Name: Anthills of the Savannah
ISBN: 9780141906744

Chinua Achebe

'[The writer] in whose company the prison walls fell down' - Nelson Mandela. After a long silence Achebe published in 1987 what many see as his greatest work - an acrid, frightening look at oil-boom Nigeria, a world of robberies, road blocks and intimidation in which those who are meant to be protecting a country's citizens are in reality supervising the looting.

Anthills of the Savannah

Marion

Man's best artifice to snare and hold the grandeur of divinity always crumbles in his hands, and the more ardently he strives the more paltry and incongruous the result. So it were better he did not try at all; far better to ritualize that incongruity and by invoking the mystery of metaphor to hint at the most unattainable glory by its very opposite, the most mundane starkness - a mere stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl containing fingers of chalk.

The prime failure of this government began also to take on a clearer meaning for him. It can't be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable; it isn't the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it isn't even this second-class, hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students and the destruction and banning thereafter of independent unions and cooperatives. It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation's being.

Annotation Achebe writes of the old Africa and the new, tribal warfare and the war that goes on in people's hearts. His story takes place two years after a military coup in the mythical West African state of Kangan, and shows the transformation of a brilliant young.

Tough reading at start, was abit difficult to follow up with various time jumps and characters but it got better at the end.