Achebe, Chinua;
Anthills of the Savannah wiki
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1988, 216 pages
ISBN 0385016646, 9780385016643
topics: | fiction | nigeria | africa
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1983 Achebe was elected as Deputy President of the People's Redemption party. The same year, there was a military coup by General Buhari, followed by another coup in 1985 by Major General Babangida. In 1986, Achebe was appointed pro-Vice-Chancellor, State University of Anambra, at Enugu. Anthills was published in 1986. It is perhaps based on his brush with senior officialdom at these positions. The following year, Achebe left permanently for the USA, working at U. Mass Amherst, City College of NY, and Bard College (since 1990).
'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. ...
If Sam were stronger or brighter he probably wouldn't need our offices; but
then he probably wouldn't have become His Excellency in the first place. Only
half-wits can stumble into such enormities.
military life attracts two different kinds of men: the truly strong who are
very rare, and the rest who would be strong. The first group make magnificent
soldiers and remain good people hardly ever showing let alone flaunting their
strength. The rest are there for the swank
the whole of Gelegele Market is one thousand live theatres going at once.
[from [Sam's] hi-fi Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik_ on a 45 r.p.m. record
playing at 33 1/3. [Sam is tone-deaf]
After a long career of subduing savages in distant lands they discovered the
most dangerous savage of all just across the English Channel. [47]
Whatever fear the ghost of British imperial vocation may still hold over the
world's little people was finally removed when a renegade Englishman and his
little band of thugs seized Her Majesty's colony in Rhodesia and held it for
thirteen years.
Polygamy is for Africa what monotony is for Europe. [72]
the old emperor who never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what
was going on ...
'I wish I could look like him,' said His Excellency wistfully
I felt that our welcome at the palace became distinctly cooler from that time.
Once upon a time the leopard ... chanced upon the tortoise on a solitary
road. 'Aha', he said; 'at long last! Prepare to die.' And the tortoise
said: 'Can I ask one favour before you kill me?' The leopard saw no harm
and agreed. 'Give me a few moments to prepare my mind.' the tortoise
said. Again the leopard saw no harm. But instead of standing still as the
leopard had expected, the tortoise went into a strange action on the road,
scratching with hands and feet and throwing sand furiously in all
directions. 'Why are you doing that?' asked the puzzled leopard. 'Because
even after I am dead I would want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes,
a fellow and his match struggled here.' [117]
Ikem could understand well enough the roots of the paradox in which a
man's personal choice to live simply without such trimmings as
chauffeurs could stamp him not as a modest and exemplary citizen but
as a mean-minded miser denying a livelihood to an unemployed driver...
[127]
the cock that crows in the morning belongs to one household but its
voice is the property of the neighbourhood. You should be proud that
this bright cockerel that wakes the whole village comes from your
compound. [Abazon elder in praise of the editor Ikem, 112]
The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce
waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of
the story afterwards - each is important in its own
way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do
without. But if you ask me which of them takes the
eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Now when I
was younger, if you had asked me the same question I
would have replied without a pause: the battle. ... why
do I say the story is chief among his fellows?
... Because it is only the story can continue beyond the
war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the
sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It
is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from
blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the
cactus fence. [114]
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