Post-colonialism and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of

POSTCOLONIALISM AND CHINUA ACHEBE’S ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH

The widest definition of postcolonial fiction easily includes Chinua Achebe’s ‘Anthills of the Savannah.’ “Post-colonial studies are based in the historical fact of European colonisalism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise...It addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning to the end of colonial contact.” Chinua Achebe’s novels deal with the experiences of Nigerian citizens after the end of British colonialism. His novels depict an archetypal post-colonial era African country. Post-colonial connotes a society in the process of recovery from catastrophe.

The issue of colonization does not just touch upon the struggle of native people to adjust to a new culture. A more serious obstacle that needs to be faced is the suppression, the annihilation of the native people’s former lives and culture that comes with the presence of another who believes that his culture is superior. Obviously, problems of crossed identity, imposed inferiority and even a raging hatred for the colonizer surface in the consciousness of the colonized people. That is where the term postcolonisation comes into play – what happens when two cultures clash and one assumes superiority over the other. Colonialism undeniably calls up a degree of suppression, Most often this oppression takes the form of a mostly unconscious cultural assimilation – an unknowing indoctrination of the colonialists’ beliefs upon their colonized persons, Post-colonialism deals more with the unconscious and lasting effects the colonizer imposes upon people by his mere presence – those aspects of his culture that are absorbed and integrated into the colonized population. Post-colonialism is a way of examining an unconsciously changed culture through its literature. Post-colonialism creates a “discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being.” Essentially, post-colonialism introduces two sides to the issue of expansion and creates the two distinct parties of colonizer and colonized or often the oppressor and oppressed. Post-colonial refers to more than just a people adjusting to changes; it includes the relationship between the changed and the changer. Within this very relationship, the unconscious assimilation that lies at the heart of post-colonialism comes into being.

Bearing witness to the failure of social justice and democracy to take root in post­-colonial Nigeria, Chinua Achebe wrote the Anthills of the Savannah in 1987. Set in the fictional nation of Kangan, a thinly disguised version of Nigeria, the plot revolves around the fate of two prominent male intellectuals victimized in a military crackdown orchestrated by the nation’s president – for – life who is a childhood friend. Narration shifts between these two characters and their female friend, who works in the Ministry of Finance. As elite figures they were chosen by Achebe to reflect his own frustrations with Nigeria and mixed feelings about Africa’s future. As Minister of Information, Christopher Oriko is in an unenviable position. Charged with the responsibility of defending the policies of a military dictator, who happens to be one of his oldest friends, he treads a fine line between loyalty and subversion. He is intelligent and knows how rotten the government is but he is too detached an intellectual to commit himself to struggle. When confronted by his old friend Ikem Osodi, a firebrand oppositionist who succeeded him as editor of the state-owned newspaper, Oriko justifies his action through a kind of aloofness.

Ikem Osodi obviously serves as a vehicle for his own dissatisfaction with post­-colonial society.

In contrast to Chris Oriko’s cynicism, Ikem Osodi is driven by compassion for Kangan’s underclass. He decides to crusade against public executions immediately after attending one as a representative of the state-owned newspaper. He is appalled by the cruel taunts of the crowd and inspired by the dignity of the doomed man, he writes an editorial the very next day. Chris Oriko calls his old friend into his Ministry of Information office to warn him against writing editorials that might risk his career or his life. If Ikem is always acting impetuously, we understand that he has no choice given the urgency of his continent’s problems.

Despite Ikem’s sympathy for the poor, he is out of touch with them. He regards them sympathetically from afar but is not organically linked to their struggles. If anything, this goes to the heart of Achebe’s novel: the inability of the nation’s elite to connect with the masses.

When a couple of members of the taxi-drivers union show up unannounced at his door one day to tell him how much they appreciate his support, Ikem is somewhat apprehensive at first. After one driver tells him how important his columns are to the rank-and-file, he is deeply touched. Later on Ikem reflects on the esteem the taxi drivers hold him in for driving a battered old Datsun rather than the Mercedes preferred by government officials. This personal choice said more than any lofty phrases.

During the Q & A of a student session for which he is invited, a student asks him whether it was necessary to put the ration “under the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat” in face of the impending crackdown. Ikem replies that he wouldn’t even put himself under the dictatorship of angels and archangels. He does not even know what the proletariat of Kangan amounts to.

To blame all of Kangan’s problems on capitalism and imperialism as “our modish radicals do” is “sheer cant and humbug.” It is like arresting the village blacksmith every time a man hacks his fellow to death.

Despite Ikem Osodi’s lack of connections to any organized mass movement other than as an unelected tribune, the government sentences him to death during a crackdown against all dissidents. In the ensuing chaos, Christopher Oriko is killed by a soldier in a random act of violence for simply appearing impudent. The president for life is also toppled in a subsequent coup. In other words, Kangan is following pretty much the same trajectory as Nigeria and other West African nations for the past 30 years or so.

The other major character in ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ is Beatrice Okoh who is a minor official in the Ministry of Finance and an old friend of the two major male characters and a former lover of Chris’s.

Despite her determination to make a career for herself above all else, she rejects the idea that this has anything to do with a “Women’s Lib” that she might have picked up while being educated in England. There was enough male chauvinism in her father’s house to last her a lifetime. Despite her admiration for his willingness to speak out against oppression, she told Ikem there was “no clear role for women in his political writing.” Beatrice understood his failures not as an expression of personal weakness but a symptom of cultural wardness in Africa, even among progressives.

The ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ is imbued with a very deep mood of utility that is only broken by the personal examples of self-sacrifice by the major characters. In the final chapter the focus is on the birth of Ikem’s daughter, for whom Beatrice holds a traditional naming ceremony. This gesture underscores the strong yearnings for some kind of reconnection with Africa’s lost traditions that, were trampled underfoot by colonialism. The infant is named Amaechina, or ‘May-the-path-never-close,” in honour of her dead father Ikem.

In ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ Chris Oriko, at the beginning of the story, is above his fellow countrymen because of his Western – education and government position. But the message of the book is clear – he must fall, rejoin his people and eventually die a low death, defending someone personally instead of through words. At the end of the novel, once the “last green bottle” has inevitably fallen, something new is able to take its place. The book ends with a bold vision of hope. With the inclusion of women, with the necessary adaptation of culture in order to let it survive.

‘Anthills of the Savannah’ ends on quite so positive a note, but the inherent definition of post colonial as a recognized need for progress seems clear. Cultural change is inevitable. Cultural growth is the true hope of a post-colonial future ahead.

Chinua Achebe’s novel, ‘Anthills of the Savannah’, is about history and its many models, and especially about national histories and their realization. Simon Gikandi says of the novel that it is a representation of the ‘political and cultural crisis that marks the transition from the colonial system to a post-colonial-situation’. He makes the very important point that Achebe seems to be particularly concerned with those forms of narrative which would rewrite history by ‘creating a time-less and autonomous version of events so that they can speak to future generations,’ with ‘new forms of narration that might have the power to liberate us from the circle of our post-colonial movement.’ For Achebe in Anthills, History remains the story of a people, and is, therefore, always ethnic. History is always the narrative of destiny.

A post colonial view of history is an entirely relevant undertaking. It enables us to understand what a people have become in the process of a particular form of political and cultural contact. It tells of an important, even crucial, moment in a process of becoming. It acknowledges that colonialism was a fact of history and an unerasable one. It reminds us that the ex-colonial, in the post-colonial condition, can never be the ‘true’ native again. Post-colonialism, in this sense, is an age after innocence. Post-colonial history thus becomes the story of the end of old history, of old identities, of nativism. It marks the period of hybridity of cultures and identities.

An analysis of ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ shows that the author wrote at a time when the colonial structure ceases to exist yet about a time when the colonial influences that persist were established through the colonial structure. Chinua Achebe’s ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ details one cycle of political rule by Nigerian officials within a colonial hierarchy and the tensions experienced by these officials and their relations when independence movements threaten to separate colonized from colonizer. Achebe views the postcolonial era as one which began when Nigeria was first colonized and which continues to exist. To understand Achebe in ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ one should view the postcolonial as that which puts two set of values, colonial and traditional, in conflict and by means of its resolution defines the new conflict and the new postcolonial reality.