Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe. rating= 5

a masterpiece, really. that's what I say. this book deserves all the praise that it gets. just read it.

Among his later works is ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH (1987), a polyvocal text with multiple narrators. The story is set in an imaginary West African state where Sam, a Sandhurst-trained military officer, has become President. Chris Oriko and Ikem Osodi, his friends, die when resisting brutal abuse of power. A military coup eliminates Sam. Beatrice Okah - Chris's London-educated girl friend - is entrusted with her community of women to return the political sanity.

oh, and of course I *LOVED* the Igbo-English creole scattered throughout. I loved getting to figure out the patterns and realizing what they were saying.


notes/observations:


page 51---

"[...] the most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable, and... just plain uninteresting."

page 88---

"It simply dawned on me two mornings ago that a novelist must listen to his characters who after all are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches."

"One of the things you told me was that my attitude to women was too respectful."

page 89---

"The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall. So she became a scape goat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. [....] Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky finally moved away in anger, and God with it.


Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be OK for the rugged taste of the Old Testament. The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy---ostensibly, that is. So the idea came to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother o God, to picker her up from right under his foot where she'd been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentlemanliness...."

this is so very Charlotte Perkins Gilman.


page 114---

"Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us..."

this is very Homer. this is the ancient Greek concept of Kleos, the glory and honour that a warrior fight so valiantly for---not to gain rewards in this world so much, but that their story, and therefore their memory, will live on after their death. the story is everything. the story guides the people.


page 126---

"Shut your mouth. Who tell you say we de make small quarrel?"

"Madam, I no need for somebody to tell me when man and woman make small quarrel. When yo see the woman eye begin de flash like ambulance you go know..."

page 130---

"In any event he had always had the necessity in a vague but insistent way, had always felt a yearning without very clear definition, to connect his essence with earth and earth's people. The problem for him had never been whether it should be done but how to do it with integrity."

amen


page 143---

"Charity, he thundered, is the opium of the privileged; from the good citizen who habitually drops ten kobo from his loose change and from a safe height above the bowl of the leper outside the supermarket; to the group of good citizens like yourselves who donate water so that some Lazarus in the slums can have a syringe boiled clean as a whistle for his jab and his sores dressed more hygienically than the rest of him; to the Band Aid stars that lit up so dramatically the dark Christmas skies of Ethiopia. While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

....

That world of yours will be in heaven, sneered one gentleman. Even in heaven, said another, there is seniority. Archangels are senior to common angels."

work for a REAL change in things, because your $25 donation does not release you from responsibility to your fellow humans and the world in which you live. it shouldn't lull you into thinking that everything is okay now.


and it's not okay to think that you can't make things better than they are here in this life. no, it won't be heaven. but it can be better if you get off your keister and actually work towards it, with your heart in it, real change and not just your token charity. saying it will only be better in heaven is just your excuse.


and apparently, some of you are being generous not even to be proud of yourself but so that everyone will know how wonderful and saintly you are and you will be abundantly rewarded for that. AND you think that you have done more than necessary for the unfortunate because you are better than they are anyway.





page 187---

"...but more so by far than Yours Sincerely who, don't forget, is one of the troika of proprietors who own Kanga itself!"

ah! glorious! a reference to Gogol's Dead Souls! wherein Gogol made a direct and famous comparison of the Russian state to a troika, travelling with such speed and purpose that other countries simply had to get out of its way... nevermind that inside that troika sat ensconced a thief and idiot. here, Achebe goes even further. Oriko, being at one time under the impression that the Kangan state was directly under his influence, realizes that he is not even a thief in the troika! no, he is but one of the three horses pulling it. ;)


he even put in a naming ceremony on page 206.


and again, one of the most perfect endings of a book I've read. 5!