‘Your Excellency is not only our leader but also our Teacher. We are always ready to learn…Your Excellency is absolutely right. I never thought of that. It is surprising how Your Excellency thinks about everything.’
(The head of the secret police, Professor Okong, grovelling to the military dictator in Anthills of the Savannah, page 18)

‘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, what is up and what is down.’
(Irreverent journalist Ikem Osodi, page 45)

‘This is negritude country, not Devonshire.’
(John Kent, also known as the Mad Medico, page 57)

‘This country na so so thief-man full am.’
(Drunk police sergeant at a roadblock lamenting the theft of his radio, page 213)

Background

There was a gap of 21 years between Chinua Achebe’s fourth and fifth novels. A lot happened in his life and in Nigeria, which I’ve summarised in my review of his 1983 pamphlet, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’.

Achebe wrote five novels. Two are emphatically set in the past, in the colonial period of the 1890s (Things Fall Apart) and the 1920s (Arrow of God). Three of them have contemporary settings: No Longer At Ease (late 1950s), A Man of the People (mid-1960s), and this one, Anthills of the Savannah (late 1970s). Read in sequence, they neatly represent a story of decline and fall of the nation, at the same time as the characters go up the political pecking order.

No Longer At Ease takes the time and trouble to portray one man, Obi Okwonkwo, a university graduate who has studied in Britain, who struggles to maintain his high moral ideals in the face of a series of personal crises and difficulties, culminating in him doing what he spent most of the novel swearing he would never resort to, which is to start taking bribes to influence his decisions as a civil servant in the Education Department. It is a private tragedy limited to just one fairly lowly civil servant, which Achebe makes symbolic of the widespread corruption afflicting Nigeria even before Independence.

A Man of the People ups the stakes by having its protagonist, Odilo, take an active part in politics, standing as a candidate in a general election against his far more canny opponent, a tribal chief and sitting cabinet minister. So A Man of the People a) steps up a rung to examine politics at a regional level but b) in terms of decline and fall, is a far more wide-ranging depiction of corruption, bribery and bad leadership than No Longer.

And Anthills of the Savannah completes the progress: in terms of social rank, it is set at the highest level, opening with ministers attending a meeting chaired by the terrifying military dictator who now runs their country. In terms of what I’ve called decline and fall, it shows how the purely personal scruples of Obi, and then the party political idealism of Odili, both from the idealistic 1960s, have been completely swept away in the tsunami of a military coup.

In the late 1950s Achebe’s characters are fretting about corruption; in the mid-60s they are feebly trying to set up a new political party; by the late 1970s they exist in a state of continual fear about how to survive an arbitrary and violent military regime.

That’s what I mean by saying that Achebe’s three contemporary novels chart the decline and fall of Nigerian political life, from high-flown optimism at the time of independence (the early 1960s) to cynicism and terror 20 years later.

The detail with which Achebe wanted to portray a military dictator and the impact of military rule on a nation presumably also explains why Anthills is the first of his novels not to be set explicitly in Nigeria, but in the fictional Africa country of ‘Kangan’. Presumably it was just too dangerous to write something which would be interpreted as a direct attack on very powerful people still pulling the strings in 1980s Nigeria.

(Nigeria was ruled by the military from 1966 to 1979, in which year the army allowed free elections and the return to civilian rule. Achebe worked on Anthills throughout the 1970s so, although the army relinquished power in 1979, the novel very much captures the atmosphere and fear of living under military rule. In the event, the short-lived Nigerian Second Republic came to an end when another military coup overthrew it in 1983, ironically in the same year Achebe had published ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ complaining about the country’s terrible leaders. Renewed military rule was to last another 16 years, until 1998.)

• Military coups in Nigeria

Setup

Anthills is set in the fictional African nation of Kangan (capital city: Bassa). The military dictator is a successful general named Sam. He didn’t carry out the military coup himself but the coup leaders asked him to become President and he agreed.

Trained at Sandhurst and a lifelong soldier Sam knew nothing about how to run a country so he turned to his civilian friends. Chief among these was Christopher Oriko, an academic. He and Sam had been schoolboys together at the Lord Lugard College 20 years earlier (pages 65, 66). Oriko helped Sam recruit various eminent figures to become his cabinet and was made Commissioner of Information.

The novel opens (Chapter 1) with a meeting of this cabinet which makes it perfectly clear that all these grown men are now absolutely terrified of the general. He has shed his initial nerves, is now in complete control of the situation, and has grown into a mercurial and quick-to-anger tyrant on the model of Idi Amin. (The comparison with Amin is explicitly made by Captain Abdu Medani in the final chapter, who says that rumour had it that Amin used to personally strangle then behead rivals for any woman who took his fancy, storing their heads in a fridge, p.221.)

What’s making him cross today is that a delegation from the troublesome province of Abazon has arrived in the city and wants to meet him to plead for investment in water holes and wells for their drought-stricken region. The President wants to fob them off by sending a photographer and journalist to give their visit lots of publicity but not actually have to meet them, make excuses about him having to meet some other VIP or something.

Technique

Such is the power of his subject matter that it’s easy to overlook Achebe’s interest in technique. Take his deployment of a consciously simplified monumental style in the two tribal novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Or the way No Longer At Ease starts at the end, with the protagonist in court facing corruption charges, then flashes back in time to describe the sequence of events which led him there.

Well, Anthills represents a notable leap forward in narrative technique. Two things are immediately noticeable, in structure and style.

In terms of structure, many of the characters have periodic chapters named after themselves, which give their points of view in the first person. These are mixed with other chapters told in the third person. This is surprisingly effective.

In terms of style, one big thing. Some of the text is in the conventional past tense, but there are also passages told in the present. The interesting thing is this doesn’t bother the reader, you barely notice the switch from past to present tense in the verbs even when it happens in sequential sentences.

She shot up from my face where she was lying and gave my face a quick scrutiny. ‘I hope you are not being sarcastic,’ she said. I affect great solemnity, pull her back and kiss her mildly. (p.67)

Summary

In a sense Anthills of the Savannah is an African version of the terror experienced by the courtiers of any tyrant. It reminded me of descriptions I’ve read of Stalin’s court. My mind also leaps to the scenes featuring Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII in the movie ‘A Man For All Seasons’, by turns hugely jovial and terrifyingly angry. And Henry isn’t an inapt comparison because Achebe has his character Chris remark that most African leaders are like ‘late-flowering medieval monarchs’ (p.74).

The book describes in detail the changing relationships between:

• Chris Oriko, who helped General Sam to the presidency and is now the government’s Commissioner for Information
• his girlfriend, Beatrice Okoh, also known as BB, a Senior Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Finance (p.75)
• his old schoolfriend Ikem Osodi, now editor of the National Gazette, a newspaper fiercely critical of the regime
• and his girlfriend, Elewa

The three men have known each other since school and their lives have been intimately connected.

‘We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us without implicating the others.’ (p.66)

Oriko and Osodi have settled into a long-term antagonism because, as the former explains, he’s tired of waking up every Thursday knowing he’s going to have to defend Osodi’s latest inflammatory editorial to His Excellency (HE).

It was only in the last quarter or so of the book that I realised how privileged Achebe intends us to see his characters as – living in a privileged government compound, having servants, cars and drivers, operating at the highest levels of state and politics. This didn’t come over at first because the characters seem so ordinary and even banal. It’s only when they step outside their privilege bubble into the ‘real world’ that the characters, and the reader, begins to feel the real poverty which the huge majority of the population live in…

Chapter 3

Ikem gets into a ludicrous race/rivalry with a taxi driver to get ahead in spaces in the colossal traffic jam on the route to the Presidential Palace, both losing their tempers in the temper-fraying permanent bad traffic which characterises Bassa.

Chapter 4 (Ikem)

Ikem remembers a year earlier attending a public execution on a beach. The crowd roared its approval and he was disgusted. Welcome to the Colosseum.

(Compare and contrast the brilliantly thorough exhibition about public executions at the Museum of London Docklands, which explained how executions were the occasions of public holidays, festivals, celebrations, eating and drinking and picking pockets in London from the 16th to 19th centuries.)

Ikem is appalled at watching four criminals being led out of the police van, tied to stakes on a beach with bull’s eyes attached to their chests, and then killed by firing squad, while the crowd roared. This episode seems to demonstrate a) the crudeness of civil life in the newly independent state and b) Ikem’s huge distance from the mass of the people which, like any Third World intellectual, he claims to represent or speak for.

Chapter 5 (Chris)

White man John Kent, who goes by the nickname Mad Medico, hosts a drinks party for Chris, Ikem, their girlfriends and an arrival from London, Dick, who set up a new literary magazine, Reject, nearly four years ago (p.58). They reminisce about how approachable and innocent Sam was back in the old days. The chapter starts with anecdotes about how Mad Medico acquired his nickname and ends with stories about sex, see below.

Chapter 6 (Beatrice)

His Excellency phones Beatrice and invites her to a small dinner party. We get a sense of the closeness of the trio when Beatrice tells us that for the first year of HE’s rule, she and Chris went regularly to the palace, till HE found his style and became more aloof. I think Achebe indicates the voice of Beatrice by making her sentences long and clumsy, and having her mangle some phrases i.e. not as fluent as Chris or Ikem.

It’s a fairly formal dinner of 15 or so people, including senior officials, the Army Chief of Staff, that kind of level. There’s a woman American journalist who Beatrice, characteristically snaps at. A long difficult dinner is followed by dancing in the drawing room overlooking the lake. The President boomingly introduces the subject of African polygamy to roars of laughter from his sycophants. For reasons I didn’t fully understand Beatrice undertakes to seduce him and shimmies so close against him that she feels his erection growing (see Sex, below). But then for reasons I didn’t understand tells him a story about being jilted by a lover when she was at a student dance in London, something which infuriates the President who storms off. Next thing Beatrice knows she’s being escorted to the car to take her home. Was it because she didn’t simply go to bed with him but insisted on telling some moralising anecdote?

Chapter 7 (Beatrice)

Yes, the prose style of Beatrice’s sections is different from the others, deliberately long winded and confusing. In this chapter she seems to be explaining that she is bringing together all the scattered parts of the narrative to tell ‘their’ story. This begins, however, with the story of her life, how she was raised on an Anglican Mission and how if any of the children misbehaved, their father thrashed them with a cane and sent them to bed (p.85). In fact her father whipped insubordinate children throughout the region, and whipped her mother, too. Once she tried to console her mother, who instead pushed her away so violently she hit her head on a stone mortar. She was 7 or 8 at the time. Man hands on violence to man.

Then she describes her very close blood-brother friendship with Ikem who she met as students in London, how she’s always been enchanted by his grand thoughts and fluency but they never quite became lovers.

Chapter 8: Daughters

This chapter continues the theme of interpolated stories, in this case Igbo legends, starting with the story of Idemili, daughter of God.

The text becomes confusing. It jumps to Beatrice being marched in disgrace from HE’s soirée, as described at the end of chapter 6. Next morning she wakes to bird song and remembers stories from her girlhood although, as the omniscient narrator points out, she was brought up in a British Anglican compound and so was deprived of her cultural legacy (the legacy Achebe devoted his lifetime to promoting).

Chris calls her the next morning and motors over, they have an argument, she bursts into tears, he cuddles her, they kiss, then go to the bedroom tear off each other’s clothes and Achebe wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 1987 (p.114).

Beatrice tells Chris everybody was criticising Ikem at HE’s party and so he (Chris) must patch up his arguments with Ikem.

Chapter 9: Views of Struggle

Ikem drives to the seedy Hotel Harmoney which is where the delegation from Abazon is staying. He is welcomed and feted at which point I realised that Ikem is himself from the province in question, which becomes even clearer when some of the speakers mildly criticise him for not attending the monthly meetings of the Abazon community in Bassa (the capital city). This is identical to the structure of No Longer at Ease whose protagonist, Obi Okwonkwo, is an Igbo and is severely criticised by the monthly meeting of Igbos living in the capital (Lagos).

At which an illiterate elder from among the Abazon delegation stands up and delivers an extended speech which concludes that folk stories are what save us (p.124). He goes on to describe what the referendum held two years earlier to decide whether Sam should be made president for life looked like to village illiterates like himself i.e. highly suspect. They trusted the opinion of Ikem and when he didn’t write in favour of it, they voted No. Then the Big Chief’s people were in touch and said that as punishment for voting no all investment in water infrastructure in their region would be cancelled.

Now the white-haired old man says they have travelled all the way to Bassa to put their case to the Big Chief but he claimed to be meeting some other Big Chief so he couldn’t meet them. He tells the folk story of the tortoise and the leopard, whose point is that the tortoise was determined not to give up without a fight. The elder says they may lose but at least future generations will know at least they put up a fight.

In the hotel parking lot Ikem is issued with a totally spurious parking ticket by a typically arrogant mocking threatening policeman. Next day he calls the Chief of Police and uses his reputation, goes to visit the police HQ. The Chief is embarrassed such an important man was hassled by his traffic cops, calls in everybody on duty that night and gives them a bollocking before identifying the culprit who is ordered to hand over Ikem’s papers, which he had confiscated.

Clout. Pull. Intimidation. The thing is it works both ways: in the cop who threw his weight around, and then in the Chief’s embarrassment at having bothered a VIP. Somehow everything about this trivial incident highlights the lack of principle, the lack of objective service, the personalised nature of law enforcement, which is at one with its universal corruption.

Chapter 10: Impetuous Son

A knock at the door of Ikem’s apartment and it’s two taxi drivers, the one he got into the silly race for spaces in the traffic jam in chapter 2, and the head of his union of taxi drivers. They’ve come to thank Ikemi for standing up for them and the working classes in his editorials. Most of this chapter consists of dialogue in pidgin which I didn’t understand a word of.

Chapter 11

That night Ikem has sex with Elewa then drives her home. He returns home, brews a coffee and reflects on the absurdity of so-called ‘public affairs’:

nothing but the closed transactions of soldiers-turned-politicians, with their cohorts in business and the bureaucracy (p.141)

Characteristically, for Achebe, the only actual political ‘policy’ Ikem is associated with is writing editorials against capital punishment. Nothing about industrial, economic or fiscal policy. Instead a load of poetic guff about how the leaders need to:

re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being. (p.141)

Not particularly practical. Meanwhile Sam calls Chris to his office and announces he is going to have Ikem arrested for working cahoots with treasonous elements from Abazon, for attending a secret meeting with them in the north of the capital (i.e. the meeting with the Bassa Abazon Association we saw being dominated by a worthy old man). He goes on, in classic security state style, to claim Ikem also had a role in conspiring to deliver a No vote in Abazon during the presidential referendum. Sam orders Chris to sack Ikem as editor of the Gazette. Chris refuses and tenders his resignation. Sam laughs in his face and says he better watch out, or he’ll be next (p.144). Chris refuses to write the letter but Sam says it will get written anyway, and also that the head of the security service will be investigating his (Chris’s) role in the referendum.

So it’s Ikem’s visit to the Hotel Harmoney to see the Abazon delegation (as Sam himself requested back in chapter 1) which looks like it’s going to be the mainspring of the tragedy.

The letter of his dismissal is couriered to Ikem that afternoon. Ikem drives over to Chris’s place, finding Beatrice there. It’s only now that Chris tells everyone how deeply upset Sam was when he lost the president-for-life referendum, and was particularly hurt that his two closest friends let him down, that Chris as Commissioner for Information, didn’t do more, and Ikem chose to take annual leave and so didn’t write an editorial supporting it.

Elewa turns up and they all watch the 8 o’clock news. Ikema smiles through the item about his sacking but leaps from his chair when the next item announces that the six men in the delegation from Abazon, including the kindly old tribal elder, have been arrested on charges of conspiracy.

Chapter 12

Ikem delivers a speech at the university on the folk story of the tortoise and the leopard, as told him by the white-haired Abazon elder in chapter 9. Tough audience of students who all appear to take Marxism with literal seriousness, one student calling for Kangan to be placed under the dictatorship of the proletariat. He then mocks the leaders of the ‘working classes’ i.e. the trade union leaders who are more concerned about preserving their privileges and being treated like VIPs than changing the system they inherited. Ikem refuses to give easy answers. Obviously acting as Achebe’s spokesman in the text, he says everybody asks the writer for easy answers but the writer’s job is to ask questions.

‘No, I cannot give you the answers you are clamouring for. Go home and think! I cannot decree your pet, textbook revolution. I want instead to excite general enlightenment by forcing all the people to examine the condition of their lives because, as the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth living. As a writer I aspire only to widen the scope of that self-examination.’ (p.158)

Everyone in the country must, in other words, become a reflective intellectual like himself. And when this doesn’t happen, as it can’t happen, Ikem will, like Achebe, write a long essay explaining why his country has let him down.

Ikem’s lecture concludes with an attack on his student audience for replicating in miniature all the vices of the nation at large, tribalism, corruption and the preservation of mediocrity and bad management. All covered by parroting right-on revolutionary phrases from Marxist professors who have absolutely no intention of overthrowing or even reforming the system they do so well out of.

During the jokey question and answer session which follows his lecture, someone asks whether he’s heard the proposals by the president to have his face put on the currency. Ikem jokes that any head of state who puts his head on a coin is tempting his people to take it off, the head he means. Much laughter. It was probably this light-hearted joke which condemned him to death (see below).

Chapter 13

Next day’s newspapers lead in the biggest type that Ikem has been promoting seditious beliefs including the suggestion that our Beloved President be beheaded! The secret police have been monitoring the Mad Medico. He is arrested, held and interrogated for four days, then deported. Chris and BB drive round to Ikem’s flat (at 202 Kingsway Road) to find his flat has been ransacked and he (Ikem) is not there. The neighbours say they saw two army jeeps outside in the middle of the night.

Chris spends the day on the phone ringing round the other high officials (he is a cabinet member, after all) like the Attorney General, the head of the State Research Council, the President himself, but they are all either unavailable or claim to have no knowledge.

Then the 6 o’clock news leads with a long story which accuses Ikem of being at the heart of a conspiracy to overthrow the state, how he was arrested by security forces but chose to fight and in the struggle a gun went off which killed him (p.169).

Chris packs and leaves for a ‘safe house’ immediately. He reaches out to foreign journalists to disseminate the true story of Ikem’s behaviour and murder, and claims on the BBC that Ikem was murdered by the Kangan security forces. He has a clandestine meeting with the leaders of students who photocopy Chris’s leaflet on the case and widely distribute it. In retaliation the security forces descend on the university campus, rampaging through it with batons (not actually shooting anyone) raping some female students. Then the campus is closed down.

The British High Commissioner complains but is handed a letter written by that poet, Dick, from chapter 5, who had written to the Mad Medico about the little drinks party at his flat at which he had heard a member of the cabinet (Chris) speak so openly and critically of the president. In other words, the security services have done a very good job of marshalling and then twisting all available evidence to make it seem like Ikem and Chris really were part of a conspiracy against the President and the State.

That night security forces come knocking on the door of Beatrice’s flat, where the terrified Ewela had come to seek sanctuary. Both women dress and watch the soldiers as they search everywhere, but leave without arresting either woman.

Chapter 14

Someone in the security forces phones Beatrice and tells her he knows where Chris is but doesn’t want to arrest him, tell him to move safe houses. Is it a trick to catch him? Beatrice phones and tells him to move. She goes to work as normal, then shopping to give an air of normality. The unknown mole in the security services calls again to say the city isn’t safe; Chris has to move out. The TV news announces that anyone found guilty of helping Chris, now an enemy of the people, will be guilty of treason which is punishable by death.

A couple of pages devoted to describing how callous and harsh Beatrice had been on her servant, Agatha, for years, ridiculing her membership of a revivalist Christian congregation and so on. Now, for the first time, Beatrice begins to feel compassion for her.

Chapter 15

Describes how Chris was handled through a succession of safe spaces. But the announcement of the death penalty for people helping him makes his current patron think someone might grass him up, so he better move out the city. First step is to move from the Government reservation to a safe house in the northern slums.

He’s collected in a taxi which is part of the network, with three minders. They get through three roadblocks but are stopped at a big one with many cop cars, lights flashing. On impulse Chris gets out of the car but this draws attention to him and his companion and a fierce soldier approaches. Tense scene where his companion does most of the talking, assuring him Chris works in a garage, and he has the brainwave of taking a kolanut out of his pocket and offering the soldier some. That’s all it takes. The soldier’s face lights up and he waves them through.

Chapter 16

Five days later Chris starts the move north. For those days he stays in the house of the very poor Braimoh, a taxi driver with five children. Beatrice elects to spend the night with him on the noisy bed Braimoh and his wife give up for their distinguished guests.

It was only at the point I realised just how privileged and elite a lifestyle Chris in particular had enjoyed, with a big house in the Government compound. a) the height of his privilege and so now b) the depth to which he has fallen, cadging a kip on the bed of a dirt-poor, taxi driver.

And realised that his journey represents an odyssey out among the common people who he and Ikem and their ilk spend so much time pontificating about but of whose lives they really know next to nothing. It is by way of being an education and a sort of penance. He has become ‘a wide-eyed newcomer to the ways of Kangan’ (p.201) undergoing a ‘transformation’ of the man he was (p.204).

Chapter 17

The bus journey on the Great North Road. The colourful design and slogans painted on long distance buses. The poverty of the passengers. The change from tropical rain country to dusty savannah as you head north. There’s been drought for two years. All water has to be bussed in (p.208).

Chris had been joined on the run by a student leader who is also wanted by the authorities, Emmanuel. He is still being accompanied/guarded by the faithful taxi driver, Braimoh. So there are three of them watching the landscape change, become more arid. Chris notices the anthills dotted around the savannah and thinks of Ikem’s prose poem hymn to the sun (the one quoted in full in chapter 3).

The bus is regularly stopped at checkpoints whose sole purpose is to extort money from the driver. Chris begins to understand the universal extent of the low-level extortion which dominates all Nigerians’ lives.

Then they come to a ‘checkpoint’ which is packed with a crowd all drinking beer and talking loudly, some dancing. When the bus stops, instead of just the driver going to pay the routine bribe, all the passengers get out and hear the astonishing news that there’s been a coup. The sergeant in charge of the checkpoint heard it on the radio half an hour ago just as a lorryload of beer pulled up, so they stopped the lorry and impounded its contents and distributed it to the growing crown and triggered an impromptu street party. Chris and Emmanuel try to get sense out of the crowd or the drunk policemen, but they just tell them to stop asking questions and drink like everyone else.

There’s a scream and Chris sees the drunk police sergeant dragging a young woman towards a nearby group of mud huts, with the obvious intention of raping her. Some women are asking him to stop, lots of the men are cheering. Chris strides right over and confronts the sergeant, tells him to stop, tells him he will report him to the Inspector-General of Police. The sergeant takes his gun from his holster, cocks it and shoots Chris point blank in the chest. Emmanuel runs over and kneels by Chris as he lays on his back and dies.

The cop drops his gun and runs off chased by Braimoh who tackles him on the edge of the scrub and they roll around struggling a bit but the cop is bigger, stronger and more desperate than Braimoh, staggering to his feet and running off leaving the latter lying in the dust.

Chapter 18

Beatrice arranges a naming ceremony for Elewa’s 28-day-old baby. Seeing as we were told Elewa was just barely pregnant in chapter 14 as Chris’s flight began, I take it this must be 7 or 8 months later.

In a brief recap we learn that after hearing about Chris’s death Beatrice collapsed, withdrew into herself etc. But then Elewa nearly had a miscarriage which forced Beatrice to emerge from her grief and assume responsibility for the young, poor, uneducated woman. So, it turns out, Beatrice has gone on a journey of self discovery comparable to Chris’s.

A group of friends or comrades regularly come to her flat, worried about her, namely:

• Braimoh the taxi driver (so he wasn’t hurt in the fight with the drunk sergeant, as I’d feared)
• Emmanuel the rebel student leader who accompanied Chris on his journey
• Captain Abdul Medani, who had led the search of her fat and, she realises, was the voice of the mystery calls warning Chris to move on
• Adamma, the pretty girl Emmanuel spent the later stages of the ill-fated bus journey trying to chat up, joking about his failure to do so with Chris

As far as I can tell the coup was an intra-military affair i.e. one bit of the army overthrew the President and the new leader is Major-General Ahmed Lango (p.218).

We learn that in the coup Sam was kidnapped from the Presidential Palace, tortured, shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave in the bush. The obvious point is that all three of the men who had been friends since their schooldays and whose fates were entwined with the modern history of Kangan (or so Achebe tries to persuade us) are now dead, run over by the juggernaut of history. And that kind of flaccid rhetoric about ‘history’ is precisely how Beatrice/Achebe see it. Were, she wonders, Ikem and Chris just victims of random accidents, or:

Were they not in fact trailed travellers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed by an alienated history? If so, how many more doomed voyagers were already in transit or just setting out, faces fresh with illusions of duty-free travel and happy landings ahead of them? (p.220)

This is OK as ‘literary’ writing, I suppose, but pointless waste of breath as political or sociological or historical analysis. I doubt it, because Achebe clearly believes in his characters and much of their debate, especially the long speech Ikem gives at the university defending the importance of storytellers – but you could argue that the entire novel is a satire on the uselessness of writers and writing, vapouring away in their ivory towers while history or events continue relentlessly on, completely ignoring all their fierce inconsequential debates.

The naming ceremony is held in Beatrice’s flat amid much tears over the dead father (Ikem) whose spirit, however is floating over them and smiling, apparently. Many tears which the reader is, I think, meant to join in.

Agatha chants one of her Christian songs and starts dancing. A Muslim woman who we’ve never heard of before, more or less invented for this scene I think, starts dancing along. So Beatrice, a self-declared pagan, thinks what the hell and starts dancing, too. I think we’re meant to see it as significant that this ecumenical gesture, this healing of communities, takes place among women, the healing sex according to much feminist thought (p.224).

Elewa’s mother and uncle turn up. The latter is a keen guzzler of booze but then unexpectedly becomes quite authoritative, and leads a traditional prayer (described as ‘the kolanut ritual’) for the long life, health and happiness of the newborn child (a girl) and indeed for everybody there (p.228).

(The baby is named Amaechina which means May-the-path-never-close, or Ama for short, p.222.)

On the book’s last pages we learn a secret. As he lay dying Chris’s last words to a tearful Emmanuel were ‘The last grin’, or at least that’s what he thought. When Emmanuel tells the christening party this, Beatrice rushes off in tears. When she returns, it’s to explain that this was a coded message or in-joke for her benefit. In one of their many arguments, Chris and Ikem had referred to themselves and Sam as three green bottles hanging on the wall (as in the song ten green bottles).

Somehow Beatrice manages to slightly distort this message into the Author’s Message for the book as a whole, which is about the isolation of its intellectual protagonists from the mass of the people.

‘The bottles are up there on the wall hanging by a hair’s breadth, yet looking down pompously on the world. Chris was sending us a message to beware. This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented…’ (p.232)

The very last paragraphs describe Beatrice achieving a kind of serene happiness, knowing that Chris died a good death, achieved wisdom at his death, like a holy man in a parable. ‘Beautiful,’ whispers Beatrice with tears running down her face, ‘Beautiful.’

Servants

A theme of the novel is how the intelligentsia as represented by Chris and Ikem, are out of touch with, disconnected from, remote from, the ‘ordinary people’, despite Ikem in particular going on about how his class needs to reconnect with ‘the poor and dispossessed of this country’.

Meanwhile, it seems to be taken for granted that all of Achebe’s characters have servants. I was staggered that even the poor young civil servant in No Longer At Ease had a houseboy, and the characters in this novel all seem to have a ‘boy’, housekeeper or cook. For example, Ikem’s cook Sylvanus, who is itching to demonstrate his culinary prowess to Beatrice when Ikem brings her home (chapter 5), or Beatrice’s maid, Agatha. Servants? A cook? A maid?

The African intellectuals go on and on about how the wicked white imperialist used to boss around and humiliate their fathers and grandfathers…and then boss around and humiliate their own (black) servants. The narrator tells us that Beatrice regularly reduces her maid Agatha to tears, making her cry for hours (p.185). Here’s Beatrice addressing her:

‘Agatha, you are a very stupid girl and a wicked girl… get out of the way!’ (p.182)

Only towards the end of the book is there a kind of set-piece where Beatrice for the first time sees Agatha as a human being, and realises how mean she’s been for years and years. Illumination too late.

Marxism

The chapter describing Ikem’s lecture crystallises the sense that a lot of the opposition to the military regime back then was couched in the date rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. The radical characters refer to ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ as if this was a viable policy or could ever be the answer to anything.

This led me to realise that Achebe wrote Anthills of the Savannah through the 1970s and 80s i.e. in a dire period of the Cold War, when communist rhetoric was very popular, not just among students in the West, but much more pressingly in Third World countries, in places like Angola or Mozambique where Marxist parties were at war, in the rhetoric of the ANC in South Africa and so on. A whole mental worldview cast in terms of outdated concepts like ‘the bourgeoisie’ and ‘the proletariat’, ‘class war’, ‘revolution’, ‘communist utopia’ and so on.

It was only two short years after Anthills of the Savannah was published that the Berlin Wall came down leading the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Leaving Marxist intellectuals around the world intellectually and morally bankrupt. Epic fail.

It was a sudden insight for me that Achebe’s entire writing career took place during the Cold War. He wrote poems, some stories and essays after the Wall came down, but no more novels. He may well have been the godfather of African literature but he was also a Cold War author.

Anger

Lack of self discipline, immaturity and quick temper are just some of the things Achebe accuses his countrymen of in his withering essay, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’. These negative attributes are very visible in the quick tempers and violence dramatised in A Man of The People and are on ample display here. Nigerians, according to this book, get furious with each other at the drop of a hat.

When Ikem phones Chris at work and the latter’s secretary insists he’s not in, Ikem starts yelling down the phone, ‘an angry man’ (p.27). It doesn’t take much to make Elewa become ‘really aggressive’ (p.35). Ikem is in the middle of his morning conference when his stenographer peers round the door to say he’s got a call, and Kiem asks who it is ‘angrily’ (p.36). Chris’s secretary makes a pert remark after Ikem has had an angry meeting with him, so he slams the door behind him in his rage (p.44). Ikem is parked in a market when he sees a soldier aggressively park his car, nearly knocking a trader over. The soldier then insults the trader ‘with a vehemence I found astounding’ which leaves Ikem ‘truly seething with anger’ (p.48). When the soldier sent to collect her tells her they’re not going to the Palace but the Presidential Guesthouse Beatrice is ready to ‘explode in violent froths of anger’ (p.72).

According to Beatrice, Ikem and Chris are always having ‘fierce arguments’ (p.73). When the security guard at Chris’s apartment complex won’t let a taxi driver in, they get into a heated altercation (p.149). When the soldiers come to search Beatrice’s flat, the sergeant leading his platoon is bursting with anger and hatred of her (p.177). When Beatrice loses her car keys and returns to a phone box where she made a call to find a man using it, when she taps on the window he angrily insists there’s no keys there and makes an angry hissing noise at her (p.181). When Beatrice gets back to her flat and finds her servant Agatha hasn’t made Elewa a proper big breakfast, she is furious at her (p.183).

As Achebe suggests in ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, this lack of self-control, this lack of self-discipline, is connected to immaturity and childishness. The reader can extend the trait to the country’s leaders, whose speeches are full of petulant complaints, and are themselves quick to rain down dire threats on their opponents. Everyone seems to be angry all of the time.

Stupidity

Notoriously, the central claim of Achebe’s long essay ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ was that the problem was the terrible quality of its leaders, not least that these leaders were uneducated, ignorant and stupid. In this book His Excellency Sam is described by Ikem as ‘not very bright’ (p.49) and there is a constant, understated hum throughout the book, a continual criticism of people who are illiterate, semi-literate and uneducated; and an implicit valorisation of Chris and Ikem and their like for having enjoyed a top hole education, first within Kangan and then topped off with post-graduate study in Britain.

Sex

As in A Man of the People I was dismayed by the novel’s bluntness about sex. Take Ikem’s description of Elewa’s lovemaking, ‘I shall never discover where in that little body of hers she finds the power to lift you up bodily on her trunk while she is slowly curving upwards like a suspension bridge’ (p.37). Or how he believes that, soon after sex a man should return to his own apartment in order to work. How he ‘couldn’t write tomorrow’s editorials with Elewa’s hands cradling my damp crotch’ (p.38).

How, when young Sam was in bed in Camberley recovering from double pneumonia, MM set him up with a good-time girl who gave excellent blowjobs (with an ‘invigorating tongue’, p.61). Which in turn makes Chris recall his ill-fated 6-month marriage to a woman named Louise who was ‘totally frigid in bed’ (p.63), and then another girl he went out with who ‘flaunted her flesh’, lacing her performance with ‘moans and all that ardent crap’ (p.63).

On one of their early nights together, Chris tells Beatrice loads about him and Ikem and Sam, including the morning after Sam and his then-girlfriend, Gwen, had sex, she woke and wanted another go, he said ‘there was nothing left in the pipeline’ so she:

‘swings herself around and picks up his limp wetin-call with her mouth’

at which point he gets an erection. This leads to a whole page devoted to Beatrice commenting on this behaviour, saying ‘how disgusting’, asking whether he ejaculated in her mouth, that’s something she’ll never do, and so on (p.69).

When Chris and Beatrice have sex in chapter 8 it should win an award for embarrassingly over-written sex scenes. In the same chapter Chris caricatures what would happen if he fled Kanga, went into exile in the west and it is typical of the novel’s worldview that he immediately thinks that in exile he would ‘sleep with a lot of white girls’ (p.118). Are white girls that sexually available to Nigerian students? Apparently so.

When Beatrice compares Chris and Ikem the salient point is not regarding their political position or economic theory or ideals for the country, it’s that Ikem has had a ‘string of earthy girlfriends’ (p.119).

When Beatrice insists on spending Chris’s last night in Bassa with him, even though it’s at the slum home of taxi driver Braimoh, the pair still have sex in someone else’s bed and despite the fact that his host’s five small children are sleeping on mats in the same room, separated only by a sheet hung from string strung across the room, so any wakeful children can hear the act (p.198).

Maybe we’re meant to find the sexual anecdotes, especially in the first half of the text, warm and funny; maybe they’re meant to indicate the openness between the three former friends and their girlfriends, a kind of prolongation of their student-era, light-hearted promiscuity. But to me almost all this sex talk felt somehow joyless and crude. It put me off the characters and the book.

And, just as in A Man of the People, I found it disappointing that these so-called ‘intellectuals’ don’t have an idea in their heads, don’t have a single practical suggestion about how to improve the law or commerce, industry, investment or economy of their country: they just spend all their time telling stories or thinking about sex.

And, of course, the entire narrative climaxes, or ends, with a fight over a sex act, namely Chris intervening to stop the police sergeant raping a young woman. Putting aside the (nasty) content of the act, it’s characteristic of Achebe’s contemporary stories that the decisive event is sexual rather than political, just as the swing event in A Man of the People is not a political decision but Odilo’s anger at Chief Nanga sleeping with his girlfriend. Seems like, in Achebe, sexual hot-headedness always trumps politics analysis.

Embedded stories

The character Ikem is now a powerful newspaper editor but like all literature students, fancies himself as a poet and author. All Achebe’s books contain numerous traditional proverbs and some of them (Arrow of God) describe characters telling each other traditional folk stories. In this one, we have Ikem’s productions quote in full, being:

• a Hymn to the Sun (pages 30 to 33)
• a ‘love letter’ to Women (i.e. a feminist interpretation of history and reform) (pages 97 to 101)
• the leopard and the tortoise

Explanation of the title

At the end of chapter 3 Ikem composes a Hymn to the Sun – an unlikely thing, maybe, for a tough newspaper editor to do, but adding an interesting extra layer of meaning to the novel’s text. Half-way through he describes the way a hallucinatorily fierce sun burns away vegetation from the face of the earth, leaving trees looking like bronze statues:

like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires.

So the anthills are repositories of history which survive a disastrous fire in order to tell succeeding generations what happened. So maybe that is the purpose of this book: to survive in the fierce times of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, to preserve history and stories for later generations.

Conclusion

I read Anthills of the Savannah when it first came out and it left a lasting, positive impression on me. Rereading it almost 40 years later I found I disliked many things about it. Of Achebe’s five novels I think it’s the weakest: I’d recommend any of the others, but especially Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God before it.

Without maybe being fully aware of it, Achebe seems to have moved into thriller territory, with the last 40 pages being an account of a man on the run from the state security services and he does a capable job but it’s not really his forte. The folk stories interspersed in the narrative are not as numerous as I expected, only about three in total, not enough to lift the book into the realm of magical realism which was so fashionable when it was published.

He makes a clear effort to be a feminist, taking time to flesh out the character of Beatrice, her one-sided upbringing, her experiences in London, falling in love with Chris, her boldness at the President’s party, overcoming her terror when Chris goes on the run, with plenty of reflections thrown in about the plight of women, the oppression of women, how women have to stick together, women are the future etc. All correct sentiments, but not really dramatised in the plot. Good intentions, somehow not fully worked through.

Also his prose style has gone to pot. I initially thought the long unravelling sentences were limited to Beatrice’s sections of the novel and designed to characterise her feminine thought processes like Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses. But they’re not. They occur throughout and are often really clumsy.

All these attractions of Abazon had of course to be set against the one considerable disadvantage of being a place where the regime might be sleeping with one eye open especially since the death of Ikem and an ugly eruption of a new crisis over the government’s refusal to turn over his body to his people for burial under the provocative pretext that investigations were still proceeding into the circumstances of his death! (p.195, cf p.196)

Achebe took over a decade to write this relatively short novel. Don’t you think that sentence could have been a teeny bit improved? Probably by breaking it up into two or more shorter sentences? And does it need the exclamation mark at the end? It serves mainly to make the thought it contains come over as callow and naive.

But most of all I disliked how useless, impractical, spurious and distracting most of its intellectual content is. Economic, social, industrial, developmental, fiscal and social problems need practical, thought-out and costed solutions, not folk stories and witless vapouring about:

re-establishing vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being.

I know it’s only a novel not an economic strategy, but it was Achebe himself who chose to make it a novel about politics, to get his hands dirty by entering the political arena and to give his characters great long speeches about the future of their country, the future of democracy, the validity of revolution, about feminism and overthrowing the patriarchy and smashing the system and supporting the poor.

So it is deeply disappointing that amid all this fine rhetoric the book’s political analyses are so limited and shallow – big on rhetoric about stories and feelings but, for all practical purposes, quite useless.

Credit

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe was published in 1987 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 1988 African Writers Series paperback edition.

Related link

• Anthills of the Savannah online
• Encyclopedia.com article about Anthills of the Savannah (lots of historical context)

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