Political Alienation in Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People
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Department of English
Abstract
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, the finest Nigerian novelist of the 20th century, draws the
lives and cultures of African people through his writing. He has set this novel, A Man of the
People in the post-colonial period in an independent African country. In the novel, Achebe
shows the social, political and psychological impact of European imperialism on indigenous
African societies. Mainly, he has shown the political degradation in the African country where
the irresponsibility and visionlessness of the leader leads the country into anarchy, chaos and
violence rather than to progress and prosperity. Achebe has depicted the invasion of colonial
remnants in an independent African homeland that leads the country to the political alienation.
Though the empire leaves the country, the psychological components that ruin and rule still
remains at the aftermath of colonialism. Through the narrator Odili and the political leader
Nanga, Achebe shows the limited independent government in which there is neither collective
will in the people nor responsible leadership to redeem the people and their culture. As a
consequence, people are unfamiliar with their culture and they are forced to live in a new form of
slavery, pessimism and degeneration. Rather than having optimistic perspectives towards the
decolonized independent nations, the self-glorifying dictators and their poverty, which are the
common images of the continents.