Another Side - of Achebe (Anthills of the Savannah)

For those who may think of Chinua Achebe as a one-book wonder, I recommend taking a look at his novel Anthills of the Savvvanah, published in about 1988 after a long gap in his writing. Everyone knows Achebe for Things Fall Apart, which made his name and his fortune; I had a lot of issues with that book, discussed elsewhere on this blog, notably the incredible violence and sexism that somehow we are expected to accept because it was part of "the culture" - behavior and attitudes we would despise or condemn in an American or European novel, I'm sure - so Things was the beneficiary of a cross-cultural condescension. Yet: the novel did have some powerful insights into African rural life at a time of great change, the breaking apart of colonialism, the arrival of Christian missionaries. The book was imbued as well with folktales and myths and dream visions - in other words, a lot in the book and many issues raised, making it a natural for book groups and college classes. In some ways, though, I'm finding Anthills a better book and more accessible: it's much more in a contemporary style (though there are, at about the half-way point, some passages on gods and myths, which to me are breaking the mood) and about contemporary life and politics in post-colonial Africa; the novel centers on three men, friends since grade school, educated in the British-colonial tradition, who each play a key role in the new government of an African nation modeled on Nigeria: one is the military leader who has taken over the country in a coup (His Excellency), one is the head of the ministry of information, the third is the editor of the major newspaper, very much censored by and controlled by the other two. The story moves about quite a bit in style and voice and narrative center, including several chapters from the point of view of the info minister's (Chris) girlfriend, BB - who is one of the strongest female characters I know of in African literature, smart and independent and upright. The dialogue throughout, shifting often from traditional English to a street patois, is often hilarious, the first chapter, a very tense cabinet meeting, is great - could actually be a play, I think. Overall, at least through the first half of the book, this novel gives as a strong a sense of a Third World country under the rule of a dictator as any I've read - better, I think, than the Latin American writers who often take on this theme (for more focused and readable than the Feast of the Goat, that I started recently). Anthills shows Achebe's sense of humor and of self-deprecation and his astuteness, which may surprise readers who think of him as the mythmaker of village life.