Summary of the man of the people
Young school teacher Odili narrates this novel about revenge, politics, and corruption in an unnamed African country. Odili lives in the village of Anata. He is unimpressed when his former teacher, Chief Nanga, the current minister of culture, visits Anata on the campaign trail. Odili has reason to believe that Chief Nanga is corrupt, and the objects when the principal asks all the teachers to line up in honor of Chief Nanga's arrival. Despite his misgivings, Odili finds himself charmed by his former teacher, who remembers Odili and recommends him for a civil-service post. Odili confesses that he has recently applied to a post-graduate program in London. It never occurred to him to ask Chief Nanga for help before now, but the minister is more than happy to oblige. He invites Odili to stay with him in the capitol at the end of the school term, two months from then. Odili accepts only to turn around and take an interest in Chief Nanga's girlfriend, Edna, who is engaged to be the chief's second wife. Odili is himself the son of a second wife. His mother died in childbirth, leaving Odili to be raised by his father's first wife, whom everyone calls Mama. Prior to retirement, Odili's father was a powerful man, a district interpreter who liaised between the white officials and the villagers. Now his father has more wives and children than he can feed on his pension, and Odili is shocked when his father decides to take a fifth wife. Father and son can't see eye to eye. Odili proceeds to the capital, where Chief Nanga and his first wife greet him warmly.
Soon after Odili's arrival, Chief Nanga takes him to see Chief Koko, the minister of overseas training, who can help Odili get into the post-grad program in London. During their visit, Chief Koko exclaims that he has been poisoned, but in reality, his chef has merely served him a different brand of coffee—one produced locally. Odili finds this funny, given that the government has been trying to get people to buy local products. When Odili wakes up the next morning, Chief Nanga has already left for the office. Mrs. Nanga and her children are going to visit her family and will be gone for a couple days. This gives Odili time to arrange a meeting with Elsie, a nurse, whom he met while she was engaged to be married and in nursing school. Their relationship is casual, and he hopes to invite her over to have sex, nothing more. It isn't difficult to arrange. Before meeting with Elsie, Odili attends a party with Chief Nanga's friends Jean and John, an...Two contrasting groups of people from two generations of politics are represented in two lead characters. Odili Samalu, an idealistic young man has no innocence at all, only a naiveté that makes a farce both of his convictions and his ambition. His father remembers the “days when the District Officer was like the Supreme Deity and the Interpreter the principal minor god who carried prayers and sacrifices to Him.
The pay and fringe benefits were enough to support Odili, 34 other children and five wives in high style, with a goat, killed every week, and lashings of palm wine to wash down the yams. But times change. The white man has gone, and Odili must emerge with his emergent nation and attach himself to black power in the person of a cynical grafter named Chief Nanga. So begins a comedy of Freedom Now. Odili, with his Bachelor of Arts degree, is a potentially valuable proteégé of Chief Nanga who is really most at home in pidgin. As a student, Odili had disapproved of Chief Nanga for his demagoguery and his “ignorance,†but it is hard for a young schoolteacher to feel superior to his old school-and-scoutmaster now that the wily old charmer has a house with seven bathrooms and an official Cadillac with the chauffeur. In the capital, he learns that the chiefs pidgin-speaking “bush wife,†who had once appeared to Odili as “the acme of sophistication†in a white sun helmet, is now seen as a hopeless hick who can’t get the hang of English or even much pidgin and is unable to make the cultural struggle into a girdle. She is about to be supplemented by a “parlor wife.†Odili, a man of many resources, wants this luscious literate for himself, despite the “bride price†being negotiated for her back home in the village by his patron, the gallant and ever-jovial Chief Nanga. Meanwhile, he attends cultural events, not the least of which is a night of instant integration with the wife of a U.S. information officer. Later he joins a reform party to put Chief Nanga and his grafters out of office. It ends not according to the plan. Odili is beaten nearly to death by the chiefs forthright constituents, and it is back to the village for him. But all is well. A military coup deposes Nanga’s gang, and, with a more or less good conscience, the convalescent Odili is able to pay the “bride price†for the now redundant “parlor wife.
He does it from party funds. A Man of the People raised Achebe’s reputation from literary giant to a prophet, perhaps one of doom or more suspiciously a secret bearer of bad news. The book brought controversy when after publication a military coup in his home country Nigeria happened almost according to the end of his novel which put him in a difficult position because he was alleged to have perhaps had an idea that the coup was going to happen. It is said that by the time of publication, everything that happens in the book had already occurred except for a military coup, and indeed it went ahead to happen almost according to the script. However, the author’s literary reputation survived the controversy.
First published in 1966, revised in 1988 and revised again in 1989, few novels in the history of world literature have been so endowed with the power to peek into the future as Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. The novel is utterly uncompromising in its laser-like focus on the profound level of corruption throughout Nigeria in the 1960s. What makes A Man of the People especially effective is the outsider perspective taken by Achebe in illustrating just how profoundly governmental corruption can become an insidious force affecting everyone in the country being run by corrupt government officials. Odili Samalu appears to be just an idealistic educator trying to teach in a world where education is seen primarily as a tool for propaganda. By launching a campaign against M.N. Nanga—the epicenter of Nigerian venality—Samalu also becomes something of a tool for propaganda. The campaign that Achebe allows his idealistic educator to run against Nanga offers him plentiful opportunities to reveal the effect that political corruption has across the board. The expected targets get hit hard and often and with all the justice that they should expect: those characters representing the political actors in the morality play that governmental vice creates as tragedy receive the full brunt of Achebe’s outrage. Less expected, perhaps, is the vitriol that drips from the pages of A Man of the People when the actions focus on everyday Nigerians who seemingly have no hand in the scripting of this tragic narrative. Indeed, what makes A Man of the People achieve its astonishing power is not the manner in which its author illustrates the easy points that bad people in government equals bad government.
The power comes from the way he insists on reminding the reader that when bad people do bad things with the willing complicity of a public unwilling to fight back, that public has lost the right to complain. What makes the novel such a prime example of the author as an oracle of the future is how the book ultimately concludes with a military coup that does little to solve the problem of corruption for the long term. Just a few short months before publication, the exact same string of events actually occurred in real-life Nigeria as the army seized control in a military coup that has done very little in the long, long term to challenge the deep-rooted corruption in Nigerian politics.
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