Province? The Rebellion was
there. They were the only ones whose Leaders of Thought failed to return a
clear mandate to Your Excellency. I don't want to be seen as a tribalist but
Mr. Ikem Osodi is causing all this trouble because he is a typical Abazonian.
 	- Reggie Okong to HE
[Abazon has the ring of Igbo in Nigeria;]

His Excellency’s mind was now divided between what he was saying and the
echoes of old President Ngongo’s advice: ‘Your greatest risk is your boyhood
friends, those who grew up with you in your village. Keep them at arm’s
length and you will live long.’ The wise old tortoise!

[attorney general to H.E. Sam]
You went to Lord Lugard College where half of your teachers were
Englishmen. Do you know, the nearest white men I saw in my school were an
Indian and two Pakistanis.

[while driving in a traffic jam, Ikem overcomes the challenge from a taxi for
an empty space in the lane]
Ikem heaved a very deep sigh and then, gallant in victory, pronounced it the
work of the sun. We are parboiled as farmers do their rice to ease the
shelling. Thereafter we take only five minutes to cook.

--Hymn to the Sun

[this hymn appears as prose in the text.  I have taken the liberty of
inserting line breaks to render it as free verse. ]

Great Carrier of Sacrifice to the Almighty:
	Single Eye of God!
Why have you brought this on us?
What hideous abomination
    forbidden and forbidden and forbidden again
          seven times have we committed or else condoned,
what error that no reparation can hope to erase?
Look, our forlorn prayers, our offerings of conciliation
lie scattered about your floor
    where you cast them disdainfully away;
and every dawn you pile up your long
	basket of day with the tools and emblems of death.

Wide-eyed, insomniac, you go out at cock-crow
    spitting malediction at a beaten,
	recumbent world.
Your crimson torches fire the furnaces
of heaven and the roaring holocaust of your vengeance fills the skies.

Undying Eye of God! You will not relent,
   we know it, from compassion for us.
Relent then for your own sake;
for that bulging eye of madness
that may be blinded by soaring motes of an incinerated world.
Single Eye of God, will you
   put yourself out merely that men may stumble
	in your darkness. Remember:
Single Eye, one-wallneighbour-to-Blindness, remember!

What has man become to you, Eye of God,
    that you should hurt yourself on his account?
Has he grown to such god-like stature in your sight?
Homeward-bound from your great hunt,
   the carcass of an elephant on your great head,
   do you now dally on the way
to pick up a grasshopper between your toes?

Great Messenger of the Creator!
Take care that the ashes of the world
rising daily from this pyre
   may not prove enough
   when they descend again to
silt up the canals of birth
in the season of renewal.

The birds that sang the morning in had melted away
even before
   the last butterfly fell roasted to the ground. ...
Morning no longer existed.

[...]
	You have nothing to sell? Who said so? Come! I will buy your
mother's cunt.	[p.29/30]

[chapter Four: in Ikem's voice]

I have never seen the sense in sleeping with people. A man
should wake up in his own bed. A woman likewise. Whatever they choose
to do prior to sleeping is no reason to deny them that right. I simply
detest the very notion of waking up and finding beside you somebody
naked and unappetizing. [34]

You see, they are not in the least like ourselves. They don't need and
can't use the luxuries that you and I must have. They have the animal
capacity to endure the pain of, shall we say, domestication. [37]

Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass. It wouldn't be so bad if it
was merely a matter of dancing upside down on your head. With practice anyone
could learn to do that. The real problem is having no way of knowing from one
day to another, from one minute to the next, just what is up and what is
down.

The Emperor may be a fool but he isn't a monster. Not yet, anyhow; although
he will certainly become one by the time Chris and company have done with
him. ... I am sure that Sam can still be saved if we put our minds to it. His
problem is that with so many petty interests salaaming around him all day,
like that shyster of an Attorney-General, he has no chance of knowing what is
right. And that's what Chris and I ought to be doing--letting him glimpse a
little light now and again through chinks in his solid wall of court jesters;
we who have known him longer than the rest should not be competing with
them. ...