Abstract
This article examines power play and gendered space in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah through the lens of cultural materialism. Set in the fictional West African state of Kangan, the novel dramatises Nigeria’s postcolonial politics of female subjugation under military dictatorship. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s theory of cultural materialism, Foucauldian power analysis, and feminist aesthetics, the study argues that Achebe’s portrayal of Beatrice Nwanyibuife — meaning “A female is also something” — represents a decisive shift from his earlier novels, inscribing women as central agents of social change rather than peripheral figures. The article contends that the novel’s feminist narrative challenges patriarchal arrangement, state violence, and class domination in postcolonial Nigeria.
Keywords: Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, feminism, cultural materialism, power, postcolonial Nigeria, Beatrice, gendered space
Introduction
The setting of Anthills of the Savannah is Kangan, an imaginary country in West Africa, where Sam, a Sandhurst-trained military officer — also known as His Excellency, has taken the rein of power by coup d’état. There is a distancing of authorial voice via the use of varied narrative channels, multiple point-of-views; while at the same instance, Achebe orchestrates his social vision for postcolonial Nigeria, which is in the throes of prebendal pillage and misguided leadership. The national tragedy — considered as the gist of this fictive work is principally relayed by three friends: Ikem, Chris and Beatrice. The intricate postcolonial malaise is captured here by Beatrice:
For weeks and months after I had definitely taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on I still could not find a way to begin. Anything I tried to put down sounded wrong — either too abrupt, too indelicate or too obvious — to my middle ear. (82)
Power Play and Military Dictatorship
The portraiture of Sam depicts him as a military dictator and inept leader, who relies on brute force, hegemony and violence to consolidate his leadership and power base. Also, he considers the state machinery as a private estate — that ought to be used for the institutionalisation of mediocrity, private interest and above all materialist pursuits. The atmosphere in the novel invokes political buccaneering and crude use of force characteristic of the Third Reich.
In congruence with this position, Chidi Maduka in his article entitled “Chinua Achebe and Military Dictatorship in Nigeria: A Study of Anthills of the Savannah”, insightfully paints the same picture: “Sam is a power seeker who ruthlessly silences opposition in order to show that he constitutes a formidable power base capable of resisting the assault of political opponents” (Udumukwu 2007: 68).
Theoretical Clarifications: Cultural Materialism
Cultural materialism is the theoretical framework upon which this study is built. Attempts to negate the contradictions posed by gendered society as well as patriarchal sanctioned power relations in our world, is steeped in cultural resistance dialectics. As a theory, cultural materialism was first introduced by the American anthropologist, Martin Harrris in his seminal work, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968). But the thesis was refurbished by the Welsh cultural theorist and leftist, Raymond Williams, as he incorporated it into literary criticism.
For Williams, cultural materialism “is the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production” (1984: 210). Put simply, cultural materialism is the materialist exploration of culture; it is a system through which social order is experienced, reproduced and communicated.
Achebe’s Women and Feminist Aesthetics
Achebe’s aesthetic preoccupation in Anthills of the Savannah is steeped in the philosophy of redeeming women from the postcolonial Nigerian trammels. Similarly, in Achebe: New Perspectives, Umelo Ojinmah contends that “Achebe believes that the time is now for the new nations of Africa to invoke the female principle…” (103). This artistic sensibility in the novel crystallises in the characterisation of Beatrice, a major character in the novel. She exemplifies Achebe’s commitment to giving meaning to womanhood as against what traditional values and arrangement offered.
Beatrice Nwanyibuife is an independent woman. Her characterisation smacks of the balance that Okonkwo (in Thing Fall Apart) and other female characters lack in Achebe’s earlier works. Achebe’s aesthetic and ideological contributions to the whole arsenal of debates to rid our world of gender chauvinism — and to make it freer and more humane find accommodation in Anthills of the Savannah.
The State, Violence and Women: Feminist Resistance Narrative
The history of Nigerian State since political independence has been shaped and sustained by violence. The colonial administrative mechanism and structure underpin this logic. In Kangan, the government in power is a military one, whose stock in trade is to use brute force and violence to sustain its structures.
In all of Achebe’s works before Anthills of the Savannah, there is a palpable aesthetics of violence — beginning with Okonkwo’s beating of Ojiugo to other crude and violent treatment of women by men in other works. But there is an overt change of gear in Anthills of the Savannah — where Achebe envisions an idea of women which ensconces respect for the women as well as recognition of their identity.
Power Play and “Nwanyibuife” Dialectics
Morphologically, “Nwanyibuife” is constitutive of triadic entities (morphemes). By transliteration, “nwanyi” means “woman”; the second is “bu”, meaning “is”; while the third morpheme is ‘ife’, and this means “something”. Creatively, this word has aesthetic, linguistic, ideological and political undertones. This aesthetic, ideological characterisation crystallises in Beatrice, Achebe’s symbol of contemporary womanhood. Her persona in the novel evokes sense of renewed and liberated womanhood — a departure from the marooned and exploited women of the old.
Conclusion
It is pertinent to restate at this point that the issues of power play and gendered universe as argued in this study are thereby inconceivable without the inscriptions and mediations of cultural materialist criticism. Anthills of the Savannah is a piece of fiction centred on power play in the gendered postcolonial Nigeria, where women have been kept at the zero level for a long time. The patriarchal tendency to de-emphasise women’s true worth and the historical damage done to their rights and power have been given expression in Sheila Rowbotham’s A Century of Women: “Women’s history has been part of a pervasive impulse …” (1997:3).
Works Cited
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