Postcolonial tensions in a fictitious African State: The unconventional first-person point of view in Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

Abstract

In the three decades, or so, postdating the attainment of independence in Africa, a whirlwind of coup d'états ravaged many African countries. A subject which Chinua Achebe explores in Anthills of the Savannah. This article explores post-colonial tensions in the novel’s fictionalized state of Kangan, as postulated by two of the three first person narrator-characters. By applying the textual methodology of close reading and anchored on American Formalism, particularly on the tenets of Robert Kellogg and Robert Scholes’ nature of the narrative and Percy Lubbock’s craft of fiction, the article argues that spatial and temporal positionality of the character-narrator informs narrative perspective. Aware that the two of the three first person narrators, under discussion in the article, die before their narrative is articulated, the article explores this unconventional first person point of view by making a critical review of Chris Oriko’s complicit positionality to the explosive events of Kangan on the one hand and the ideological idealism of Ikem Osodi on the other to foreground the implausibility of their having to survive the fatalistic logic of the tensions in Kangan, hence their physical vacation of the narrative space, and yet, their retention  as  witnesses to the tragedy.