Abstract
As Chinua Achebe’s most contemporary and most sharply political novel, A Man of the People1 was a scandal from the outset. With its scathing appraisal of Nigerian public life, and apparent call for a military takeover, the text became notorious in January 1966 for predicting the army coup which took place only hours after the novel’s launch. This violent anti-corruption purge, carried out by a group of nationalist army officers, marked the beginning of a major power struggle in the region which culminated in the Biafran war.
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Notes
Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (London: Heinemann, 1966).
Tony Hall, interview with Chinua Achebe, ‘I Had to Write on the Chaos I Foresaw’, Sunday Nation (Nairobi), 15 January 1967, 15–16, reprinted in Bernth Lindfors, Conversations with Chinua Achebe (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 23.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958).
Robert Wren, Those Magical Years (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1991)
Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe: a Biography (Oxford: James Cuney, 1997), 109.
Bemth Lindfors, ‘Achebe’s African Parable’, in C.L. Innes and Bemth Lindfors, eds, Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (London: Heinemann, 1979), 248–54.
Ossie Enekwe, ‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’, Okike, 30 (1990), 129–31
Bemth Lindfors, Ian Munro, Richard Priebe and Reinhard Sander, ‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’, Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas (Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, 1972), reprinted in Lindfors (1997), 27–34
Chinua Achebe, ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, New Statesman (London), 29 January 1965, reprinted in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 40–1.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968).
Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991), 7.
Chinua Achebe, ‘English and the African Writer’, Transition, 4, 18, (1965), 27.
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991).
Jürgen Habermas (1962), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere’, New German Critique, 3 (Fall 1974), 50.
Umelo Ojinmah, Chinua Achebe: New Perspectives (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991).
Benedict Njoku, The Four Novels of Chinua Achebe: a Critical Study (New York: Peter Lang, 1984).
Ngugiwa Thiongo, ‘Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People’, in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1972), 51–4.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), 119.
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983).
Joe E. Obi, Jr, ‘A Critical Reading of the Disillusionment Novel’, Journal of Black Studies, 20, 4 (June 1990), 399–413.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 120–1.
Chinua Achebe, ‘The African Writer and the Biafran Cause’ (1969), in Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), 78–84
Chinua Achebe (1971), Beware, Soul Brother (London: Heinemann, 1972).
Chinua Achebe, Girls at War (London: Heinemann, 1972).
Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann, 1987).
See, for example, Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1983).
Chinua Achebe, ‘Africa and her Writers’, Massachusetts Review, 14 (1973), 617–29
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© 2007 Jago Morrison
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Morrison, J. (2007). Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People: the Novel and the Public Sphere. In: Morrison, J., Watkins, S. (eds) Scandalous Fictions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287846_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287846_7
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