Post-Colonial Disillusionment in Achebe’s A Man of the People

Abstract

Albert Chinuaulmogu Achebe, widely known as “the father of the African Novel in English”, portrays the lives and culture of African people through his writing. In the novel, A Man of the People, Achebe shows values and norms of the colonized society and social and psychological impact of European imperialism on indigenous African societies. The novel is set in the postcolonial period in an independent African country. Similarly he has shown the independent government and the quality of the leader, who leads the country into anarchy, chaos and violence rather than progress and prosperity. Through the narrator Odilli and the political leader Nanga, Achebe picturises the limited independence where the governance is nominally in the hands of the people, there is neither collective will in the people nor responsible leadership to redeem the people and their culture from the colonial impacts. As a result, the people cannot identify their culture and try to mime others, and they are forced to live in a new form of slavery, pessimism and degeneration. Rather than having optimistic perspectives toward the decolonized independent nations, Achebe highlights the negativities such as corrupt politics, the self-glorifying dictators and their poverty, which are the common images of the continents. Achebe seems to be saying that there is always degeneration either in political or in social level of the Third World nations. But his interest is in the failures and the tragic destinies of his heroes, for out of their failures new possibilities will arise.