Self-possession and the crisis of the post-colony in Achebe’s A Man of the People

Abstract

Chinua Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People, portrays a wider range of significant female figures than any other fictional narrative by Achebe. The leading female characters defy literary marginalization because the text humanizes their personal predicaments and validates their choices. As a result, their collective voice is as important to the novel’s themes as the male voice expressed through the two protagonists, Odili Samalu and Chief Nanga. Achebe’s novel suggests that its unnamed post-independent African nation will not fulfil its potential without the tangible evolution of women’s self-ownership and leadership roles. What unifies the roles of leading female characters in the novel, such as Eunice, Mama, Elsie, and Edna, is their ability to seize possession, financially and emotionally, of fundamental elements of their own lives. The opposition between women’s aspirations in A Man of the People and the daunting familial and communal restrictions imposed on women mirrors colonial and postcolonial pressures placed on the newly independent African nation. While the nation may have transitioned politically from a colonial entity to an independent state, the female population is pressured to remain dependent and subject to the norms of patriarchy, a far more primal colonial order than that of Western capitalist domination. Even in the post-independence context, most women exist in a state of collective vassalage: they play subordinate and dependent roles in a post-colony stratified by (among other things) gender. In this context, one of A Man of the People’s notable achievements is to dramatize women’s fashioning of independent economic and social realities despite structures that sustain female subjugation. The novel’s theme of female self-possession is shared in the work of two Igbo and Nigerian-born female authors, Flora Nwapa and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Additional West African authors are considered as well.

Kneel down, kneel down, you are a woman . . . I am a human being. I am not a piece of wood.

— Flora Nwapa (Efuru, 1966)

Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.

— Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing, 2016)

Chinua Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966), depicts a wider range of dynamic female characters than any other fictional narrative by Achebe. ¹ Indeed, the variety and vitality of the women portrayed make the female presence as central to the Nigerian-born author’s purposes as that of the male characters. This is the case even though Achebe’s readers would have to wait until his fifth and final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), to encounter a female character, Beatrice Okoh, who could be classified as a protagonist (along with her two male co-protagonists, Chris Oriko and Ikem Osodi). A Man of the People suggests that its unnamed African nation (a version of post-independence Nigeria) will not fulfil its potential without fundamental socio-political changes, including a tangible evolution in women’s selfhood and leadership roles. The opposition between women’s aspirations and the daunting familial and communal limitations imposed on them mirrors the independence-era struggles that unfold in Achebe’s tale. The title, A Man of the People, while denoting one of the main characters, Chief the Honorable Micah A. Nanga, a corrupt Member of Parliament and Minister of Culture, may hint at a few of the key political and gender-related themes that unfold. A Man of the People asks whether the newly independent African nation belongs to an African male elite (“the Man” of the title that Nanga represents) that has replaced the colonizing males; or to neocolonial interests, represented by (the fictional) British Amalgamated; or to the military, who launch a successful coup d’état at the novel’s end; or to the people themselves (who also are designated in the title). Achebe’s story implies that the last of these are the only rightful possessors of the nation. As will be further discussed, the narrator, Odili Samalu, views democracy and “cleanliness in the politics of our country” (which partly denotes a “moral position”) as “our society’s only hope of salvation” (Achebe, 1966: 131, 129). ² And 21 years later Anthills would render explicitly in Beatrice’s voice the idea that the people in general rather than a small elite are the rightful possessors of their realm: “This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented” (1987: 215). Yet, in practice, the people are dispossessed of their common inheritance and the fulfilment of their talents through “corruption [and] political ineptitude”, terms the author uses in There Was a Country, his final non-fiction volume for the post-independence circumstances that arose in his homeland of Nigeria (2013: 158). Corruption and political ineptitude are the national maladies that A Man of the People explores.

As mentioned above, A Man of the People submits that the political system that would most benefit the people is a “clean[ ]” democracy and that the “coming election”, despite the prospect of violence it entails, augurs a faint hope of the nation’s “salvation” from, among other scourges, the political corruption that siphons wealth from the working and needy majority: “I saw beggars sleeping under the eaves of luxurious department stores” (131, 101, 129, 72). In keeping with the narrative search for fundamental political fairness and reform, the novel also implies that women, while central to the family and larger community, belong as possessions neither to men with authority nor to the nation, but rather to themselves. While the female characters are not the main actors, those on which this study focuses are crucial to the novel, which establishes their subjectivity in the spaces that they do inhabit. This narrative characteristic may be associated with a feminist sensibility, for, as Onyemaechi Udumukwu obsrves, “feminism […] is animated by a desire to reconstruct history in order to reconstitute the woman as subject […]. This implies that the woman is presented or re-presented not as a mere object of history, put at the margin” (2007: 7; qtd. in Nwagbara, 2012: 133). A Man of the People’s leading female characters emerge from the margins precisely because the text humanizes their personal predicaments and validates their choices. Their sympathetic collective voice rivals in significance the insistently egocentric voice of their male counterparts.

The way that the phrase “a man of the people” is applied to Chief Nanga in the novel’s first paragraph implies the desirability of a politician being “approachable”, of being able to relate to regular folk (1). What we learn, though, beginning on the next page, is that Nanga is not really a man of the people even though he is charismatic and at times approachable. He uses his position and corrupt methods to enrich himself with, at best, slight benefit to his constituents. ³ So the phrase, “a man of the people”, quickly takes on ironic overtones that may prompt further reflection on the book’s title and content. Why, for example, does the man who leads fail at leadership (that is, to really be a man of the people)? Why does the group of influential men to which he belongs also fail? Why are women excluded from the power elite and subject to (as the story reveals) male control and mistreatment? Aspects of these questions are addressed below, but for the moment it may be noted that while the title implies that the man, or, by extension, the men, in power should be responsive to the will of the people, the socio-political norm in which the people, and women in particular, exist is to serve and enrich the men.

What complicates the situation is that the people tolerate some degree of venality among their leaders, those who have scaled colonial and independence-era barriers to positions of formal power in the post-colony. They do not believe “that a sensible man would spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth” (2–3). That is, if a man has arrived in a privileged position, one should expect him to make the most of it, and so some degree of corruption is only to be expected. Significantly, Achebe had made clear in his second novel, No Longer at Ease, set at the end of the colonial era, that corrupt practices were not simply a matter of African custom: “You think white men don’t eat bribe? Come to our department. They eat more than black men nowadays” (1960/1994: 38). Furthermore, in his memoir, There Was a Country, Achebe remarks that “in a sense Nigerian independence came with a British governor general in command, and, one might say, popular faith in genuine democracy was compromised from its birth. Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule” (2013: 51). Despite these circumstances, A Man of the People suggests not only that the new nation deserves a “clean” democracy, but also that the nation belongs to men and women alike and, moreover, that women belong to themselves. At the same time, the novel recognizes that the female share in the possession of the nation, and the very idea of female self-possession, has been culturally proscribed. Women are discouraged and prevented in the world of the novel from owning themselves, and the diverse ways in which this discouragement is expressed should be noted. A Man of the People examines a spectrum of relationships involving women, including ones governed by traditional practices of polygamy and bride-price, and ones governed by contemporary and Western-influenced attitudes. Yet, whichever norms are in place, women in the novel tend to face obstacles in realizing the selfhood and autonomy needed to direct their own lives, much less the life and direction of the post-colony. And while a prevailing independence-era concept was that the “project of liberation for women […] had to defer to the men’s project of achieving national liberation” (Harrow, 2008: iv), A Man of the People suggests that suppression of women’s manifest potential thwarts both their own capabilities and those of the nation at large.

In the opening paragraph of his article, “The sex of omission: Obscured feminism in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People”, Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi

refutes the common assertion that Chinua Achebe does not represent women as active participants in his portrayed communities until in his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah. […] A Man of the People foregrounds a taxonomy of women contesting multiple forms of subordination […] [and] dramatizes the material conditions of such reduced opportunities. [It includes] a spectrum of plainspoken, self-possessed women. (2017: 88–89) ⁴

No doubt the novel’s female characters’ self-reliant and dignified qualities do impart to them qualities of self-possession. Yet the very “material conditions” that Osinubi mentions repeatedly obstruct women’s practical and full possession of their own work and choices. These conditions of law and culture assign possession of a female to her fathers and husbands so that when push comes to shove, a man has tangible authority over a woman’s work and choices. This will be further considered below in relation to A Man of the People, but for the moment it will be helpful to note two other literary illustrations of this idea of a man’s possession and the authority it confers on him. In Igbo-born novelist Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, the protagonist, Nnu Ego, testifies in a late colonial court in Lagos that her husband “‘Nnaife is the head of the family. He owns me, just as God in the sky owns us. So even though I pay the fees, yet he owns me. So in other words he pays” (1979: 217). The leverage in marriage that such a culturally sanctioned sense of ownership gives husbands carries over into twenty-first century New York City in Imbolo Mbue’s novel Behold the Dreamers. The central couple, Neni and Jende Jonga, are of the Bakweri people of Cameroon rather than the Igbo of Nigeria, but similarities are evident in the context of marriage. Jende is not able to pay Neni’s bride-price until after he moves to New York. After Neni, along with their young son, joins him there, she studies to become a pharmacist, and becomes pregnant again. They fight because Jende “decide[s]” that he wants her to stay at home while Neni wishes to continue in school during the pregnancy. Jende explains, “I think it’s going to be best for you and the baby” (2016: 171). Despite Neni’s intense opposition, she capitulates: “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, she cried […] Why are you always acting as if you own me? […] He made decisions for their family. Sometimes he conferred with her about his decisions. Most times he did what he deemed best. Always she had no choice but to obey” (2017: 172). In essential ways Neni is a self-possessed woman, but Jende still believes in his practical possession of her while Neni does not have the cultural leverage to resist this assumption. These are determining factors in Neni’s withdrawal from school.

Achebe’s story, too, delineates obstacles to a woman’s ability to define and pursue identities and courses of action that diverge from the ones assigned to her at birth and overseen by fathers, husbands, and others. Several of the female characters are discouraged from materially possessing themselves. In several cases, the novel’s male characters enjoy a kind of ownership of women, so that the custom of “bride-price” is not merely a ceremonial purchase (141, 148). The discouragement of female autonomy derives from societal assumptions and economic structures that are oriented to appropriating women’s selfhood and labour and to enforcing their dependency on others. These limiting pressures on women in A Man of the People parallel factors, such as the checkered system of governance left by the former colonizers as well as neocolonial inducements, that ensure the post-colony’s dependence on inadequate or external actors who hinder the fulfilment of its potential as an independent entity. At the same time, some of the novel’s women exercise a relatively greater degree of autonomy in the post-independence milieu than what is permitted in the more traditional Igbo cultures portrayed in Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), and his third, Arrow of God (1964).

Multiple commentators have viewed the portrayal of women in Anthills as the author’s great leap forward in female representation, a tendency alluded to by Osinubi, drawing attention to the apparently menial and subservient roles of women in Achebe’s prior novels. In a video interview that focuses on Things Fall Apart, the author maintains that his dramatization of the unequal treatment of women in that book is rooted in the Igbo culture that he portrays and is exactly what he tried to show (1999: n.p.). Eustace Palmer makes much the same point — that Achebe offers an authentic representation of women’s existence in traditional Igbo communities (1983: 38–39; qtd. in Agbasiere, 2004: 359). Yet, while it is true that Achebe’s fiction generally foregrounds men, the author repeatedly attests to the social power and interpersonal skills of women. He does so through such characters as the storyteller, farmer, and market woman, Ekwefi, as well as the prophetess and market woman, Chielo, in Things Fall Apart; the nurse Clara Okeke and the farmer and mentor, Hannah Okonkwo, in No Longer at Ease; and the checkpoint guard, Gladys, in the short story, “Girls at war” (1972). In addition, Things Fall Apart emphasizes the central and sustaining contributions of women through the elderly Uchendu’s remarks — meant to edify, among others, his exiled nephew, Okonkwo — concerning the Igbo proverb, “Nneka, or Mother is Supreme” (1958: 133, 162). Uchendu’s observations embody the deeply rooted tension between the society’s acknowledgement of women’s virtues on the one hand and their social subordination on the other. Remarkably Uchendu even suggests that men should emulate women, that they, too, should be comforters:

“It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut […] Your mother is there to protect you […] And that is why we say that mother is supreme […] Your duty [Okonwko] is to comfort your wives and children and take them back to your fatherland after seven years.” (1958: 134)

Another dimension of Things Fall Apart’s affirmation of feminine strength is expressly acknowledged decades later in Anthills of the Savannah when Beatrice associates herself with the earlier novel’s priestess, Chielo: “As a matter of fact I do sometimes feel like Chielo in the novel, the priestess and prophetess of the Hills and the Caves” (1987: 105). Whether or not Beatrice may be regarded literally as a prophetess, she articulates the need for women to exercise greater political agency in Africa’s future socio-political order, a kind of agency denied to previous generations of women. On the other hand, Beatrice, in her courage and resilience, also represents an extension of an array of earlier Achebe women. This article considers ways in which A Man of the People’s female figures likewise display such qualities of courage and resilience.

As suggested above, the diversity in the novel’s portrayal of women is achieved not only through the range of character types and actions, but also through the women’s varied social circumstances. Some of the female characters’ lives, for example, are conducted as if little in West African societies had changed from precolonial times, while numerous Western influences and features of modernity, from British education to technological amenities, are integral to the lives of others. Still, what unifies the novel’s leading women is their ability to seize possession, financially and emotionally, of fundamental elements of their own lives. Some acts of self-assertion by A Man of the People’s women may be viewed, indeed, as a breakthrough for Achebe’s characterizations and West African fiction in general. Kenneth Harrow contends that until the publication of Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1979), the presentation of “mature” women in African literature was characterized by “women’s ‘plight,’ that is, as victims” (2008: ii). And, while female victimization is inescapable in patriarchy, as A Man of the People acknowledges, its women generally circumvent victimization and chart courses most likely to satisfy themselves for their own sake and in relation to those they love.

“Possession”, according to one definition of “the concept […] in law[,] is that, at the relevant time, you intentionally have control over the object in question” (“Possession”, 2004: n.p.). The most dramatic portrayal in A Man of the People of a woman seizing possession of her life rather than submitting to control — and thereby mere victimhood — at the hands of masculine authority occurs toward the end of the novel when lawyer and political activist, Eunice, shoots and kills the corrupt Minister for Overseas Training, Chief Simon Koko. A member of Chief Nanga’s political party, the ruling People’s Organization Party (POP), Chief Koko, with his henchmen, has just assassinated Eunice’s fiancé, Max Kulamo, by running him over in one of Koko’s cars, in the process missing Eunice “by a few inches” (144). Chief Koko attacks Max because of his work for candidates of a new party, the Common People’s Convention (CPC), in the coming election, despite accepting Koko’s bribe to not stand in the election against Koko himself. Once Eunice shoots Koko, she is surrounded by his goons, underscoring the grave danger that her action entails. Eunice’s homicidal act is represented as shocking but admirable by the narrator, Odili Samalu, whose reflection on the assassination of Max and Eunice’s revenge brings A Man of the People to a close. “In such a regime”, Odili remarks of the democratically elected but corrupt POP government recently overthrown by the military, “you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest — without asking to be paid” (150).

Eunice’s shooting of Minister Koko helps spark a wave of political violence that results in a coup d’état (144, 145, 148). The new military regime, ostensibly attempting to correct political corruption, sees fit to “release Eunice from jail and pronounce [her murdered fiancé] Max a Hero of the Revolution” (148). While Eunice’s killing of Chief Koko is unplanned, she has certainly been working for political change in her land. Having attended the London School of Economics, Eunice, like Max, is a founding member of the CPC, a left-leaning political party created to challenge the two corrupt but most powerful parties (POP and PAP) of the post-independence nation (78). To at least some considerable extent her life as a woman has not been defined by patriarchal power, but that situation is threatened through the intrusion of Chief Koko and his henchmen. Yet her rejection of their control in the killing of Koko not only has a far-reaching impact on the political landscape, but it also likely represents more decisive political change in the short term than her political activism would have accomplished. In effect, Eunice dispossesses a corrupt political party of its hold on governmental power and signifies that women can be decisive agents in the political destinies of their nations. This is not to say that Achebe expressly advocates homicidal violence or military coups to resolve electoral turmoil. Rather he shows that political corruption incites violence and that women like men may resort to physical aggression when pushed beyond endurance.

After the murders of Max and Chief Koko in A Man of the People, the military coup that quashes the political disorder appears almost as a favourable development. The view offered by the army and accepted by the credulous public is that a stand against rampant political corruption had to be taken. Nevertheless, prior to the takeover, Odili expresses his hope that the nation should enter “a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country” (131). He believes the most desirable national outcome is one in which a healthy democracy, rather than official corruption or military rule, prevails. Eunice works for that outcome nearly until the story’s close, exhibiting a scope of action, partly derived from her educational attainment, that the novel’s other African-born females do not share. However, her life and work become entangled in the violence that ensues from the nation’s political morass. Eunice’s story illustrates the practical impact that a woman may have on the national stage while disclosing, too, the nation’s complex perspective on women’s roles.

This perspective is partly reflected in Odili’s second-hand description (based on another CPC member’s account) of the murder of Max by Chief Koko’s gang and of Eunice’s act of retribution:

[A]s soon as [Max] alighted from his car, one of chief Koko’s jeeps swept up from behind, knocked him over and killed him on the spot.

The police, most of whom turned out to be disguised party thugs, performed half-hearted motions to arrest the driver of the jeep but Chief S. I. Koko came forward and told them not to worry; he would handle the matter himself. Eunice had been missed by a few inches when Max had been felled. She stood like a stone figure, I was told, for some minutes more. Then she opened her handbag as if to take out a handkerchief, took out a pistol instead and fired two bullets into Chief Koko’s chest. (143–44)

Eunice’s desperate action entails heightened drama because physical violence stands as a male prerogative elsewhere in the novel, and because, in the deed’s aftermath, Eunice’s own life would appear to hang in the balance as she finds herself at the mercy of Chief Koko’s thugs. At this point in his narration, however, Odili ignores these men, negotiating instead his apparent discomfort with an admirable female character turning homicidal. He hastens to mention that after slaying Chief Koko, Eunice modulates into more suitably ‘feminine’ traits: “Only then did [Eunice] fall down on Max’s body and begin to weep like a woman; and then the policemen seized her and dragged her away. A very strange girl, people said” (144). As Odili spins it, Eunice transitions back to a “woman” upon exhibiting signs of inconsolable grief, and then, one sentence fragment later, back to a “girl”. The narrator’s choice of words effectively effaces the concepts of “killer” and “hero” through the semantics of “woman” and especially of “girl”. ⁵ The latter designation diminishes Eunice and trivializes her enactment of murder for the sake of her slain man. Because Eunice acts violently and succumbs to grief, she is a “strange girl”.

Eunice’s action against the underhanded politician who murders her fiancé is not only violent, but also, and in keeping with commonly accepted norms for men, courageous and perhaps heroic. As previously noted, Eunice shared Max’s agenda for political reform, and her action against Chief Koko dispossesses the nation’s ruling party of its corrupt hold on power. Yet we are not told of any accolades to Eunice, beyond release from prison, whereas Max is “pronounce[d] a Hero of the Revolution” by the new regime (148). This outcome may be determined by the specific circumstances but faintly echoes traditions that celebrate male achievement while neglecting the female contribution. Even Odili’s previously cited final remark, “you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest — without asking to be paid”, though employing the gender-neutral “someone”, may subtly reinforce the restricted valuation of feminine merit — partly because of the context, in which males repeatedly are given priority over the female. Max is presented as the ultimate achiever because he inspired Eunice’s vengeance rather than Eunice herself, the one who, without ulterior motive, exacts a high price on Max’s assailant. From this perspective, the masculine order, channelled by Odili, among others, avoids inclusion of aggressive power exercised by women within the same conceptual realm as that enacted by men. And, as has been seen, it reflexively contests constructions of feminine agency that threaten to do so. Still, Eunice’s self-directed choices in her professional and political life bespeak a practical possession of self that, for women of her society, tends to be discouraged.

It remains the case that at the close of the novel Eunice’s agency is demonstrated through self-sacrifice. A fuller sense of Achebe’s perspective on female self-sacrifice and Eunice may be gained by considering another young female character, Gladys, whom he depicted a few years after the publication of A Man of the People. In his short story, “Girls at war” (1972), Gladys’s sacrifice is even greater than that of Eunice. At the end of the tale, set during the Biafran War, Gladys runs to protect an injured soldier who is no relation to her as an enemy bomber nears. The bomb strikes and both the soldier and Gladys perish, “the entangled remains of the girl and the soldier” causing Gladys’s older, selfish, and less courageous lover, Reginald Nwankwo of the Ministry of Justice, to “let out a piercing cry” (1972: 120). The married Nwankwo’s venality is reflected partly in his chauffeur-driven car that is loaded with the food that others so desperately need, a car in which he picks up the young Gladys rather than an elderly woman. Nwankwo’s recurring thoughts of women such as Gladys as “girls” carry ironic undertones since Gladys is projected as a committed and empathetic adult, rather in contrast to Nwankwo himself. Gladys and Eunice each embody the courage and resolve that a new nation (Biafra in Gladys’s case, the unnamed African nation in Eunice’s) would need from women as well as men to survive and rise. But in both cases women must risk self-destruction after the corrupt male power elite has created insupportable social and political conflict and chaos, that is, when it is “a damn sight too late” (as Beatrice puts it in Anthills) for women to do much more than risk, and even sacrifice, their own wellbeing (1987: 84). ⁶

The figure of Eunice in particular carries forward an enduring story, that of the woman whose assertion of self-possession is expressed, paradoxically, through self-sacrifice, and whose worth is appreciated only in relation to that sacrifice. An essay by George Eliot, which addresses female self-immolation, and which is discussed by critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, highlights the motif’s antiquity. In Gilbert and Gubar’s words, Eliot viewed “Antigone’s revolt against the misogynist King Creon [in Sophocles’ Antigone as] her virginal, voluntary self-entombment” (1984/2008: 494). As the play unfolds the Chorus’s sympathy shifts to Antigone and away from Creon, who imposes the death penalty on her for burying her brother Polynices. This sympathy comes too late to save Antigone, who commits suicide in the cave to which Creon had condemned her. Gilbert and Gubar observe that “Eliot uses [Antigone] to analyze female enthrallment, born of women’s complete dependence on men for self-definition and self-esteem” (1984: 494). The authors argue that certain of Eliot’s own heroines are “modern-day Antigones [who] are lonely, ineffective creatures whose acts of loyalty are invariably suicidal” (1984: 494). For both Antigone and Eunice, loyalty to a beloved male figure is expressed through self-abandonment. Polynices, Antigone’s fallen brother, and Max, Eunice’s fallen fiancé, are the objects of the women’s sacrificial loyalty, while Gladys dies in her effort to save an injured male soldier whom she scarcely knows. Altruism, misguided or otherwise, in relation to a male figure motivates these acts of self-sacrifice, and perhaps not merely altruism but devotion to a man heightens the idea of female heroism. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Cordelia’s heroism is fully appreciated with her death, in consequence of her attempt to help the father who disinherited her and who recognizes her authentic devotion — again, “a damn sight too late”. Giving women their due in the male-privileged environment is often a belated event, if it occurs at all. While Eunice does not actually die in A Man of the People, in contrast to the other female characters considered here, she does risk her life and for a time loses her liberty to avenge her fiancé’s murder. Projecting into the future, moreover, she arguably sacrifices some part of an actualized post-prison existence since, her pardon notwithstanding, she may be stigmatized as a woman who has killed. Nonetheless, Achebe’s portrayal of Eunice and her impact on national affairs represents a forward-looking aspect of A Man of the People’s female characterizations insofar as its assertion of the feminine role in the politics of a modern nation would become a vital component of the later portrayal of female characters in African literature.

In her article “Adichie’s genealogies: National and feminine novels”, Susan Andrade traces lines of influence between African authors (especially female ones) while also examining African women writers’ blending of “familial structures” and “the politics of their time” (2011: 92). Andrade invokes such writers as Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, but also discusses Achebe’s influence on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction: “Adichie extends further in 2006 [in the ending of Half a Yellow Sun] what Achebe was able to imagine in 1958 [in the ending of Things Fall Apart]” (2011: 93). In remarking both the growing willingness of African women writers “to represent the nation in explicitly political terms” (2011: 93), as well as the literary inspiration that Achebe provides to Adichie, Andrade’s article, though not mentioning A Man of the People, encourages a further observation concerning that novel’s pivotal literary role. Eunice is one of the first African female characters in the modern anglophone novel to have a direct impact on the political life of a post-independence nation. And the military coup that occurs partly through her vengeance, as well as the prospect that this “coup might be followed by a counter coup and then where would we be?” (148) — circumstances that famously anticipated the actual coup and counter coup in Nigeria that led to the Biafran War — are alluded to in Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), in its representation of Nigeria under General Sani Abacha. Indeed, Andrade cites the very moment in Purple Hibiscus that echoes the military and political events that unfold in A Man of the People’s finale: “Despite Papa’s rigid enforcement of domestic order as others might enforce military discipline, he denounces the coup […]: ‘Coups begat coups’ (24)” (2011: 94). Andrade draws attention to the public–private parallel in Purple Hibiscus between, on the one hand, a military strongman, Big Oga, who postures as a nation’s leader and, on the other hand, an abuser of wife and children, Eugene Achike, who postures as a loving family man. ⁷ For its part Achebe’s novel creates another dubious public–private parallel, that between the corrupt practices of a politician, Chief Nanga, who is meant to work on behalf of the people, and the duplicitous self-indulgence that corrupts his personal relationships (discussed below). The abuses perpetrated by each of these characters stem from their concept of others as personal possessions.

A Man of the People inspects the drive to dominate and possess others that is manifest in post-independence politics and patriarchal privilege. The novel repeatedly questions who owns a woman, and although its responses are given in a single general time frame in a single African nation, they encompass strikingly varied historical and cultural assumptions. ⁸ In analysing the theme of women and possession in relation to Achebe, one may not avoid considering the practice of polygamy. Achebe does not condemn polygamy outright in his fiction. Okonkwo’s three wives in Things Fall Apart, for example, are mutually supportive in their ordeal with his violent temper. That said, in A Man of the People, the author’s representation of polygamy as practised by Odili’s father, Hezekiah Samalu, and as prepared for by Chief Nanga, is decidedly less favourable. Hezakiah has five wives (not including Odili’s mother, who died giving birth to him [28]). But while the five wives cooperate in childcare, Odili associates his father’s large family with personal neglect, for Hezekiah “had too many other wives and children to take any special notice of me” (28). Odili finds, moreover, that his father’s later marriages are unjust to the younger wives and that his 35 children cannot have the attention or the resources for their development that they deserve. It is the work of the women that fills the void. Odili discloses that Hezekiah

right now […] has five wives — the youngest a mere girl whom he married last year. And he is at least sixty-eight. He gets a small pension which would be adequate for him if he had a small family instead of his present thirty-five children. Of course he doesn’t even make any pretence of providing for his family nowadays. He leaves every wife to her own devices. It is not too bad for the older ones like Mama whose grown-up children help to support them; but the younger ones have to find their children’s school fees from farming and petty trading. (30)

The “farming and petty trading” that sustain the younger wives are exactly the kinds of tasks that women would perform in a precolonial Igbo village, as reflected in Things Fall Apart (1958: 13, 22–23, 49). In both settings, a woman’s resourceful, autonomous activity helps compensate for the challenges posed by polygamous constraints. In the later novel a younger wife of Hezekiah also must rely on herself, not on her husband, to ensure that her children with him will go to school. Yet Hezekiah benefits from his technical possession of these wives through marriage — and presumably not merely because they bear and work to support his children, but also because they perform for him domestic chores such as food preparation. ⁹

While female self-reliance is required to meet challenges that Hezekiah’s family faces, women persevere as well through cooperation and emotional support. The eldest wife, Mama, raised Odili “like one of her own children” after his own mother died in childbirth (28). Mama successfully intervenes, moreover, to heal a bitter quarrel between Odili and Hezekiah over the latter marrying the much younger fifth wife. In addition, Mama, along with her husband and Chief Nanga’s prospective second wife, Edna Odo, visits the injured and delirious Odili in the hospital. Although Mama apparently does not exercise the self-interested agency of certain of the novel’s other female characters, who inhabit a more modern milieu, she is empowered and achieves favorable outcomes following a more collectivist code. Odili’s family needs Mama, but in light of Odili’s portrayal of the approximately 70-year-old Hezekiah, including the observation, “all the old man does is buy himself a jar of palm-wine every morning and a bottle of schnapps now and again” (30), one may ask whether Hezekiah’s wives need him as much as he does them. Odili remarks, “We had only one Mama”, to signify her leadership among the wives and children (28), and her role conjures Uchendu’s maxim in Things Fall Apart: “Mother is Supreme”. Yet, while Mama exercises the leadership and empathy that help keep the larger family afloat, Hezekiah possesses the ultimate family authority: “he never tolerated any of his wives drawing a line no matter how thin between her own children and those of others” (28). While Mama’s wisdom, fortitude, and kindness should not be interpreted as a validation of the apparently exploitative polygamy that Hezekiah practises, these qualities would arguably serve the nation better than anything on display from A Man of the People’s male characters. Regarding this and other connections made here between fictional content and the emerging African state, mention may be made of Simon Gikandi’s view that Achebe’s work interweaves narrative content with a vision of possibility for the nation: “in Achebe’s writings, there is a fundamental link between the idea of the nation, the concept of national culture, and the quest for an African narrative. […] Thus, the idea of a national culture that restores dignity to African peoples […] is an important function of Achebe’s narrative and poetics” (1991: 7). The display of leadership qualities by Mama and other females in A Man of the People draws attention to the potential of women beneficially to shape the larger society, but also to the imbalance between that potential and a woman’s practical power in the national, as well as domestic, spheres. This imbalance is correlative to the actual corruption in the novel’s masculinized political sphere.

Gender-based inequities of labour and opportunity associated with polygamy in A Man of the People contribute, moreover, to the novel’s picture of imbalance between the sexes. Not only are wives of Hezekiah adversely affected by these imbalances, but so too is the title-character’s wife, Margaret Nanga. She must endure painful practical and emotional adjustments in anticipation of Chief Nanga’s marriage to a second wife, the young Edna Odo, whom Chief Nanga is grooming to be his “parlour-wife” (1966: 23, 77). According to Odili’s friend and fellow teacher, Andrew Kadibe, Nanga considers Margaret “too ‘bush’” for the kinds of social occasions that a government minister attends (1966: 23). But the likely rationalization embedded in Nanga’s view is implied in its intrinsic paradox: some of the very people who would see Margaret as “too bush” would tend to look askance as well at Nanga’s taking a second, much younger, wife. As Andrew, who is from Nanga’s home village, remarks concerning Edna and Chief Nanga, “I feel sorry for her; that man has no conscience” (23). Parallel to his cultivation of Edna as his parlour-wife, Chief Nanga grooms Odili, his former grammar school pupil, as a political protégé. He invites Odili, who at the story’s outset is a village schoolteacher, to stay at his home in Bori, and raises the possibility of “a strategic post in the civil service” and a “post-graduate scholarship” for him (11–12, 18, 24). This brings Odili into contact with Margaret, whose suffering in anticipation of her altered status Odili witnesses. As Chinyere Nwagbara puts it, Margaret’s “feeling of rejection and loneliness worsens as her husband, Chief Nanga, decides to take a younger wife to fill the social role she is too old to play” (2004: 346). Simultaneously, Margaret expresses empathy for Edna as well as her resolve to accept Edna into her home:

“Edna is falling into the same trap. Imagine a girl straight from college not being allowed to teach even for one year and look around. Anyway what is my share in it? Let her come quick-quick to enjoy Chief Nanga’s money before it runs away.” She laughed bitterly. […] “I won’t spoil anybody’s good fortune […] As soon as [Edna’s] mother recovers let [Edna] come and eat Nanga’s wealth […] Let nobody remember the woman who toiled and starved when there was no money […]” She rubbed her eyes with a corner of her lappa and blew her nose into it. (89–90)

Mrs Nanga will not attempt to thwart Edna’s new life with the Nanga family; her intention is generous but is more or less a function of Nanga’s possession of Margaret, of his ability to determine his outcomes. Meanwhile his use of marriage to make a young woman a prop for his social appearances (among other things), and his expectation that his first wife adapt to sharing her home are expressive of the imbalances A Man of the People ties to polygamy and of Chief Nanga’s drive to possess women.

What causes the rupture in Odili’s relationship with Nanga occurs in the temporarily absent Margaret’s bedroom, adjacent to Nanga’s (68–71). Odili expects to resume intimacy with Elsie, the student nurse who was Odili’s lover during his final term at university. Instead, Chief Nanga avails himself of the opportunity to be with Elsie in his wife’s room. Elsie is undoubtedly aware of the penalties, including male denigration, to which a sexually independent woman is subject, but she ultimately pleases herself in her physical relations. More than once Elsie finds a way to enjoy two men at the same time — the one she is with and the one she imagines. When at university she makes love with Odili for the first time, she repeatedly vocalizes the name of her fiancé, Ralph, a medical student at Edinburgh, and when intimate with Nanga she calls out Odili’s name (24–25, 71). To be sure Elsie’s “namings” on their own do not demonstrate exceptional autonomy, but they do contribute to a portrait of a young woman who repeatedly defies deeply engrained gender norms. ¹⁰ Odili refers to Elsie as “just a good-time girl” and “a common harlot” prior to and subsequent to that intimacy (60, 72), and, in a heated exchange with Odili, Nanga dismisses her as “a common woman” (74). ¹¹ In characterizing Elsie, certain commentators follow the lead of Odili’s and Nanga’s degrading epithets for her, but this is to participate in their self-serving bias, for Elsie exhibits the very qualities of sexual autonomy and self-possession that each of these male characters find worthy in a man (24, 60). Such a gender-based distinction, wherein a sexually aggressive man shows “prowess” and a woman is “a common slut”, terms Odili as narrator uses in precisely this fashion (1966: 25, 70), epitomizes the familiar double standard that Achebe submits for consideration, and ultimately challenges, in A Man of the People. Women in the novel repeatedly transgress the approved societal formulae for modest and submissive conduct. While Elsie’s sexual encounter with Chief Nanga partly is the product of his carefully manoeuvred seduction of her, it should also be noticed that the process is reciprocal, and that Elsie likewise seduces him. ¹² She sympathetically participates in Nanga’s banter, laughs at his humorous remarks, sits between him and Odili in his chauffeur-driven Cadillac — and possesses him. The attraction that she exerts on Nanga, moreover, prompts him to violate the relationship that he has fostered with Odili.

The reversal in Nanga’s fortunes commences with this violation. The triangle comprising these three characters shifts into the competition between Nanga and Odili for a privileged relationship with Edna Odo — a competition that Nanga loses. Odili initially pursues Edna with the purpose of avenging himself against his former patron for the betrayal with Elsie. Later, he finds, no doubt with a degree of rationalization, that he “lov[es] Edna” and “want[s] Edna now (if not all along) for her own sake first and foremost and only very remotely as a general scheme of revenge” (1966: 109–10). In the latter half of the novel, before Nanga and other members of the government are jailed in the aftermath of the coup, Edna quietly conveys to Odili the affection that he has sought and in the process determines which man she will join, as Elsie has done before her. For Edna the pressure to choose someone to marry is unavoidable given her father’s profitable arrangements with Chief Nanga. Despite her father threatening physical violence against her over any connection to Odili (108), Edna lets Odili know with a look that she is warming to him after his recent attentions to her, ostensibly on behalf of her ailing mother (108–109), and afterwards writes him an affectionate letter (111–12). Later, during one of Nanga’s political rallies, after Nanga learns of Odili’s pursuit of his parlour-wife to be, Edna attempts to stop him from repeatedly slapping Odili while Nanga’s thugs hold Odili’s arms; Nanga then “pushe[s Edna] aside so violently that she landed on her buttocks on the wooden platform” (141). After the henchmen viciously beat Odili, he is taken to hospital, where Edna twice visits his room. On the first of these occasions, with Odili sunk in delirium, she stays the entire night. During the second visit Edna clarifies for Odili what her feelings toward Nanga have been: “Marry him [Chief Nanga]? To be frank with you I did not want to marry him […] It was only my father” (1966: 146). Shortly afterwards Odili recalls that he “squeezed her hand” and that moments later, “It was Edna’s turn to squeeze my good hand” (147). Later still, after Nanga’s arrest, her father finally agrees to negotiate her marriage to Odili (145–48).

Prior to these events it seems certain that Edna will marry Nanga, but this is circumvented by, among other factors, Edna’s maturation: she becomes more comfortable in the assertion of what she wants for herself. “Perhaps”, as Odili reflects, “she had simply grown a little more since October; whatever the reason she was now a beautiful young woman and not a girl looking as though she was waiting to be taken back to her convent” (92). Edna, in short, has come to “own [her]self a little more”, a term that Adichie connects to Americanah’s female protagonist, Ifemelu (2013: 87). ¹³ She has decided during this period to act according to a principle that in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, the aunt of the protagonist, Olanna, lays down to her niece: “You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man […] Your life belongs to you and you alone, soso gi” (2006: 283). Adichie’s own thematics of possession in respect to women is likely not a gesture of homage to a literary mentor, but rather a sign that any gains women have made in modern Nigeria are precarious, and that the male urge to control remains vital, including among those with extensive formal education. A passage in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, spoken by Ifeoma, a university lecturer and the narrator Kambili’s aunt, reveals that one of Chief Nanga’s methods for taking possession of Edna from her father, that is, paying her school fees, only became more elaborate in later years: “Six girls in my first-year seminar class are married, their husbands visit in Mercedes and Lexus cars every weekend, their husbands buy them stereos and textbooks and refrigerators, and when they graduate, the husbands own them and their degrees” (2003: 75). In the Nanga-dominated environment that Edna and Margaret inhabit, substantial time to grow as an individual, to obtain a fuller education, and thereby to own oneself more fully is precisely what a woman is denied. Margaret recalls to Odili that Chief Nanga “and his people kept at me to marry him, marry him, and then my own parents joined in; they said what did a girl want with so much education? So I foolishly agreed. I wasn’t old enough to refuse” (1966: 89). ¹⁴ Edna likewise is very young and has relatively little education at the time Nanga begins negotiating for her with her father. Achebe leaves no doubt, then, that early marriage, in which the young woman has little if any discretion, including to pursue her education, is detrimental to the fulfilment of her potential in ways meaningful to her.

Achebe’s story implies that Edna, before definitively expressing her interest in Odili, has needed to internalize that her pending marriage to Chief Nanga does not augur well for her. In her situation, as the daughter of poor villagers (95), the realization has not been easy. Making matters more difficult, Nanga is used to getting what he wants in various spheres. He is among those who comprise the group of independence-era leaders who inhabit the neocolonial space that theorist Frantz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth: individuals who selfishly pursue their own advantage rather than that of their nation. Fanon remarks that “the national middle class disappears with its soul set at peace into the shocking ways — shocking because anti-national — of a traditional bourgeoisie” (1963: 152–53). Chief Nanga has used his governmental position and mutually beneficial relations with foreign companies — British Amalgamated and Antonio and Sons are the fictional firms mentioned — to enrich himself and to build in his home village a new four-floor home next to the one he already has there (43, 97, 101, 127–28). Odili describes Nanga’s other residence, the one in the capital city of Bori, as “a princely seven bathroom mansion” (41). As with homes, so with women. According to Odili, Nanga is “a man who had so many women ready to make themselves available” (62) and has “five stories to every one of mine” involving “tales of [female] conquest” (60). In trying, moreover, to placate Odili after sleeping with Elsie, Nanga makes an offer of young women: “If you like, I can bring you six girls this evening” (73–74). In gaining independence, then, from the philandering government minister who has paid her “bride-price […] education and other incidentals”, Edna Odo decolonizes herself (148).

She transitions from viewing the married Chief Nanga as her future husband, a circumstance chosen for her, to viewing the single Odili that way, a circumstance she chooses for herself. In doing so Edna asserts that she — not her father, not her other family members, not her social circle, and implicitly not even her new fiancé — has the right to control her life. This transition signifies one woman’s passage from subalterneity to independent agency. Gayatri Spivak contends that “If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (1995: 28). Spivak’s remark indirectly suggests why Edna’s rejection of Chief Nanga is especially resonant. Edna insists that it is her right not to exist in the shadow of Chief Nanga in the years ahead. Her subordination to the later liberation from Nanga heightens our identification with the women and men of the new nation, as a grasping male power elite threatens to ruin it. Even so, Edna’s defiant self-empowerment may be traced to generations of women whose personal strength Achebe attests in his portrayal of traditional village characters like Mama, Ekwefi, and Hannah Okonkwo.

Here one also may note Efuru, the title character of the novel by Achebe’s Igbo contemporary, Flora Nwapa. ¹⁵ The claim by Efuru, a pre-Nigerian independence market woman, to her right to self in the face of social pressures bears some resemblance to Edna’s. Efuru twice chooses the man she wishes to marry and twice claims the right to exist as her own person rather than as the possession of those husbands. Efuru is mistreated by both, and after making considerable allowances for the two, she leaves them and returns to the home of her father (who in the second instance already has died). Efuru compares her abandonment by her first husband to the ultimate loss of possession of self to another: “Adizua has treated me shabbily. He has treated me only the way slaves are treated. God in heaven will judge us” (1966: 58). Efuru secures her independence from the husbands, but in returning to her father’s home she also abides by the traditional imperative that a woman be subject to a male relative’s authority — or indeed ownership. (This of course is a symbolic gesture the second time.) Similarly, in No Longer at Ease, Edna quits the man who paid her bride-price. However, the cause does not appear to be Nanga’s mistreatment of her (such as the pushing incident), but rather, among multiple factors, her disinclination to be with him and her disdain for his corrupt wealth: “He is no better than any bush, jaguda man, with all his money” (1960/1994: 146). Another cause, of course, is that Edna is drawn to the much younger Odili. In choosing him as her partner, Edna “owns herself a little more”, refusing, as Efuru does, to be treated as a slave by a man.

Efuru may have been the first novel to be published by a Nigerian woman (Achebe, 2013: 112), but it is far from the case that women’s contribution to African literature was minimal until that point. As Achebe declares in his memoir:

The literary harvest from Africa today owes a great debt to female African intellectual forerunners. These griots, orators, and later writers played an indispensable role in recording, molding, and transmitting the African story. By boldly mixing numerous African and Western literary traditions in a cauldron, seasoning them with local color, and spicing their tales with the complexity of the human condition, modern women wordsmiths have deepened our understanding. (2013: 112)

And long before Achebe wrote these words, he embodied them in his work, for in his fiction women have a place among the storytellers. Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease each includes a scene in which a mother, Ekwefi and Hannah, respectively, tells a folktale to her child. These folktales and their transmission from mother to child correspond to Achebe’s own observation in “Africa and her writers” that “Our ancestors created their myths and legends and told their stories for a human purpose (including, no doubt, the excitation of wonder and pure delight) […] Their artists created their works for the good of that society” (1973: 29). Ekwefi and Hannah share in the fulfilment of this purpose, embodying a cultural attitude that children benefit from learning some part of their community’s cultural tradition. In paying tribute to the role of women in Igbo storytelling, Achebe represents women as possessors of a narrative tradition while his own portrayal of women, including in A Man of the People, pushes back against traditional views of women themselves as possessions, as slaves to normative repression and exploitation.

Pushing back in this way, A Man of the People interrogates the economic and political dangers faced by a post-independence nation as it attempts to rise both from foreign oppression and from dependence on the former rulers. Although the two most prominent characters of A Man of the People, Odili and Chief Nanga, are men, collectively the female characters, such as Eunice, Mama, Margaret, Elsie, and Edna, play at least as essential a role. Against the restrictive codes imposed on them, Achebe depicts female resourcefulness, cooperation, and compassion, qualities that enable them to survive and sometimes emerge from subjugation. Still, Achebe makes clear that while colonial rule has been rejected, the female population generally remains subject to a primordial type of colonialism based on gender. ¹⁶ The novel’s insistent reminder that women manage to fashion self-directed economic and social realities despite structures that maintain female subjugation and dependency is of enduring value.

A Man of the People posits that the future success of the independent nation depends on honouring the aspirations and independent agency of women. Its portrayal of women inescapably reflects on the new nation’s political welfare. Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo enlarges this connection, maintaining that the status of women is directly related to prospects for modern Africa to come into its own:

When people ask me rather bluntly every now and then whether I am a feminist, I not only answer yes, but I go on to insist that every woman and every man should be a feminist — especially if they believe that Africans should take charge of our land, its wealth, our lives, and the burden of our own development. Because it is not possible to advocate independence for our continent without also believing that African women must have the best that the environment can offer. (qtd. in Allan, 1993: 173–74)

In other words, as Tuzyline Jita Allan puts it, “Aidoo believes that post-independence Africa cannot afford to ignore women if it wants to succeed in nation rebuilding” (1993: 173). In contemplating the fate of the African nation, A Man of the People exposes attitudes and conventions that thwart the potential of women’s wellbeing along with their capacity to help the nation to succeed, to raise the lot of women and men alike. The novel suggests that the nation and its communities will be better positioned to flourish when a woman is able — indeed, enabled — to belong to herself.