Anthills of the Savannah

Chinua Achebe was born near Ogidi, Nigeria on November 16, 1930, when Nigeria was still a colony of the United Kingdom. His parents were Igbo, a West African ethnic and linguistic group; though they had converted to Christianity, they raised Achebe to know about Igbo culture. From 1948 to 1953, Achebe attended University College (renamed the University of Ibadan in 1962). After graduation, he worked as a teacher and then as a radio writer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS). In 1958, he published his first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, with a UK publishing company called Heinemann. As Nigeria achieved independence from the UK in 1960, Achebe continued to work for the NBS and to publish novels—but after Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, seemed to predict Nigeria’s military coup later that same year, Achebe and his family had to flee their home in Lagos to southeastern Nigeria, which subsequently seceded and renamed itself Biafra. After Biafra lost the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), Achebe accepted a job from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and moved with his family to the U.S. in 1972. In 1976 he moved back to Nigeria, where he first taught at the University of Nigeria and then entered politics, working for the People’s Redemption Party (PRP). However, he became disillusioned with politics and quit the PRP after several years. In 1990, after a serious car accident, he moved back to the U.S., where he died in 2013. At the time of his death, he had published five novels and two short story collections as well as children’s books, essays, poetry, and a memoir—and he won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.

Anthills of the Savannah takes place in an invented African country, Kangan, but it alludes to real events and people in 20th century African history. One of its protagonists, poet and journalist Ikem Osodi, has written a play about the Women’s War (1929–1930). During the Women’s War, women led protests in British Colonial Nigeria to contest new taxes and lift restrictions that British colonizers had placed on women’s participation in public life. Ikem also places Kangan’s military dictator in context by referring to real-life African military dictators such as Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971–1979, and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who ruled the Central African Republic (which he temporarily renamed the Central African Empire) from 1966–1979. Similarly, Kangan’s dictator makes paranoid reference to the possibility of events like the Entebbe Raid happening in Kangan. Also known as Operation Thunderbolt, the 1976 Entebbe Raid involved an Israeli military task force raiding Uganda during the dictatorship of Idi Amin to rescue hostages kidnapped in the hijacking of an Air France flight to Tel Aviv.

Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Chinua Achebe’s fifth and final novel, represents the political situation of an invented African country, Kangan, formerly colonized by the UK and ruled by a military dictatorship overthrown, near the plot’s climax, by an unexpected coup. Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966), published more than two decades prior, likewise represents the political situation of an invented African country that ends in a military coup. Anthills of the Savannah also repeatedly alludes to other literary works. For example, characters frame sexual relationships between Black men and White women in terms of a “Desdemona complex,” a reference to William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello (c. 1603), whose titular protagonist, a Black war hero, is tricked by a racist subordinate into believing that his adoring White wife Desdemona is having an affair. One of the novel’s protagonists, poet and journalist Ikem Osodi, praises British novelist Graham Greene for his complex, ambivalent portrayals of priests despite Greene’s own Catholicism—most likely a reference to Greene’s 1940 novel The Power and the Glory, about an alcoholic priest who has fathered a child. Finally, another protagonist, Beatrice, compares the death of her lover Chris to that of Shaka Zulu in Mazisi Kunene’s Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic, a 1979 interpretative translation of an epic poem from the Zulu oral tradition. Additionally, Achebe was involved in curating the African Writers Series by his own UK-based publisher Heinemann; the series ran from the 1960s to the 2000s and published books that Achebe may have influenced and been influenced by. For example, Achebe selected for publication Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), which like much of Achebe’s work deals with British colonialism in Africa.