In his conversation with Pa Ahime of Aiyéró, Ofeyi the cocoa promotions man comments on the negative aspects of Alyero's selfsufficiency and stagnation: 'It can prove paralyzing in a crisis, and our generation appears to be born into one long crisis' (Soyinka, Season ofAnomy6). What he is to find out as the crisis of Season of Anomy turns full circle into resolution, or rather to return to the starting point, is that Aiyéró is uniquely vital, flexible, and proactive. Long before the crisis becomes experiential reality, the Aiyéró leaders have divined it and taken measures to influence its course, to try and guide it to a goal of their own determination. In this, the community violates an element essential to its ideology. The community is non-aggressive to the extent that even the use of persuasion to bring others to follow their example is discouraged. According to Ahime, their leader, 'Evangelism is a form of aggression' (6). It will surprise Ofeyi no end when it emerges in the heat of the crisis that the Aiyéró has a nationwide network, with contacts and agents all over the world aiming at a silent revolution in which the nation itself becomes an enlarged copy of Aiyéró. This silent revolution will equally unveil a figure of violence, the 'lone wolf,' Demakin, 'that self-effacing priest of violence' who Ofeyi begins from the moment of their first meeting to refer to mentally as The Dentist' (22). This element of violence he concedes to the Aiyéró is necessary, for the 'Cartel had killers and used them; the Dentist would redress the imbalance, at least to some extent' (23).
The revolution the Aiyéró are planning is needed particularly because of the 'corrupting agency of the Cartel and its many subservient alliances' (22). Ofeyi, first employed as one of their agents, gradually grows in awareness of this corrupting influence. He finds that though the Cartel is a business conglomerate, it is they who appoint and control the government. His own skills as an advertiser are exploited to create a craving among the people for substances they consume believing they are cocoa products. He then attempts to subvert them from within. For Ofeyi, it is in fact a choice between resistance and acquiescence, for the Cartel are unavoidable, being the controlling interest running his country. But they are also individuals, with names, Zaki Amuri, Batoki, Chief Biga, 'and their uniformed stooge' (217). What the Aiyéró had long realized is that the influence of the Cartel is so pervasive and their hold on the people's minds so strong that a successful revolution must be nationwide, beginning at the grassroots, and must have a tried and workable model to replace what is swept away. We may conclude from the long-term nature of their plans and the elaborateness of their network throughout the country that Ahime and the leaders of the Aiyéró have sought to incorporate Ofeyi as a kind of king-pin in their chessboard. In all probability, he is the one to play the leading role in the state structure to follow after the revolution, although Ahime has only let out that they are in search of a 'new Custodian of the Grain,' someone whose role pertains to the internal organization and functioning of the community itself (6). The four individuals who make up the Cartel can be seen in opposition to all the rest of the people they intimidate and exploit. But they are seen in clear opposition to people like Ahime and Ofeyi, who have no personal interests as such to serve, except social justice and the wellbeing of the commonwealth. The Cartel are not only serving exclusively their own personal, mostly economic interests, but they see the people purely as tools they may use to further these interests. These tools are expendable by being used up. But sometimes scores are killed off in well-staged massacres, others sent to jail and tortured so that the remainder may take note, and mind that the role assigned them in the system is selfless labour. Such controlled upheavals comprise the state of emergency the people have to live permanently under. We have seen in Chapter 6 above that the sorts of individual who escape the power of the normalizing social discourse are hardly in a position to unbalance the system. They do little or no harm. They are strictly individuals, and see themselves as such. Their existence and career do not significantly affect society. But there is a special individual perceived in the Nigerian novel's meditation on history at the place of origin of social crises and convulsions. In Season of Anomy, we have four of such individuals instead of one; but they are often treated as a single individual, the Cartel. More commonly in the novels we shall be seeing here, the sequence centres on one such individual. Despite that we often see him as part of a social convulsion, he is not to be confused with the kind of character we have called, in Chapter 4, the historical individual, an Okonkwo or an Ezeulu, for example. He is what we here designate as the Rough Beast, a figure whose original home is in Yeats's poetry. In the Nigerian tradition, we can trace his movements not only in the novels of social convulsion, but sometimes in the heroic narrative as well. His career seems to go back in fact to the earliest works of the tradition. In Yeats's 'The Second Coming,' from which the head note, and thence the title of Achebe's Things Fall Apart proceeds, anarchy is the consequence of the appearance of the rough beast. Its personal markings are a 'lion body and the head of a man, /A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun;' and its impact is the letting loose of 'the blooddimmed tide,' and the drowning of all 'ceremony of innocence.' These convulsions have the consequence that the best lack all conviction, and the worst are 'full of passionate intensity.' The coming of the rough beast is marked at the socio-political level with war and slaughter; and it has implications at the cultural level as well—the drowning of all ceremonies of innocence. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, is its impact on the consciousnesses of the individuals who survive its passage. The worst become confirmed in their ways, while the best are sifted, as it were, like wheat (Lk 22.3132), and rooted up from their moorings. The result is loss of all selfconfidence among the very people on whom a system depends for stability and for the transmission of the values that characterize it. Anarchy is the outcome. This is how the Nigerian civil war is textualized in many of these novels: anarchy on a vast scale, in terms of social, cultural, and psychological convulsion and utter moral collapse. The novel, of course, has retained this much from its Classical situation (Foucault), as a meditation upon individual history in its relation to the social discourse, that it is unable to think an event as such, except by means of the individual at the heart of it, who brings it about, or whose conditions of existence are affected and blighted by it. Accordingly, even though the phenomenon of war may be seen, for example, in Okpewho's The Last Duty, as itself the rough beast of history, which causes suffering, coarsens and hardens hearts, most of the other sequences developing on that upheaval have an individualized and personalized rough beast. We do not conceive of him as a handy-villain to blame for unpleasant reality; rather it is as though this upheaval is a great chance seized upon by this strange character who always has accompanied history to run free. Peacetime is by contrast for him a time of adversity and constraint, when he is 'straining the leash,' as Nanga and his fellow 'back-bench hounds' in A Man of the People do, while the Prime Minister holds up a chance of overturning good order. As a figure always already at home in the literary tradition, we catch a glimpse of this rough beast in Achebe's Arrow of God, in the person of His Highness Ikedi the First, Obi of Okperi. As soon as this man receives his warrant as a chief, he sets up a machinery for abuse and exploitation of the people, with 'an illegal court and a private prison.' He even takes 'any woman who caught his fancy without paying the customary bride price.' He also organizes 'a vast system of mass extortion' targeting the well-off especially, not because he feels one way or another towards the less well-off, but simply for pragmatic reasons: the money must be collected very quickly and with as little fuss as possible so as not to attract the attention of the colonial administration and its fearsome machinery of law and order. Therefore, it follows that those who have something in store are likely to produce the desired result at short notice if suitable pressure is applied. Ikedi's instrument of intimidation in this affair is a new road project into Okperi, which the villagers are told is going to pass through their compounds, but might be diverted if they made payments (57-58). With this Machiavellian prince, notions of the social contract and values of the common interest are unthinkable. His goal is absolute power, but unlike the prince in Nwankwo's My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours, Ikedi will obtain the money he needs to support this absolute power by extortion. He uses every opportunity he can find to do this, so that the people are reduced effectively to payers of tribute. The illegal court and private prison he has set up comprise the basic infrastructure for the tributary system in the process of formation. But there is a supervisory authority nearby, the white district officer of the colonial administration, overlooking his activities, and this is the only check against his exercise of absolute power. It is in the narrative of this officer who has had occasion once already to pull him up short that we have our glimpse of His Highness Obi Ikedi. Now aware that he is being watched, the chief is proceeding cautiously, trying to cover up his tracks so as not to get into trouble a second time. This rough beast is to some extent under restraint, and unable to rampage free. The supervisory authority is non-existent in Okara's The Voice, allowing Chief Izongo the exercise of absolute power. Until the arrival of Okolo, he is able to carry on as if by common consent. But this is because beginning with his chiefs and extending to the ordinary people, the whole of Amatu has been successfully intimidated and reduced to silent compliance. The chiefs have learned to think his thoughts, smile when he wishes it, and are ready at his bidding to assemble their substance to give a feast for any whim of his. Okolo resists intimidation and declines the offer of a place among the chiefs in exchange for stopping his search for it, and particularly to stop him encouraging the people to join in his search. He piles pressure on Okolo to no avail and finally gives up all pretence of peaceful persuasion, and physically crushes this young rebel. As has become usual with Izongo's people, they anticipate his every move so well that it is as though they are leading, and he obliged to follow. When he has made up his mind how to dispose of Okolo finally, the chiefs and people quickly read it off. They then prepare themselves to carry out the decision by setting the stage and re-enacting the logic and necessity of reaching it: For the men and women had composed a praise song praising him thus: 'Who can Izongo's words face? Nobody! Nobody! Who can Izongo's place take? Nobody! Nobody! Who gets money reach him? Nobody! Nobody! Who is the leopard in this town? Izongo! Izongo! And who is goat in this town? Oko-lo! Oko-lo! Can goat fight leopard? No, no! No, no! (117-118) Izongo's very rampages are democratic. He knows how to get the people to take upon themselves and see themselves as the authors of his very acts of violence. But he does not let them have all the pleasure of carrying out this violence all to themselves. He takes a personal interest. He is there at the head of his mob when they move against Okolo hiding in Tuere's hut. The question of the relationship of rough beasts like Izongo and the people they brutalize comes up several times in Achebe's A Man of the People. But the narrator, Odili—no less cynical than the people he thinks of as 'not only ignorant but cynical,' only that his is of a slightly different order—knows the answer, and does not hesitate to tell. He gives it full airing, as he contemplates his chances against Nanga: What would happen if I were to push my way to the front and up the palm-leaf-festooned dais … and tell the whole people—this vast contemptible crowd—that the great man they had come to hear with their drums and dancing was an Honourable Thief. But of course they knew that already…. And because they all knew.... they would simply laugh at me and say: What a fool! Whose son is he? Was he not here when white men were eating: what did he do about it? Where was he when Chief Nanga fought and drove the white men away? Why is he envious now that the warrior is eating the reward of his courage? If he was Chief Nanga, would he not do much worse? (138). In this reflection, Nanga is confirmed a Machiavellian to whom all things are permitted. We shall see that more than this, he is really a figure of the rough beast rampaging as free as Chief Izongo. The rough beast is rampaging also in Ekwensi's Burning Grass in the person of the Prince and of Ardo, but with less freedom because the people are much less compliant. When attacked, they respond in kind. The result is greater instability and high levels of violence, with shedding of blood. There is greater freedom of action on all sides, as the central authority is apparently unconcerned, and the people are not afraid to take and deal blows. In Echewa's The Crippled Dancer, the central authority is far from the scene of action. The people having learned to protect themselves from harm by acquiescence and readiness to serve as instruments for the projecting of violence against their oppressor's opponents are looked upon with great contempt by the narrator, who is so close to the protagonist that little difference can be made out between their viewpoints. Just as the villagers of A Man of the People know that their man is an 'Honourable Thief,' so do those of The Crippled Dancer know that Chief Orji is a thief, but instead of denouncing him, they accept bribes from him and elect him head chief. For anyone to oppose him is as dangerous an enterprise as Okolo's undertaking in The Voice. Thus the structure of struggle we see in Echewa's The Crippled Dancer is almost like that in Okara's work. But whereas Okolo meets with a rebuff in Sologa, the urban place, Ajuzia of The Crippled Dancer finds powerful allies in the urban centre and commits them to his struggle. This is what makes all the difference. Chief Orji has been left in almost exclusive control of the field by the central authority based in faraway Aba. This man bears physical resemblances to Yeats's own rough beast. His 'strong eye' particularly recalls Yeats's rough beast's gaze, 'blank and pitiless as the sun.' Of this man we read: Orji was . . . huge, in his youth an unthrowable wrestler, always a bully, who tended to acquire things by the strong eye and the strong hand, undeferring to elders and to custom, apt to do things out of turn. If a goat or cow was slaughtered for a village festival, men chose their shares of the meat by age—from the oldest to the youngest. But not Orji. He would step up and choose whatever share he wanted without regard to whoever was supposed to choose before him. And the rest of the kindred were reduced to shrugging or pouting or making nervous jokes about the fact that for Orji rules and protocol were not necessarily binding (42). To him all things are permitted: the people have already conceded him this. But they find that they have still more to fear from Orji. As the head chief, he is the chairman of the Icheku Native Court. Here he files cases against the villagers 'for a hobby, mostly on spurious charges' (55), imposes arbitrary fines, illegally holds them in detention, and sets bail as he chooses. For this, cash must be paid, which he himself collects, as he is also the treasurer of the court, though without obligation to account. The logic of this rough beast's career is projected by imagery: His motto was: 'Shake the tree long enough and hard enough, and something is bound to fall out of it.' He went about shaking everyone's tree, inspiring such awe that people avoided his gaze, and in fact detoured from his path when they saw him coming (55).
Under the glare of Orji's blazing eyes comes Old Man Erondu, together with his tiny family of two, his wife and their young grandson Ajuzia, because they do not tamely grant Orji's right of way, or give up what they have without a struggle when he shakes their tree. When Orji gives them a really bad shake, we see the entire clan gathered in their council of war; but much like the council itself, the weapons at their disposal are all too few: Ajuzia was doing Standard Five, and vividly remembered the evening after the judgement, after supper and after the visitors and well-wishers had left. His grandfather had summoned him and his grandmother to his parlour, and the three of them had sat down in the shadows of the hurricane lantern, which was turned down very low to conserve kerosene. 'I will never go to prison again,' the grandfather said.... 'Not ever again,' he repeated. 'If I ever again see the inside walls of a prison, someone will die. I will kill myself. Or I will kill somebody, and the police will arrest me and kill me.... If I lose this fight ...' 'You will not lose,' the grandmother interrupted.... 'God is still in heaven.' 'I hope he is looking down,' the grandfather retorted. 'Erondu, you cannot permit yourself to blaspheme against God…. Anyway you are not going to any prison. I would rather go myself.... let them take me instead. You and Ajuziogu can carry on, and keep your grandfather's line going' (56-57). Unlike in Burning Grass, the opposition here have no one to beckon to come and help them. There are none to support them in their struggle because Orji has successfully intimidated all their potential allies into silence and acquiescence. Much is at stake for Erondu and his people, moreover. They see themselves, as it has not even occurred to Okolo to think, as the bearers of a charge to continue a line. Orji is a real threat to this charge. If he should succeed and knock out the old man, the child whom he has bullied from as far back as he can remember will be done for. Orji has seized the occasion of the illness of Radio, Ajuzia's younger bully, as an opportunity to try for a moral destruction of the grandfather, by instigating that he be publicly charged and tried for witchcraft. As a result, His grandfather confronted Orji and, in the argument which ensued, called the chief a thief. Orji swore that he would live to regret that statement. 'It is true,' the grandfather said. 'It is true that you have stolen before. The heart of this village is now faint and no one has dared to accuse you, but any day you wish you can summon me before the amala and I will accuse you!' (15). Orji then persuades Radio's father to take Erondu to his court, where he finds against him, and sentences him to a month in prison, plus a fine of ten pounds. Erondu's appeal to the white district officer only enriches Orji by twenty-five pounds, which he has exacted as bail money, while the appeal is pending. He and his court clerk conspire to prevent the case being heard by the white man. By some strange inspiration, however, Ajuzia writes to the district officer himself. The quashing of the case, the return of the bail money, and the public reprimand of the court clerk and the court chiefs mark Ajuzia's first triumph over a man he has learned to hate, in part because of his longstanding enmity towards his family, using every opportunity he can find to try and beat them down. But also he has several times been manhandled and humiliated by Orji, and unjustly deprived of the reward of his achievement. Of course, Orji does not take this setback lying down. Radio will provide him further opportunities to get at his enemies. Radio is a younger version of Orji, with the same identical mindless brutality, total absence of a sense of what is right or acceptable, utter disregard for order or precedence, and equally lacking in any form of humane sensibility. In the next opportunity he provides, Orji is able to clear them out of all their savings, and a large parcel of land into the bargain. The final battle is when Radio, in the course of his acrobatics on his bicycle, is knocked down by a motor vehicle and killed. Orji instigates Radio's family to declare that Erondu has brought this about by witchcraft, and to sue him. Another member of the extended family brings an additional charge. He too is a stalking dog for Orji (190). The rough beast is comprehensively defeated in this new attack on Erondu because of a new and much more forceful ally Ajuzia has cultivated in Aba, where he has been living for some time as a student. This is the Assistant Superintendent of Police; with whose daughter he appears to be heading towards marriage. Orji is lured into a notable breach of the law, assaulting two police constables in his court when they arrive with an arrest warrant. So utterly convinced is he that his will is law that he first orders the constables, 'Go and wait by your motorcycles until we finish this case. Then I will consider talking to you (221). Then he orders the crowd of villagers in his court to attack the men. But help quickly arrives. He is overpowered, and his helpers put to flight. We read that, Later that evening Ajuzia and his grandparents were in exceedingly high spirits. The grandfather had done his victory dances across the compound over and over again, fired off his cap gun countless times and accepted dozens of congratulations from his friends. 'We won,' he shouted, shaking every hand that offered itself. 'We won again! Winning has become a habit with us. Orji is in the lockup tonight. God knows I did not want him there, but he has done enough to me and others to deserve staying there several years' (223-224). The visitors and well-wishers are people who have suddenly been released from their state of thraldom and collective fascination, whereby they had exercised a regard of Chief Orji as a divine form. This way of regarding the rough beast is something connected to the symbolism of power. For example, few had come to the family on the occasion of their first victory because, after all, Orji is still at large, and has not been personally and physically hampered or impaired. Thus they consider the appearance of the white man as no more than a temporary eclipse, and that at his departure Orji will regain all his habitual vitality, so that he is as dominant and blindingly radiant as ever. In the last encounter, however, he has not been able to hold his own: before their very eyes, he is broken and taken away. He whose word bad been enough to bring them to charge armed police in full force and mindlessly has revealed impotence at his core. His aura of power has simply dissolved under the glare of another and more irresistible, more incontestable manifestation of power. Power is one of the intuitions of mythic thought conditioned by either of two emotions, fear and hope (see Akwanya, 1997:87-88). As a result, it totally dominates consciousness and keeps it enthralled. This is the kind of presence which Chief Izongo has commanded over the people of Amatu until the coming of Okolo. Tuere who has never submitted and come under the sway of this divine form is utterly free of fear and hope. For this refusal to bow, dazzled by 'the spectacle of power' (Christopher Pye, 1984), she is excluded from the community, and driven to the outskirts of the town, where she has lived alone until Okolo's coming. As a divine form, the original of the rough beast in Arrow of God is not Obi Ikedi, but the ancestral mask. We see this, for instance, in the ogbazuluobodo sequence, where the night mask Ayaka is constituted. At this moment of constitution, an exchange occurs. Once the regalia are put on Obika and the ritual words pronounced on him, the human substance gives way, as it were. In its place a divine form has appeared: The old man, Ozumba, who kept the regalia of the night spirits took a position near the drummer. Then he raised his cracked voice and called ugoli four or five times as if to clear the cobweb from it. Then he asked if Obika was there. Obika looked in his direction and saw him vaguely in the weak light. Slowly and deliberately he got up and went to Ozumba, and stood before him. Ozumba bent down and took up a skirt made of a network of rope and heavily studded with rattling ekpili. ... The ekwe continued to beat in the half-light of the palm-oil torch. Obika closed his hand tight on the staff and clenched his teeth. Ozumba allowed him a little time to prepare himself fully. Then very slowly he lifted the ike-agwu-ani necklace. The ekwe beat faster and faster. Obika held his head forward and Ozumba put the ikeagwa-ani round his neck. As he did so he said: Tun-tun gem-gem Oso mgbada bu nugwu. The speed of the deer Is seen on the hill. As soon as these words left his mouth Ogbazuluobodo swung round and cried: Ewo okuo! Ewo okuo! The drummer threw down his stick and hastily blew out the offending light. The spirit planted the staff into the earth and it reverberated. He pulled it out again and vanished like wind in the direction of Nkwo leaving potent words in the air behind (225). By means of the 'pious capital letter' (Mallarme), the transformation that has produced a night spirit Ogbazuluobodo out of what was formerly Obika is recognized and signified. He has disappeared even to the narrator and in his place, a spirit, the spirit. Not even Obika knows himself any longer as a man. It would appear in fact that the man dies while the mask flies along following his accustomed route, and re-enters the sacred space before the catastrophe is discovered. In Aluko's His Worshipful Majesty, Jelenke is such a transform. He has the human need to breathe and see. Nevertheless, he is addressed as 'One-from-the-Land-of-the-Dead' (151), and has the power to foretell the future in detail, or perhaps the power to shape the future by means of the words he utters (151, 155). This transformation in which a divinity comes forth has taken a historical dimension in Arrow of Cod, in the appearance of the white man, 'the masked spirit of the day.' Obika is one person who fails to treat this masked spirit with the respect and circumstance it claims for itself, and is severely punished for this. The rest of the people render up the entitlements without his even demanding them. Thus it is a great shock to them when Obika defies the white man. Their shock is even greater than that of the white man. Without thinking a moment about it, they seize and hold him for the white man personally to administer the punishment. In the same spirit as Obika's people, Orji of The Crippled Dancer defers to the white man. For example, at the serving of the warrant for his arrest, we read that He opened the folded sheet of paper the officer had handed him. 'Who signed it? Is it a White Man or a Black Man?' He peered at the sheet, a pointless gesture since he could not read (221). In fact, Orji sees himself as a transform of the white man: he himself is a masked spirit, only by substitution for the White Man, who is the real thing. As he tells the Superintendent of Police, 'I am part of the law, too [ ] as the Head Chief at Icheku' (222). It is by the White Man's dispensation that he exercises authority; by this right, he demands tribute, and would not be denied. For a brief moment in The Land's Lord, Philip is to constitute himself a divine form, on a basis all his own, and not derived either from the cultural tradition or from Father Higler's Christian tradition. The decisive element is the nature of the force he has at his command: 'Now,' Philip said again, and waved the machete in their faces. A few grabbed the other machetes. 'Put them down!' Philip thundered like an angry god. 'Or you wish your head to be the first to roll, or your entrails the first to be poured out!... Who among you is not afraid.... Who? ...' He waved the machete wildly, feinting and thrusting, and he rounded them like a sheep dog into an ever tightening huddle. They ducked as he flailed the machete, cowered, and gasped. Suddenly he was like a god to them, a present and immediate god, vindictive and wrathful, mindless (142-143). Philip has given himself the means to deal instant death, unafraid and unconstrained by any other power. This power to deal death is an attribute of the divinity we frequently encounter in Arrow of God. Ulu is the god who 'kills a man when his life is sweetest to him.' By this divine title, Evil Forest, the great egwugwu of Things Fall Apart identifies himself, as we see in a brief dialogue with a litigant: 'Uzowulu's body, do you know me?'
'How can I know you, father? You are beyond our knowledge,' Uzowulu replied. 'I am Evil Forest. I kill a man on the day that his life is sweetest to him (66). But the days of Evil Forest's unchallengeable godhead are really at an end, although the fact takes some time to become apparent. It is possible to review and achieve a new understanding of Things Fall Apart on the basis of the forms of divinity and their successions. The watershed is the unmasking of the ancestral mask by a Christian. All the egwugwu of Umuofia, with Evil Forest at their head, assemble to exact vengeance. Having destroyed the house of the convert who has done the abomination, they make for the church premises: Mr Smith was in his church when he heard the masked spirits coming. He walked quietly to the door which commanded the approach to the church compound, and stood there. But when the first three or four egwugwu appeared on the church compound he nearly bolted. He overcame this impulse and instead of running away he went down the two steps that led up to the church and walked towards the approaching spirits (133). The surprise of the day is to be the experience of the egwugwu, namely that Mr Smith stands his ground before them. Evil Forest is the greatest of the masked spirits of Umuofia. But defied by Mr Smith, he is the one reining in his troops, putting aside force and violence, and offering to enter into a reasonable conversation. Mr Smith's interpreter has wisely modified the former's retort that the masked spirits go away, so that it is as if he is undertaking to look into their complaints, to which Evil Forest responds: 'We cannot leave the matter in his hands because he does not understand our customs, just as we do not understand his (134). The offer of a parley and the balancing of the merits of the arguments one against the other in Evil Forest's speech amount to recognition of the white man as, at least, an equal. He really has ceased being the one who kills 'a man on the day that his life is sweetest to him.' In any event, this is a threat which can have no meaning in regard to Mr Smith. In the event, the egwugwu manage to withdraw in reasonably good order, and with some satisfaction, having razed Mr Smith's church to the ground. But the issue is decided. The district officer takes up the outrage, and bears down heavily on Umuofia, overwhelming and overawing them. Umuofia has no answer for him. Then and there is decided once for all who is the master, who the masked spirit of the day. Both Umuofia and the white man know this. Even Okonkwo knows this. But he does not give up the struggle. Henceforth, it is taking for him the form of personal revenge, no longer an attempt to restore a state of affairs unbalanced by the white man's incursion. In other words, he no longer contests the white man's order. It is the new and permanent state of affairs: 'The greatest obstacle in Umuofia,' Okonkwo thought bitterly, 'is that coward, Egonwanne. Tomorrow he will tell them that our fathers never fought a "war of blame." If they listen to him I shall leave them and plan my own revenge' (141). There is so much at stake and so many lines of defence that separate him from the white man: Okonkwo can never reach his adversary. The field is unquestionably in the command of the one who can reach and strike everywhere, while remaining himself out of reach, even out of sight. This is the hard-won ground which we find in Aluko's His Worshipful Majesty, that the white man has let slip from his hold, into the hands of the educated Africans. The visiting obas console the Alaiye, who has reached a point of insight that his divinity has lost its force and validity, since he has been publicly blasphemed by the Council Chairman, Mr Morrison, overruling him, and setting his wishes aside: The world was once ours…. Then the white man came, and the world changed. It became the world of the white man.' 'Yes, the world has become the world of the white man,' another of the royal visitors confirmed.
'No. It has changed again.... It is now the world of the educated black man…. And it has all happened with the white man's eyes wide open' (146). Worse still, the Alaiye will come to realize, as Okonkwo does, that the monster he is faced with is not really an individual, but a whole movement, with a source located in the faraway capital, and inaccessible to him. This unbridgeable gap that we also find in Season of Anomy is what makes the struggle of Ofeyi and the Aiyéró appear as so much wasted effort. On the other hand, in the habits of thought of the people of Anata (A Man of the People) Nanga's unchallengeable position is by virtue of driving away the one who hitherto has been the masked spirit and deity. By right, therefore, by virtue of stripping the other of his anklet of title (Arrow of God), he now succeeds to the rights of the vanquished opponent. In A Man of the People, the country is divided up into constituents, which amount simply to spheres of influence. In each of these the parliamentary representative seeks to function as a divine form, who dazzles the people and commands their instinctive loyalty and obedience. This is what Chief Nanga finds unbearable in Odili's challenge for his parliamentary seat. He will take every measure necessary to retain the seat, but he thinks he deserves to be returned unopposed. The assurance of this instinctive and unquestioning loyalty is what General Sam of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah craves, but is unable to command. He has exercised a hold over the people entirely by overbearing force before which they are cowed and in terror. He brings down all this force on the people of Abazon when they misinterpret his referendum as an invitation to exercise their franchise, and vote for a change of government. He has the water borehole projects of this semi-arid region stopped, and sends his agents to tell them why: 'Because you said no to the Big Chief… you will know what it means to offend the sun. You will suffer so much that in your next reincarnation you will need no one to tell you to say yes whether the matter is clear to you or not.' The people of Abazon have been learning their lesson fast because of the drought ravaging their region at the moment. And so they send a delegation to the head of state. In the words of the leader of the delegation: 'So we came to Bassa to say our own yes and perhaps the work on our bore-holes will start again and we will not all perish from the anger of the sun. We did not know before but we know now that yes does not cause trouble' (127). General Sam blazes down on them even more pitilessly. He refuses to receive the delegation. Sam's inability to command instinctive loyalty and obedience even among his closest aides, especially his old school mates and boyhood friends Chris Oriko, the Commissioner for Information in his government, and Ikem Osodi, the editor of the Gazette, is a great source of resentment because it seems to take something from the absolute power he craves. When he gives up all subterfuge and attempts to enforce this discipline on the two, beginning with Ikem, he sets off the recoil in which all three of them perish. By contrast, Nanga has had no worries at all as regards the loyalty of the people of his constituency, until Odili's challenge. The measure of his success in this regard is seen in the kind of reception he is given by the people when he comes on a brief visit to Anata Grammar School, where Odili is a teacher. But we see it in a striking manner at the scene of his recognition of Odili. His noticing this former pupil of his specially is divine benediction, and this immediately sets him apart in the eyes of the people. It has a remarkable effect on Odili himself: Everybody around applauded and laughed. He slapped me again on the back and said I must not fail to see him at the end of the reception. 'If you fail I will send my orderly to arrest you.' I became a hero in the eyes of the crowd. I was dazed. Everything around me became suddenly unreal; the voices receded to a vague border zone. I knew I ought to be angry with myself but I wasn't (9). By reason of Nanga's benediction, Odili ceases momentarily to be himself. The crowd is even before him in noticing and signifying the change. They know how to read Nanga's signs and to respond to them. But this is not all. That Nanga has importance beyond his immediate constituency is seen in Odili's reflection on the fate of the nation, after becoming involved in a new political party in process of being formed. What the nation is faced with is so utterly different from the high hopes of 'the intoxicating months' following independence, reflected in his friend Max's poem, which today he has sung to him as if a dirge. Afterwards: I read (the) last verse over and over again. Poor black mother! Waiting so long for her infant son to come of age and comfort her and repay her the years of shame and neglect. And the son she has pinned so much hope on turning out to be a Chief Nanga. 'Poor black mother!' I said out aloud. 'Yes, poor black mother,' said Max looking out of the window (80-81). Nangahar becomes the name of a remarkable passage in the history of the nation, when what was expected and longed for, comfort and repayment for years of shame and neglect have not come, instead, everything opposed to these, everything which tramples and makes mockery of the hope formerly entertained. Nanga's own supporters and agents do indeed give his name to the travail of this 'black mother,' though they intend something quite different by it: New branches of [ ] Nangavanga were springing up every day throughout the district. Their declared aim was to 'annihilate all enemies of progress' and 'to project true Nangaism'. The fellows we ran into carried placards, one of which read: NANGAISM FOREVER: SAMALU IS TREITOR (112-113). Nanga's approach to political practice is hereby constituted as an ideology. In the course of the campaign for parliamentary elections in which Odili's party is to take part for the first time, the nature of this ideology is forcefully brought out. Its business consists of pulling the wool over the eyes of the people while transferring public money into one's own coffers for use in building up real estate and other kinds of business enterprise. The tools in its arsenal include bribery at massive levels for the smothering of the opposition, and when this fails, unbridled violence. The destructive and amoral aspects of the character of the rough beast do not appear as long as he has the recognition and deference he is used to. What he demands are the prerogatives of a divine form. This entails that the people see him where he wishes to be—at the centre of their field of consciousness—where he is certain to absorb and retain all attention. It also entails that the people make his business their own, and are prompt in paying their tribute as demanded by the occasion. This may be by attending to swell up his crowds, receiving and propagating his words as an oracle, praisesinging, or dancing themselves lame, as Odili says, to delight the great one. The great one responds to all this with promises of bounty and benediction. But all the good nature is quickly replaced by violence and brute force the moment he suspects that the spell with which he holds the spectator in thraldom has weakened to the extent of the latter regaining awareness of self. Odili's esteem of Chief Nanga as a politician is initially very low. He lets himself be fascinated when the latter, the idolized political leader of his district, recognizes him as his former pupil. But his awareness of self is fundamentally strong, and has only slipped from him now and again under special circumstances. We see it slip from him again when Chief Nanga speaks to the Minister of Public Construction in derogatory terms about what the chiefs in His Worshipful Majesty call 'the educated black man.' Afterwards Odili reflects on this indiscretion: I remember the day he was telling his ministerial colleague over the telephone in my presence that he distrusted our young university people and that he would rather work with a European. I knew I was hearing terrible things but somehow I couldn't bring myself to take the man seriously (A Man of the People 65). Nanga's views here flow from a kind of self-confidence which is quite different from the one we remark in Odili. Odili's self-confidence is based on superior knowledge, and superior sensibility—hence the ordinary people lacking his perceptive powers are contemptible to him. Nanga's self-confidence comes from a sense of being wellplaced in the relationships of struggle for power, and therefore, a sense of having the means to achieve his purpose. The attaining of that advantageous position is achieved in the ousting from government the university people who apparently have played a role in the winning of independence, as this seems to be the initial qualification for anyone participating in government. Nanga and his colleagues now persuade the people that they are the real ones who have won independence, and are now preserving it against subversion by the university people. Accordingly, the people have conceded them the right to 'eat' the rewards of their courage. In the history of A Man of the People, we know of Nanga ousting the university people from government, not of his ousting the colonists. It is by the former action that he has won a cabinet seat. His opportunity has come over the slump in the price of coffee in the world market, this cash crop being the mainstay of the national economy. This development coincides with preparations for parliamentary elections. But the situation has to be addressed: The Minister of Finance at the time was a first-rate economist with a Ph.D. in public finance. He presented the Cabinet with a complete plan for dealing with the situation. The Prime Minister said 'No' to the plan. He was not going to risk losing the election by cutting down the price paid to coffee planters at that critical moment; the National Bank was to be instructed to print fifteen million pounds (3).
All the university people in the cabinet support the Minister of Finance, and are forced to leave the government. The Prime Minister follows this up with public denunciation and malicious accusations of conspiracy with outside interests to subvert the country's independence. University educated people do not, however, abandon politics entirely to Nanga's class. The former cabinet ministers may have been successfully silenced and marginalized, but the younger generations of university people re-enter politics, as Nanga and his colleagues make free run of political power and notoriously abuse it. They start a new party, with the aim of fighting the governing party at the parliamentary election, the time having come round again. What appears to have happened is that the politicians of Nanga's class, presumably the class to which the Prime Minister belongs, had been in a relationship of cohabitation with the intellectual class, with the aim of assimilating and neutralizing them. This pattern of attempted assimilation so as to render ineffectual is what Odili is in turn subjected to at Nanga's hands. He is drawn into the older man's orbit and enters into a cosy-cohabitation when he accepts his invitation to come and stay with him at Bori. But this is short-lived. Nanga arouses his fighting spirit by stealing his girlfriend. And he is able to break away from that bear-hug. The new party is being put together just at the time of Odili's quarrel with Chief Nanga, and he is drafted, not necessarily with his consent, though he quickly realizes that it would afford him opportunity to make contact with his enemy for the settling of accounts: I must say that I was immediately taken with the idea of the Common People's Convention. Apart from everything else it would add a second string to my bow when I came to deal with Nanga (78). This revenge motive with which Odili enters into politics will change over time. He never directly and expressly questions himself whether the course of action he is embarking upon is principled or not, whether his reasons are noble and morally sound or irascible and base. The change comes to him as a settled fact, as a kind of reaction to rejection by the woman he has set his heart on marrying, and who has warmly responded to him, until he makes his intention known to her. This is Edna, the young woman Chief Nanga was going to make his second wife, whom he had first thought to seduce in revenge for Nanga stealing his girlfriend. In suddenly and bluntly turning him down, she declares she is firmly resolved to marry Chief Nanga. All this has a sobering effect on Odili: The knowledge that Chief Nanga had won the first two rounds and, on the present showing, would win the third and last far from suggesting thoughts of surrender to my mind served to harden my resolution. What I had accomplish became more than another squabble for political office; it rose suddenly to the heights of symbolic action, a shining, monumental gesture untainted by hopes of success or reward (130). In the upshot, Nanga is ushered from the scene, a victim of power practices which prolong and complicate what he himself has initiated. But this is not to re-establish order and restore the status quo before the coming of the rough beast. It is so that something infinitely worse may come into possession: What happened was simply that unruly mobs and private armies having tasted blood and power during the election had got out of hand and ruined their masters and employers. And they had no public reason whatever for doing it. Let's make no mistake about that (144). No longer have we a personalized rough beast as such; rather it is the unleashing of 'the blood-dimmed tide' and the banishing and drowning of all 'ceremony of innocence.'