Discoursing the Story: A Study of the Narrative Strategy of
Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah
In all his literary works, the famous West-African Anglophone novelist
Chinua Achebe has creatively Africanized the English language. In the
process of writing counter-narratives to Euro-centric misrepresentations of
Africa, Achebe has successfully harnessed the colonizer’s language to
make it bear the burden of his native experience. Reading his novels,
which are set in Nigeria during different historical periods, one can hardly
miss the fact that his narrative strategies change in accordance with the
time and message of each novel. As Gikandi puts it:
In every novel Achebe has written to date, what we know about
Igbo or Nigerian culture is less important than how we know it:
Achebe’s narratives seek to create the initial situation in which the
African problematic developed and to express the conditions in which
knowledge about phenomena is produced. (Gikandi 11)
Thus, the narrative strategy becomes an important element in elucidating
the various paradigms of West-African, socio-cultural reality and human
experience in Achebe’s novels. However, the choice of narrator remains
central to the narrative strategy in any text, since it asserts the
intentionality of the respective author how s/he intends to capture the
complexities of the time being portrayed in his/her work. For Achebe, this
choice is implicated with the question of representation itself, i.e. who has
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the right to tell the stories of Africa. If not the bigoted Europeans, then
whom amongst the natives? All his five novels remain, in a way, an
exploration for the answer to this question through his choice of narrators,
the answer to which is finally reached in the fifth novel. The present
paper proposes to show how Achebe develops a more sophisticated mode
of narration in Anthills of the Savannah to solve this problem of
representation in the African context.
The setting of Anthills of the Savannah is a fictional African state
named Kangan, which is “a very thinly disguised Nigeria”(Innes 152). The
country is ruled by a military despot, Sam Okoli, whose abuse of power
brings tragedy upon himself as well as his former friends, Christopher
Oriko—the Commissioner of Information, and Ikem Osodi—the Editor of the
National Gazette. Their tragedies also greatly affect Beatrice Okoh, a
senior secretary in the Ministry of Finance and a close acquaintance to
Chris and Ikem. The social attitudes which characterize the historical
background of this novel are more complex as compared to the previous
novel by Achebe, namely A Man of the People. As Innes points out: “the
easy optimism and the more vulnerably youthful cynicism which
characterized those early years of independence have been replaced [now]
by awareness of a deeply diseased society and a more profound
determination to understand and cure the illness” (Innes 151). In keeping
with the complicated problematic of characters and situations displayed in
the novel, Achebe employs a multi-voiced narrative strategy that brings out
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the dialectics of power and representation in the context of the West
African society of the late 1970s. He discovers that none—be it the
western-educated elites, or the people who are at the helm of affairs, or
be it an omniscient narrator who has access to both traditional and
modern ways of African life—none is capable of telling the story of
modern Africa singly, since “the African space [is] heterogeneous and
multiple, defined by differences and contradictions, [and is] not homogenized
into a single national voice” (Gikandi 128). That’s why, Achebe breaks
down the singular narrative persona (as used in his previous novels) into
four different narrators, three of whom are character-bound ones—Ikem,
Chris and Beatrice, and the fourth is an omniscient, third-person narrator.
Together, these four narrators attempt to construct a text of the recent
national history of Kangan in the manner of folklore, that involves
juxtaposition of multiple accounts rather than privileging one single version
of reality. Each of the narrator displays a certain kind of drawback which
disqualifies him/her from being the exclusive storyteller of Kangan.
Therefore, the narrative is self-consciously turned into a discourse of the
contemporary story of Kangan, so as to encourage the subversion of
narratorial finality and to resist the hegemonic singularity of any
authoritarian account.
Chris, the first narrator is a rational individual who is always at pains
to dissociate himself from any opinion or point of view. This renders his
narration a cold detachment, which, though would have qualified him as a
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trustworthy narrator in the Western context, nonetheless dismisses him the
same position in the African situation. An instance of his ‘cool-headed’
reasoning comes up when he defends Sam’s unethical squandering of
government money to build a Presidential Retreat at Abichi saying:
‘Nations [. . .] were fostered as much by structures as by laws and
revolutions. These structures where they exist now are the pride of
their nations. But everyone forgets that they were not erected by
democratically-elected Prime Ministers but very frequently by rather
unattractive, bloodthirsty medieval tyrants. [. . .] Our present rulers in
Africa are in every sense late-flowering medieval monarchs [. . .].
(67-68)
The above statement, said in counter to Beatrice’s accusation that the
retreat is actually a symbolic withdrawal of the President from the common
people’s needs of potable water, simple shelter and food, it brings out
Chris’s incapacity for moral commitment to the people’s cause in fear of
involvement and confrontation. That’s why he makes such “off-the cuff”(68)
remarks to cover up his trepidation with a mask of reasonableness and
neutrality. As Robin Ikegami observes, “Such an attitude, and such a
position are luxuries that the current [West African] society cannot afford or
allow. There is no such thing as an impartial storyteller in this society”
(Ikegami 499). From this it evinces that the reasonable attitude in Chris is
actually an effort towards deliberate distancing of his self from aligning
with any kind of social responsibility. Also, he displays a tendency for
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overt self-justification, which sets the readers wary of his intentionality to
gloss his acts. Here goes an example:
Without raising my eyes I said again: “I am very
sorry, Your Excellency.” A year ago I would have
never said it again that second time—without
doing grave violence to myself. Now I did it
like a casual favour to him. It meant nothing at
all to me—no inconvenience whatever—and yet
everything to him. (emphasis added 1-2)
As it is evident, Chris is well-aware of the cowardice implied through his
capitulation to the monstrous ego of Sam, and that too when his own
stand remains rightful (i.e. egging the dictator to reconsider his wrongful
stance on the Abazonian issue). That’s why to show himself in favourable
light he makes an elucidation of his mental reactions to the reader in
order to highlight the reasonability and inevitability of his act. Such a
narrator, who is more given to self-preservation than bearing the onus of
his people can definitely not be entrusted the singular authority of telling
the story of his people.
The next narrator Ikem is not as lackadaisical as Chris. But he has
the defect of having his words at variance with his actions. On one
hand, he claims himself as a passionate crusader of the poor and the
dispossessed, but on the other he could sit inactive and watch the
harassment of vendor boys in the hands of local police at Gelegele
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market. That he is empathetically alienated from the common people is
evident in his following statement, “I never pass up a chance of just
sitting in my car, reading or pretending to read, surrounded by the vitality
and thrill of these dramatic people”(emphasis added 44). The very words
‘these’ and ‘dramatic’ used by Ikem to describe the common people of the
working class reveals his dissociated, elitist outlook towards the same,
which renders his narration an inadequacy to become the authentic
version of Kangan’s life.
Beatrice, the last of the three character-bound narrators seems to
possess more objectivity than Chris and Ikem as a storyteller. Unbound by
the intimacy of childhood-friendship with Ikem, Chris and Sam, she could
dispassionately assess the mighty triumvirate as three preposterously
conceited people who assume themselves to be the ‘owners’ of Kangan.
Achebe’s narrative-shift to a female voice is a clear acknowledgement of
the need of female-empowerment in the modern African context. In a
novel concerning the polemics of power both in the political and
patriarchal sphere, Beatrice plays up the author’s fictional double by
questioning the abuse of power in the male-dominated sphere, as the
author himself challenges the misusage of same in the field of politics.
But even Beatrice is not without her own drawbacks as a narrator. Her
strict Anglican upbringing has rendered her totally ignorant of the native
tradition and folk-lores. As Gikandi observes:
Beatrice’s knowledge and success as a student and government
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official has been achieved through the repression of tradition and
legends of her people. She is educated in schools which had no
place for her bearers and divinities with whom they had evolved.
So she comes to barely know who she was. (Gikandi 132)
Therefore, being cut off from her native African identity, Beatrice also loses
eligibility to become a singularly trustworthy storyteller of her people. It
must be noted that all the three first-person narrators are given limited
scope of narration, and that too at the beginning of the novel when they
are yet to reconcile with their native identity or social responsibility.
However, these characters, also the protagonists in the novel, are given the
narrative authority because their highly enlightened and receptive
perception allows them not only to have a comprehensive outlook of the
entire situation in Kangan vis-à-vis the current global politics, but also to
articulate their voice of protest against organized tyranny more powerfully.
Through their individual narration though they establish their respective
idiosyncrasies to disqualify themselves as the authoritative storyteller of
Kangan, they do reveal their potentiality to become the true leaders of
their people to guide them in the battle against tyrannical oppression, once
they are reconciled with their social responsibility.
From Chapter Eight the narration is entirely taken over by the
omniscient narrator. S/he gives a comprehensive picture of the whole
scenario, which is yet another version of reality seen from the bird’s eye-
view. But even this narrator is flawed, as the objectivity of the same is
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often jeopardized. At some occasions, this omniscient narrator’s voice
merges up with that of the characters described, as it happens in the
following instance:
She [Beatrice] heard far away the crowing of a cock. Strange. She
had not before heard a cock crow in this Government Reserved
Area. Surely nobody has been reduced to keeping poultry like
common villagers. Perhaps some cook or steward or gardener had
knocked together an illegal structure outside his room in the Boys
Quarters for a chicken-house. (emphasis added 98)
The statement, though coming from the omniscient narrator, is definitely
focalized through Beatrice, which is evident through the intentionality of the
highlighted words. This reveals that the narrator here does not make any
discernible effort to distance his/her opinion from merging with the
subjective attitude of the character. With the objectivity thus jeopardized,
the third-person, omniscient narrator in this novel diminishes his/her
prospects of becoming the authentic and exclusive storyteller of Kangan.
By highlighting the weaknesses involved in all his narrators, Achebe
highlights that the very assumption of a singularly dependable account of
Africa or Kangan is erroneous in itself. There can be no first-person
narrator without the in-built limitations of his/her eccentric disposition, and
there can also never be a totally disinterested omniscient narrator since
such kind of narrator definitely contains the vestiges of author’s own
ideological presuppositions. Therefore the best way to derive the picture of
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reality is to combine the various prismatic refractions of the same from
various people’s accounts.
A discreet point may be made here regarding the first-person narrators
used in the novel. Chris and Ikem are respectively referred to as the ‘First
Witness’ and ‘Second Witness,’ whereas no such tagline is attached with
Beatrice. The reasons may be, first, Beatrice is in a more objective
position to assess the activities of the mighty triumvirate—Ikem, Chris and
Sam, since she remains exclusive to their bond of childhood intimacy.
Second, it may be seen as an early hint from the author himself that
Beatrice is to survive the trial of embittered history (as enacted in the
current socio-political scenario of Kangan) in which Chris and Ikem are
drawn onto the shoes of witness against Sam, the mighty dictator on the
scaffold. She would live through the trial, bearing testimony to the ultimate
fate of the triumvirate, thus carrying forward the message evolved through
it to the surviving milieu in the end, that that the world belongs to the
common people and not any power-hungry, self-presuming individual.
Another point worth noting regarding the narration is, though Sam, the
antagonist, is not given a chance of narration, there is one occasion in
Chapter Two where the omniscient narrator’s voice briefly slides into the
‘I” of Sam without the demarcations of inverted commas. Here is that
particular passage:
What Exactly did the fellow mean, His Excellency wondered. I
handled him pretty well, though. I certainly won’t stand for my
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commissioners sneaking up to me with vague accusations against
their colleagues. It is not cricket! No sense of loyalty, no esprit de
corps, nothing! [. . .] whatever put it into our [triumvirate’s] head when
we arrived on this seat [of power] that we needed these half-baked
professors to tell us anything. What do they know? Give me good
military training and discipline any day! (emphasis added 19)
As it is evident, only the first line of the passage is in third person, after
that the narrator slides into the subjective self of Sam. This reveals that
even the dictator is given a brief chance to speak up for himself, in which
he reveals his ineptitude as a ruler, since he attempts to translate the
complexities of African bureaucracy in foreign terminology, and also tends
to straight-jacket the problems of his country by deeming military rule as
the only available option. Also, he shows total disregard for the experience
of civilian leaders, who are better acquainted with native life and customs
than him. Thus, Sam is revealed as a thoroughly unreliable ruler of his
people, which is revealed in the distrustful absence of the inverted
commas that would have distanced his expression from the ‘custody’ of the
omniscient narrator. However, similar thing happens with Ikem in Chapter
Eleven, when he gains illumination of the real truth behind the atrophied
socio-political condition in Kangan—“It is the failure of our rulers to re-
establish vital links with the poor and the dispossessed of this country,
[. . .]”(emphasis added 130-31), and he eventually comes to realize his own
role in bringing a reformatory change to this scenario—“So for good or ill
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I shall remain myself; but with this deliberate readiness now to help, and
be helped”(131). This statement brings out Ikem’s final reconciliation with
the common people of the country. Earlier, Ikem has been given two
chapters for first-person narration, where he displays his own weakness as
an alienated, class-conscious individual. But now, with the comprehension of
the entire scenario dawning in him, he rises almost to the stature of the
omniscient narrator who takes in the greater picture of the reality. That’s
why, perhaps the omniscient narrator allows his/her third person to
temporarily merge up with the subjective first-person of Ikem without the
demarcation of inverted commas, as he is elevated to the ultimate
realization of his duty towards the society.
Finally, an enumeration of an incident where multiple versions of reality
are afforded becomes necessary. The Abazonian delegation at Bassa is
initially projected by Sam as a mere ‘goodwill delegation’ to cover up his
failure as a ruler. Mad Medico interprets is as a ritualistic effort made by
ignorant natives to turn their king into a rain-maker. This reveals a bigoted
attitude in the European towards the natives, as he attempts to reduce a
the gravity of a serious issue into ridiculous absurdity. Ikem sees the
arrival of the delegation in terms of legend, comparing it with the
archetypal journey made by the Abazonians in the past from death to life.
His “Hymn to the Sun” thus imparts the delegation with a mythic grandeur.
The Abazonians themselves however assume to carry a straight-forward
plea to the President for supplying water in their drought-stricken district.
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Later in the novel, Sam fabricates the whole incident as an attempted
treason, and imprisons the delegation. However, the common people of
Kangan show their unwillingness to accept the tyrant’s version of the
story, which is evident in the outbreak of a mass resistive movement
throughout the country led over by Ikem, that ultimately snowballs into a
coup overthrowing Sam’s government. From this it evinces that there does
exist a power-knowledge relationship between the storyteller and his/her
audience. A story is never free from the filters of the individual storyteller,
and so he/she is in the position to impress the truth convenient to
him/her upon his/her audience as the final and absolute one. Thereby,
rather than labouring to find out which version is true, it is far more
important to understand why a certain story is to be believed as true over
others. This, as Gera observes, is the technique of folklore which is more
practical than narratology. Whereas narratology rests by establishing the
ultimate fictionaility and relativity of truth through the sampling of multiple
accounts/texts, folklore follows the pragmatic needs in the selection and
rejection of stories (Gera 90). This reveals why Achebe intends to present
the story of Kangan in a folk-lore style, so that it includes multiple
versions of reality, but also insists on the general morality of humankind
to reject the improbable fables fabricated by the oppressors of humanity.
The dialogic objectivity thus afforded by the multi-voiced narrative
strategy in this novel approximates the Lyotardian prescription of the
‘agnostic’ multiplicity of small narratives in order to resist the formation of
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a grand narrative, i.e. any totalitarian version of knowledge and reality
(Nayar 222). Robin Ikegami thus rightly observes, “Although each of
Achebe’s five novels reveals his view of the complex and problematic
relation between power and storytelling, nowhere does Achebe more
minutely examine the nature of the relation than in his last novel, Anthills
of the Savannah” (Ikegami 493). In other words, Achebe successfully turns
the story of Anthills of the Savannah into a self-conscious discourse where
the versions of different narrators counteract and complement with each
other, thus standing a vigil against the formation of a hegemonic
representation of reality.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of Savannah. (1987). New York: Anchor-Doubleday,
1988.
Gera, Anjali. Three Great African Novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka &
Amos Tutuola. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2001.
Gikandi, Simon. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction.
London: James Currey, 1991.
Ikegami, Robin. “Knowledge and Power, the Story and the Storyteller:
Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah.” Modern Fiction Studies 37.3
(1991): 493-507.
Innes, C.L. Chinua Achebe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Nayar, Pramod K. Literary Theory Today. Delhi: Asia Book Club, 2002.
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