REVIEW ESSAY: FICTION AS POLITICAL THOUGHT

Abstract

THE LITERATURE of a society tells us much about its culture, soeial structure and even politics. Indeed, the fietion of a certain eountry, eulture or period may reveal more of its values, customs, confliets, stresses, changes and transformations than does all the formal scholarship of historians and social scientists. In particular, fiction may give us special insights into how culture and history intersect with and reshape, or are reshaped by, the lives of people, ordinary and extraordinary. For these reasons, literature may provide a precious and indispensable window into a society, a people and an era. But fiction is more than a passive reflection of society and history. It is also an active influence, reinforeing or refashioning values, beliefs, ideas, perceptions and aspirations. The teller of a story can beeome a powerful force in shaping the way a people think about their social and political order, and the nature, desirability and direction of change. Among other things, literature may affeet the way people think about politics, the way they perceive their political system, and the approach they embrace to the challenge of political change. The novel, then, may be an agent of political culture, and the novelist a political philosopher and teacher. It is my premise here that Chinua Achebe has assumed this role quite selfconsciously in his biting and brilliant new novel, Anthills of the Savannah. For Anthills is more than a portrait of the pervasive corruption of power and responsibility in Nigeria and throughout Black Africa. It is more than a merciless depiction of the vanity, immorality and destructiveness of dictatorship; more than a punishing satire on the bankrupt syeophancy of those elites (not least the intellectuals) who serve the dictator; more than another classic story of power gone mad and terribly wrong. It is all of these, to be sure. And these reflections of Africa's sad plight themselves carry a powerful political message. But there is also here a chilling measure of anticipation and forewarning of the dangers of unaecountable and repressive power. There is a blunt and stunning denunciation of the false promise of revolution, and a sobering and deflating exposure of the naivete in the image of the 'the people' as some great pure conscious mass who have been