Anthills of the Savannah

...The efficient young head of the Bureau of State Research carefully nurtures His Excellency's paranoia, and soon the outspoken Ikem loses first his editorship and then his life, precipitating a national crisis...

...But Western readers of Achebe have their own challenges to face, represented in an extreme degree by that reductionist interpretation...

...At the center of the novel stands the figure of Beatrice Nwanyibuife, the daughter of a particularly stern village headmaster...

...His friends Chris, the Minister of Information, and Iken, poet and editor of the National Gazette, watch with amusement and then horror as their chum sheds his initial reluctance to rule and takes on the lineaments of a contemporary Caligula...

...translated, "Nwanyibuife" yields the faint praise of "a female is also something...

...In his current novel, he gives us the latest chapter in that saga, a story of three boyhood friends from a local missionary school whose separate careers take them by way of higher education in England back to positions of considerable, though quite unequal power in their native land...

...The story is our escort, without it, we are blind...

...Similarly, the novel's insistence on remembering and retelling stories as a way of recapturing one's identity has the paradoxical effect of giving a privileged position to the native oral tale within a quin-tessentially Western literary genre...

...The shock of such a juxtaposition reveals, I think, the dilemma Achebe has forthrightly faced since he began writing in English: How can you express your own identity in the colonizers' tongue without submitting to a still deeper colonization...

...And when all three of the promising young men have been murdered, it is Beatrice who holds the naming ceremony for the daughter of the martyred Ikem and gives her a name that transcends traditional gender stereotypes...

...John B. Breslin It has been two decades since Chinua Achebe's last novel (A Man of the People), but neither his pen nor his publisher has been idle, and the complex interplay of politics and literature which has dominated collections of his essays and short stories in the interim has found in Anthills of the Savannah a powerful fictional voice...

...death comes as violently and irrationally in the bush as it does in the capital...

...When the puzzled leopard asks why he's doing that, he replies: "Because even after I am dead I would want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here.'' Listening to the old man, Ikem has little idea how close the leopard is, but like the tortoise, he uses what time he has to rally the students at the university to defend their freedoms before it is too late...

...In addition to her rather exalted Christian name, she also bears a native one reflecting her father's disappointment at being given a fifth daughter in a row...

...No, neither do we the story...

...At another and deeper level, the novel is about the world of villages, folk wisdom, and peasants these achievers have left behind in their flight to the metropolis...

...Put most simply, Achebe's constant concern has been with the process of deracination which has taken place in Africa since the beginning of the colonial period...

...His spirited championing of the storyteller's importance takes aim at critics of Ikem the poet and journalist, but it also serves as an apologia pro vita sua for Achebe himself: It is the story that outlives the sound of war drums and the exploits of brave fighters...

...For Ikem the moment of reawakening comes at a meeting with his countrymen from the North who have journeyed to the capital to seek help for their drought-stricken province...

...Turned away by Sam because they failed to support his bid to become president-for-life, the villagers gather at a hotel where one of their elders instructs them and their citified compatriots in the rhetoric of the tribe...

...For her, the forging of the link becomes possible through a growing identification with her African sisters who lack her advantages-first with Agatha her house girl and then with the shop girl Elewa, left alone and pregnant after Ikem's death...

...If we are to translate Beatrice's and Ikem's rediscoveries into contemporary Western jargon, we might be tempted to say that they find salvation through feminism and narratology...

...Chris goes into hiding and manages through various ruses to escape into the disaffected North where, simultaneously, he learns of Sam's ouster and meets his own death trying to save a young woman from rape by a soldier drunk on his own sense of absolute power...

...rather it is the story that owns us and directs us...

...By having her piece together the fratricidal story of three friends, and even more by linking her story to that of Idemili, the great African goddess of water and fertility, Achebe underlines just how important that "something" is...

...In this dual role, Beatrice, more than her lover Chris or her brotherly friend Ikem, represents the link between Africa's tribal past and its westernized present...

...But Achebe is too sophisticated to divide the world neatly between rural virtue and urban corruption...

...Trapped at last, the tortoise begs for time and begins scratching the earth and throwing sand in all directions...

...True to form, the old man ends his own speech with a fable about the leopard and the tortoise...

...It is the story . . . that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence...

...Beatrice experiences her soul as split between the efficient career woman in the ministry office (she, too, has studied in London) and, "like Chielo in the novel, the priestess and prophetess of the Hills and the Caves" (a sly suggestion, by the way, that Beatrice has read Things Fall Apart...

...Chris, too, exits with a flourish despite the apparent absurdity of his murder...

...Indeed, whatever divide Achebe suggests in the novel has as much to do with gender as geography, for it is the women who survive and hold out the possibility of cultural and psychic reintegration...

...Does the blind man own his escort...

...Sam, the graduate of Sandhurst, has been thrust into ultimate power in the wake of a coup...

...note, the frustration of Babel may finally yield here and there at least, before the ecstasy of Pentecost.tasy of Pentecost...

...There is certainly a feminist core to this novel, but its African accent resists being subsumed into any European or American dialect, just as Achebe's insistence on reproducing Nigerian speech patterns of English, quite alien to Western ears, reminds the reader that BBC (or NBC) English is not the standard for the whole of the Anglophone world...

...Okonk-wo, the tragic hero of Things Fall Apart, was the first in a series of Africans undone by the convergence of their own flaws with the alien culture of the white man...

...The possibilities for misunderstanding and misinterpretation here are indeed legion, as I have tried to suggest, and they may explain in part Achebe's novelistic silence over the past two decades...

...But there is another, more positive way to view this peculiar dilemma of translation within the same language...

...Folktale and novel kiss...

...If we allow Achebe to challenge and broaden our understanding of the role of women and the power of story in the contemporary world, then, if I may be permitted to end on a biblical (and wildly optimistic...