‘Big man, big palaver’
(The one-eyed thug, Dogo, describing Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga in A Man of the People, page 15)

The Africa trilogy

Achebe’s previous three novels – Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) – are grouped together under the title of the ‘African Trilogy’. They are all told in the free indirect style, meaning they have an omniscient third-person narrator but that narrator tells everything from the point of view of a central protagonist, at moments entering deep into their minds and thought processes so we see the world from their point of view.

Books 1 and 3 of the trilogy are entirely set within the world and mindset of ‘backward’ ‘primitive’ tribal people from a subset of the Igbo people of south-east Nigeria. Their whole point is to immerse you in the mindset, beliefs and practices of these people and make you understand that they in fact had a deep and rich cultural and spiritual life, complicated customs, laws and processes for managing themselves, most of which were brutally over-ridden with the advent of white Europeans, specifically British imperial administrators.

Book 2 is set in the contemporary world (i.e. around 1957/58) but is also told in the free indirect style, and has the protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, frequently returning to the undeveloped village of his birth and ancestors. It’s also tied into the trilogy because the protagonist, Obi, is the grandson of the central figure of the first book, Okonkwo.

A Man of The People

The point is that A Man of the People marks a significant break with the trilogy. It is still set in Nigeria but it is a) very much the contemporary Nigeria of 1964 and b) above all, it is told in the first person.

It is a first-person narrative told by a young male teacher, Odili Samalu (full name p.23). It is a mazy narrative, punctuated with lots of flashbacks. In these we learn about Odili’s boyhood in the village of Urua, his success at the local school, winning a scholarship to university, his womanising student days, travelling to London to do a post-graduate certificate in teaching, then his decision to take up a teaching post at an out of the way private or grammar school in the town of Anata. He has been teaching there for 18 months (p.8).

Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga

The present part of the narrative kicks off in 1964 when this school is paid a visit by an eminent Nigerian politician and cabinet minister, Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga.

It turns out that Odili has a history with Nanga. Back in 1948 Nanga had been Odili’s teacher in standard three and Odili had been one of his favourite pupils. Then the narrative jumps to 1960 and political events which first disillusioned Odili with his country’s politicians.

A general election was imminent. The world price of coffee had collapsed throwing the Nigerian economy into crisis. The Minister of Finance, Dr Makinde, who had a PhD in Economics presented a well worked out plan for dealing with the public finances which would require cuts to public services. Because of the election, the Prime Minister said no and abruptly sacked not only the Finance Minister but also the majority of the cabinet which had backed him. He instructed the central bank to start printing money, which led to the high rate of inflation which is still dogging the country as the narrative opened. But much worse, he launched fierce attacks on the Finance Minister, calling him and those who backed the plan conspirators and traitors and saboteurs working with foreign powers to undermine the country. Press and radio echoed these cries and ambitious MPs in Parliament joined in, yelping like jackals, like a ‘pack of bench hounds, at their prey.

Odili happened to be in the public gallery of the Parliament when the Prime Minister made this speech and was appalled at the naked greed, the unleashing of public hatred, and lickspittle sycophancy he saw on display. Among the lead jackals baying for a place in the cabinet was the Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga who Odili is welcoming to his private school.

From the day a few years before when I had left Parliament depressed and aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how. We complained about our country’s lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high places – sometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn’t believe existed in the country. But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one’s teeth into. (p.39)

So a central strand of the novel is a portrait of this corrupt politician who embodies everything Achebe thinks is wrong with Nigerian politics in the first few years after independence.

• he presents himself as a great benefactor of his people, dispensing largesse at every opportunity
• despite having two wives, Nanga has a mistress (a ‘parlour wife’, p.22) he has appointed to various profitable positions within his portfolio with the result that she is festooned with expensive clothes and accessories
• he is accompanied everywhere by a journalist writing down his wit and wisdom and feeding positive stories to the press
• and by an entourage which includes ‘a huge, tough-looking’ security guard
• full of himself, Nanga has had numerous streets, avenues and so on named after him

And he’s stupid (see below). Nanga invites Odili to look him up next time he’s in the capital (of the region, Bori, not Lagos, capital of Nigeria), saying ‘we must promote clever people like you’ etc.

First Odili goes to visit his father, Hezekiah Samalu, in his home village of Urua. They have an argument because his father is about to marry his fifth wife (Odili’s mother died in childbirth).

With Nanga in the capital

Then Odili takes Nanga up on his invitation, pays a social call on him in Bori and finds himself invited to stay in the minister’s huge mansion, being taken the houses of his fellow cabinet ministers,

What comes across loud and clear is that within a few years of independence all the elements are in place for Nigeria’s decline and fall. Universal corruption. Politics seen as not an opportunity to serve the country but to garner position, power and wealth for yourself, your family and clan. Over indulgence in the trappings of power i.e. big cars, huge houses, every mod con, bodyguards, multiple wives. Extreme rhetoric whereby ministers or authority figures constantly scream about murder, poisoning, conspiracies and so on, and are correspondingly hysterical in their threats of punishment, torture, death and so on. The assumption right from the start that the press is not there to be a free and critical part of the system of checks and balances but a medium of propaganda to be whipped into line.

Achebe is well aware of all this, it’s the issue at the core of the book:

A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation – as I saw it then lying on that bed – was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say ‘To hell with it’. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best – had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase – the extension of our house – was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house. (p.37)

We see plenty of examples of Nanga creaming off backhanders and bribes which are called ‘dash’. Odili’s own father is more in turn with general opinion than his priggish son:

My father’s attitude to my political activity intrigued me a lot. He was, as I think I have already indicated, the local chairman of P.O.P. in our village, Urua, and so I expected that his house would not contain both of us. But I was quite wrong. He took the view (without expressing it in so many words) that the mainspring of political action was personal gain, a view which, I might say, was much more in line with the general feeling in the country than the high-minded thinking of fellows like Max and I. (p.114)

According to the publisher’s summary on the cover the book is intended to be a comedy (‘a very funny satire’ opines Angus Wilson) but: 1) nothing in any of it made me laugh except for one sentence at the very end (see below), and 2) instead it felt like a grim anticipation of the 60 years since independence during which Nigeria has become one of the most violent, unequal and corrupt places on earth (ranked 150th out of 180 countries for corruption by Transparency International).

Plot summary

Odili is a schoolteacher at a country grammar school. Cabinet minister the Honourable N.A. Nanga comes to address the school. Odili reminds him that he was his teacher back in 1948 and tells him he want to university, then did a PGCE in Britain, before returning to become a teacher. Nanga invites Odili to come and stay with him in his luxurious government mansion in Bori. Here Odili has sex with a white married woman guest of Nanga’s but when he then invites his own girlfriend, Elsie, to stay the night, she prefers to have sex with the chief, prompting Odili to storm out and go and stay with his friend, the lawyer Maxwell Kulamo. Maxwell inducts him into a new political party they’re setting up named the Common People’s Convention (CPC). There’s a meeting of the small steering committee which includes a trade unionist and someone from an Eastern Bloc country, though they’re all careful to emphasise that they’re not communists. Also, none of them are working class i.e. the people. Odili is surprised to learn the party’s backer is a minister in the existing government. At a stroke I guessed he’s encouraging the CPC as part of an internal powerplay. Odili goes back to his town, and pays two visits, one to Chief Nanga’s ‘bush wife’ who is tired and bitter that he’s taking up with a new young parlour wife; and then the young wife-to-be of Nanga, Edna, and her protective greedy father. Odili offers to give Edna a lift on the back of his bicycle to visit her mother in hospital, taking a home-made lunch but like an idiot manages to crash it, spilling all the food in the sandy road and grazing her knee. Ouch. Odili is in a campaign to seduce and sleep with Edna, maybe taking her virginity, in revenge for Nanga bedding Elsie. It’s like a children’s game with women as the winnings.

A corruption scandal blows up and brings down the government. An election is called. Odili announces he is going to contest Nanga’s seat which consists of five villages, including his home village Urua and Nanga’s base, Anata. This is on page 100 of this 150-page book so exactly two-thirds through. He encounters resistance in Anata. The principle of his school, Mr Nwege, sacks him. Like all the characters, Odili can’t behave politely but starts insulting Nwege who is instantly enraged and runs to get his shotgun, so Odili flees (p.102). Everyone is so quick to anger, insult then violence. When Odili tries to gain admission to Edna’s hospital the gateman doesn’t tell him private cars aren’t allowed in but shouts at him ‘like a mad dog’. I don’t see how this is comic. It is symptomatic of the high levels of anger and intemperance throughout the text. They even frighten the protagonist:

I reflected on the depth of resentment and hatred from which such venom came – and for no other reason than that I owned a car, or seemed to own one! It was depressing and quite frightening. (p.104)

He then drives over to Edna’s place and when she lets him in she is petrified that her father, who’s popped out for a poo, will kill him when he returns. She is literally shaking with fear (p.104). And when the father sees Odili, he does, indeed, run to fetch his machete with the aim of hacking him to death. I don’t see how this is funny. They manage to calm him down but as Odili leaves, Edna’s father threatens to beat her. Funny?

The election campaign commences and Odili has to hire bodyguards, a main on, Boniface, a violent thug, and three assistants, plus load up on weapons which eventually included machetes and two shotguns. The youth wing of Nanga supporters carry violent placards and attack his rallies. In his essay ‘The trouble with Nigeria’ Achebe claims it’s the corrupt and badly educated leadership – he says nothing about this resort to anger and violence which characterises every level of public discourse.

Anyway, Chief Nanga drives up in a Cadillac full of bodyguards to Odili’s father’s house and very smoothly converts the father, over a new bottle of whisky describing how abominably his son behaved in abusing his hospitality etc. Then Nanga offers Odili a scholarship for further study plus £250 to pack in his campaign. He’s going to lose anyway, Do what his buddy Maxwell has already done, which is take the money and stand down.

In fact Nanga was lying and the next day max and the rest of the team (a dozen organisers) roll up to help Odili with his campaign bringing a car, a minibus and two new Land Rovers with loudspeakers fitted on the roofs. They hold a rally with Max declaiming through the speakers but the crowd is apathetic and replies with two points: 1) the politicians may be corrupt, but so is almost everybody down to the lowliest council official and storekeeper, so an attack on ‘corruption’ is actually an attack on the very ‘people’ the CPC claims to be standing for, and 2) nobody expects the CPC to be any different, everybody expects them to join the existing political parties, the P.O.P. and P.A.P. on the gravy train (p.125).

Max tells Odili he did take a bribe from his opponent in his constituency (Max and Odili are fighting campaigns in adjoining constituencies), £1,000 from Chief Koko – it’s what paid for the shiny new Land Rovers – but he won’t honour the terms of the deal, he won’t stop campaigning.

Things start to go wrong. Odili’s father is expelled from his party (just to be clear, his dad was a treasurer of the established opposition party the P.O.P.), then tax inspectors came demanding a new, much bigger payment, and could only be persuaded not to arrest him with the payment of a cash bribe (£24). How can Odili, Max and their dozen friends hope to change the embedded practices of an entire society?

Next day the village Crier announces there is only one candidate worth voting for, Chief Nanga. The message is repeated on the radio. A message comes that his father’s expulsion from his party will be reversed if he simply signs a document dissociating himself from his son’s (Odili’s) subversive activities.

A day or two later Nanga holds the inaugural rally of his campaign. Foolishly, Odili decides to attend. He tries to mingle with the crowd but one of Nanga’s creatures spots him and Nanga immediately tells the crowd to seize him. So Odili is manhandled to the front of the crowd and then taken by minders up onto the stage where Nanga reads out the long list of his bad behaviour, treachery and scheming, as the roars of anger get louder. Then Nanga playfully hands the microphone to Odili so the crowd can hear his excuses but he doesn’t get further than ‘I came to tell the people that you are a liar…’ before Nanga slaps him, then lots of other fists are pummeling then something hard feels like it is cracking his skull and he loses consciousness.

When he awakes it is to find he has a cracked skull, a broken arm, and bruises to his groin where he was heartily kicked by Nanga’s henchmen. He is confused for weeks and only slowly finds out he is under arrest for having dangerous weapons in his car (the machetes and shotguns), a car Nanga’s thugs ransacked, turned over and set on fire. In fact the charge was dropped once it was clear Odili wasn’t going to sign his nomination papers to stand as a candidate (he thought he’s already submitted them but they were intercepted by Nanga’s thugs).

Anyway the day of the election comes and goes and Odili is still in bed recovering. When he hears that his good friend Maxwell was killed in his electioneering, in the process of investigating vote rigging, he suffers a relapse. Max was run over as he was getting out of his vehicle by thugs of Chief Koko’s. For some reason Koko is nearby and Max’s girlfriend, Eunice, gets a gun out of her handbag and shoots Koko dead, before she’s arrested.

On election night the gangs assembled by these ruling MPs, Nanga and Koko, get out of control and go on the rampage, attacking markets, burning and looting, which lasts for days.

At first the Prime Minister is re-elected and selects all the cabinet who had been disgraced, including Nanga. Violence continues across the country and he assures foreign investors the country is safe and stable.

Meanwhile, in the love interest part of the story, Edna has been visiting him. Turns out she refused to marry Nanga. Turns out she loves Odili. This is very inconsistent with the scene where she shouted at him to leave her house (?) but it does provide the standard happy ending of the slight comic novel.

When he finally gets out of hospital he and his father go and see Edna’s father to begin a ‘conversation’ about marrying her. Edna’s father says no but then history takes a hand. In the only thing that made me smile in the whole book, I liked the phrasing of:

But the Army obliged us by staging a coup at that point and locking up every member of the Government. The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over. We were told Nanga was arrested trying to escape by canoe dressed like a fisherman. Thereafter we made rapid progress with Edna’s father who, no doubt, saw me then as a bird in hand… (p.147)

So there’s a military coup, the entire existing government is thrown in prison, and Odili ends up with the girl. Happy ending, of sorts.

The final thought of the book is Odili’s complete disillusion with the people of Nigeria, because the day after the coup the entire population, from the loftiest intellectuals to the lowliest latrine cleaners, like the population of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, completely and absolutely switches its allegiance from the old regime, which it now reviles, to the new one, which it fulsomely praises.

So the novel ends on a note, I thought, of real despair. In his essay The trouble with Nigeria Achebe famously wrote that it’s Nigeria’s main problem has been its appalling leaders. The implication, in fact the explicit conclusion of this book, is that this is not the case. But the real trouble with Nigeria, the last pages of this novel imply, is its people.

Note

I now proceed to say some very blunt things about the stupidity, childishness, ignorance, quickness to anger and swift resort to violence which characterises the world of the novel and, if it is in any way intended as a depiction of his native country, of Nigeria as a whole. I felt nervous doing this but have just finished reading Achebe’s 1983 essay The Trouble with Nigeria and have discovered that everything I comment on is raised and worried over in that essay. In other words, the negative qualities I discuss in the next few sections are aspects of Nigerian life which Achebe himself lamented. In other words, the novel deliberately paints Nigerian political and social life in almost as unflattering light as he could manage, almost as if he wanted to stun his country into reform.

Stupidity

It’s a tactless thing to write but what really comes across from the book is not that Nanga or any of his cabinet colleagues are especially corrupt – they are, of course, but the real take-home is that they’re just stupid, very stupid; stupid, ignorant and uneducated. All Nanga’s charisma and loud-talking makes it easy to forget the surprising fact that he is, as Odili tells us, ‘barely literate’ (p.47). And he was a teacher!

I know the novel is packed with the moral fol-de-rol which GCSE students are told to waste their time writing essays about (‘Was Odili right to do x?’, ‘What options does Edna have in a patriarchal society?’ etc) – but surely the important dynamic is established early on, in that story about the Minister of Finance, who had a PhD in public finance and a sound plan, being sacked and vilified by the Prime Minister and the lickspittle press and replaced by Nanga, who is a loudmouthed ignoramus.

It’s not me imposing this on the text – the young university-educated characters (Odili, Maxwell, Kadabie) themselves comment on the ignorance of their leaders. Here’s Odili’s friend, the lawyer Maxwell:

‘That’s all they care for,’ he said with a solemn face. ‘Women, cars, landed property. But what else can you expect when intelligent people leave politics to illiterates like Chief Nanga?’ (p.76)

And one of the villagers, an elderly man. Max addresses in a campaign rally freely admits the people’s ignorance:

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

Not everyone can go away to university. Hardly anyone gets to go and be educated in Britain. Meanwhile 99% of the population continues illiterate and soaked in its traditional beliefs, namely that the tribal chieftain’s first job is to provide for his people. Out of that venerable, traditional, tribal, people’s assumption comes the corrupt structure of most African countries’ political and economic systems.

Quick to anger

I’ve highlighted the little sequence of characters getting irrationally furious (the hospital gatekeeper, Edna’s father, gangs of Nanga’s supporters). But the protagonist, Odili, is like this, extremely quick to take violent offence. And so is his father. When Nanga visits them at their house in Urua, Odili refuses to put his newspaper down so his father, instantly super enraged, steps towards him as if to hit him (p.115). When Edna’s brother doesn’t immediately go and fetch Edna when he pays her family a visit, Odili immediately starts shouting at the poor boy (p.129). After Edna has given him a good dressing-down, the brother warns Odili that the minder set on her by Nanga will castrate him (Odili) if he finds him there in Edna’s house (p.129). Then, of course, Odili is badly beaten up on Nanga’s campaign stage. And then his friend Max is murdered by his political opponent, Chief Koko.

Can’t everyone just try to calm down and be civil to each other?

Childish

Much of the behaviour of a lot of the characters, comes over as petulant and childish. The narrator is touchy:

‘Hello, Jalio,’ I said, stretching my hand to shake his… He replied hello and took my hand but obviously he did not remember my name and didn’t seem to care particularly. I was very much hurt by this and immediately formed a poor opinion of him and his silly airs. (p.62)

A trait which forms the spine of the plot when he makes his juvenile determination to get his own back on Chief Nanga for sleeping with his girlfriend, by sleeping with his future wife (Edna).

The same tetchy quickness to feel insulted comes over in Nanga’s touchiness about what journalists write about him and his heartfelt wish to muzzle and silence them.

It explains why all the characters’ political ideas are blunt and stupid as a child’s: to acquire more money and power; muzzle the press; intimidate other political parties; throw anyone who disagrees with them in prison. In fact most of the satire is at Odili’s expense because he never has any idea how to run a country or an economy, he has no policies or ideas of any kind except to get his own back on Chief Nanga.

It’s not that it’s corrupt or wicked so much as that it’s childish, a childishly inadequate mentality for running a country.

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

And it’s this childishness, this immature petulance and resentment of any criticism, which the outside world was to hear in the angry speeches of African leaders like Patrice Lumumba, lashing out at the West for not helping him tackled Congo’s chaotic crises, the angry rants of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe or Thabo Mbeki, over the decades to come.

Over-symbolising

This is connected to something else I noticed, which is the way all the characters (the meaningful characters i.e. the men, in this patriarchal narrative) madly over-inflate even the tiniest incident into being symbolic of The State of Nigeria. When Nanga shags Odili’s ‘good-time girl’, the latter delivers a long aggressive diatribe to the startled older man, but what stood out for me is when he says ‘What a country!’ as if one man sleeping with another man’s girlfriend somehow typifies an entire nation.

But that is exactly how the narrator thinks. Everywhere he looks he sees symbols and allegories of Nigeria’s present and portents of its future. It explains his conviction in the novel’s last 30 pages or so that the gimcrack little ‘party’ he and his schoolchum have cobbled together is somehow ‘our society’s only hope of salvation’ (p.128). Similarly, when Edna tells him to buzz off and leave him alone, Odili is immature enough to make it hugely symbolical:

What I felt was sadness—a sadness deep and cool like a well, into which my hopes had fallen; my twin hopes of a beautiful life with Edna and of a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country. (p.130)

I think it was this incorporation of a supposedly ‘political’ element in the novel which led critics to praise it and give it its status. Yet just having your character constantly worrying that every little event somehow threatens the very future of his country, nay the whole of Africa!! doesn’t really amount to political analysis. The opposite. It makes him sound like any saloon bar bore droning on about the country going to the dogs.

Sex

Odili is highly sexed and lets us know it. He describes his sexual exploits at university. He tells us he slept with his current girlfriend, Elsie, a nurse, within an hour of meeting her. There’s a dinner for some foreign guests of Nanga’s and he ends up sleeping with the white American, Jean. This doesn’t stop him going to see Elsie the next day and trying to sleep with her. He has a role model in his father who has four wives and is about to wed a fifth, thus being able to have sex with any of five women.

And it spills over into Odili’s initially tolerant attitude to Nanga, who has two wives, a mistress, and is expected to have sex with any of his (especially foreign) guests who are up for it – ‘a man who had so many women ready to make themselves available’ (p.60), who has sex with an educated woman lawyer paying her £25 a pop (p.127).

While he stayed in his household, Odili and Nanga ‘swapped many tales of conquest’ (p.59) and the text shares some humorous anecdotes about these sexual ‘conquests’ with us. When Nanga asks about Elsie Odili dismisses her as a ‘good-time girl’ (p.59) i.e. not marriage material. In a taxi with Elsi, Odili throbs with anticipation, Elsie dressed up for a party ‘looks ripe and ready’ (p.68), sex indeed throbs through many of the pages.

This may well be an accurate depiction of a modern (1964) Nigerian young man but it felt like a shame. One of the many appeals of the African trilogy was its tremendous chasteness about sex which was almost never mentioned. Both casual sex and adultery barely seem to have existed in the tribal culture Achebe describes in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and this is one of the aspects which gives them such a chaste, monumental, timeless aspect, like Homer.

Not so in this novel which throbs with sweaty male sexuality and often feels as seedy and sordid as the nastier Kingsley Amis novels. We learn about ‘ the unsettling effect which imminent fulfilment always has on’ Odili and that his fantasies about Elsie are so intense that one night he had a wet dream so messy he had to change his pyjamas. When Elsie decides to sleep with the rich cabinet minister instead of Odili, the latter goes on a long soulful walk round Bori and calls her a ‘common harlot’ (p.71), all of which feels insufferably childish.

The book cover tells us that Anthony Burgess included A Man of The People in his personal selection of the 99 best novels in English since 1939. To be unfair, maybe this was partly because Achebe had managed to reproduce the casual sexism and political simple-mindedness of a British writer like Kingsley Amis in an African setting.

Pidgin

A pidgin or pidgin language:

is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common. Typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages…A pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language.

All the African characters in A Man of The People slip into pidgin very easily and have extensive conversations in it:

‘I think I tell you say Chief Nanga de go open book exhibition for six today,’ I said.
‘Book exhibition?’ asked Elsie. ‘How they de make that one again?’
‘My sister, make you de ask them for me-o. I be think say na me one never hear that kind thing before. But they say me na Minister of Culture and as such I suppose to be there. I no fit say no. Wetin be Minister? No be public football? So instead for me to sidon rest for house like other people I de go knack grammar for this hot afternoon. You done see this kind trouble before?’ (p.60)

According to the narrator pidgin has an inbuilt ‘levity’ or lack of seriousness so that merely switching to it lightens the mood or indicates jokiness. Similarly, switching out of it implies a refusal to be jokey or a switch to more serious subject matter (p.87).

I understood occasional words and phrases (this exchange starts out reasonably comprehensible) but almost all of it was impenetrable to me and so I ended up skipping all the dialogue in pidgin.

Beyond the novel

In case you think my judgements on the worldview and political and cultural situation depicted by the novel are harsh, here are some excerpts from Martin Meredith’s book The State of Africa (2011), from his chapter describing the build-up to the Nigerian military coup which took place in 1966, the year A Man of The People was published:

By nature, Nigerian politics tended to be mercenary and violent. Political debate was routinely conducted in acrimonious and abusive language; and ethnic loyalties were constantly exploited. The tactics employed were often those of the rough house variety… (p.194)

Of the 1965 general election in the Western region of Nigeria, he writes:

The campaign was fought on all sides with brutal tenacity; bribes, threats, assault, arson, hired thugs and even murder became the daily routine. Akintola’s new party – the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) – used its position in government ruthlessly to rig the election at every stage – blocking the nomination of opposition candidates, kidnapping election officials, destroying ballot papers and falsifying results… (p.198)

It was this environment of political chaos and violence which triggered the military coup launched in January 1966. Meredith describes it with a blunt candour which is worth reproducing for its shocking effect:

The hopes that Nigeria would serve as a stronghold of democracy in Africa came to an abrupt halt on 15 January 1966. In a series of coordinated actions, a group of young army officers wiped out the country’s top political leaders. In Lagos they seized the federal prime minister, Sir Adubakar Tafawa Balewa, took him outside the city and executed him by the side of the road, dumping his body in a ditch; in Kaduna, after a gun battle, they shot dead the premier of the Northern Region, the Sardauna of Sokoto. In Ibadan they killed the premier of the Western Region, Chief Ladoke Akintola. The wealthy federal finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, a notoriously corrupt politician, was dragged screaming from his house, flung into a car ‘like an old army sack’, and driven away to be murdered… (p.193)

The army leaders claimed to be not just staging a coup but sweeping away the entire old order, managed by corrupt elders. Two points:

1. Odili and Max talk about sweeping away the old regime, as if a dozen or twenty utopians with a few loudspeakers could ever do such a thing, but a) that was obviously always hopelessly naive and b) there are hints in the text that even if the CPC had won the election (impossible) they would have been sucked into the same patterns of corruption as the old guard. So only an actual revolution which decimated the old ruling class could have hoped to effect change.

2. But it didn’t effect change. Instead the country sank into further chaos triggered by the fact that most of the young military leaders were Igbo, which triggered resentment and then anti-Igbo violence in the north then west of the country, leading to huge flight of the Igbo minorities in both places back to their homeland in the south-east, and then the secession by the Igbo authorities, the declaration that they constituted a new independent country, Biafra. Which led to the Biafran War or The Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970) in which up to 2 million Igbo civilians died from famine.

This catastrophic background makes the naive political dreaming and petty personal feuds of A Man of the People‘s protagonist, Odili, look even more childish and superficial. In the real world this half decade of Nigeria’s history showed that it had basically three options: corrupt but essentially peaceful civilian rule; military coup and rule by the army; ruinous civil war. Of the three the first one, the one Idoli and his friends so fervently want to overthrow, is quite clearly the least bad.

In a sentence

Critics praise A Man of The People as a ‘political’ novel or for its ‘political’ content but, in my opinion, its so-called ‘political’ element is shallow, childish and completely inadequate to the catastrophic political and historical moment it purports to describe.

Credit

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe was published in 1966 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1988 Heinemann African Writers series paperback edition.

Related links

• A Man of The People online
• Recent article about A Man of The People and the state of Nigeria
• Bookrags summary of A Man of The People

Chinua Achebe reviews

• Things Fall Apart (1958)
• No Longer at Ease (1960)
• Arrow of God (1964)
• Arrow of God: Sayings of Wisdom
• A Man of the People (1966)
• The Trouble with Nigeria (1983)
• Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

Africa reviews

• Africa reviews