Phases of the unpremeditated and mindless violence associated with the impersonal rough beast are seen in Munonye, A Wreath for the Maidens, I.N.C. Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice, Cyprian Ekwensi, Divided we Stand, and Survive the Peace, Eddie Iroh, Toads of War, Forty-Eight Guns for the General, and Siren in the Night, Buchi Ernecheta, Destination Biafra, Chukwuemeka Ike, Sunset at Dawn, Andrew Ekwuru, Songs of Steel, and Maxwell Nwagboso, The Road to Damnation. In many of these, the air is of an eye witness account. The rampaging impersonal rough beast is also seen in works of a more reflective temper, like Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, Elechi Amadi, Estrangement, and Nkala's Drums and the Voice of Death. In these works, the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970) is clearly functioning as a provocation of thought which poetry is committed to encompassing in the novelistic form. But in a few of the cases does something really new appear, something untroubled by a sense of actuality, as by the need to be faithful to the facts, and to memory. Poetry will hardly be accomplished if these movements of thought taking place as a novel do not issue in something wholly new. That is to say, it is hard to select from the list of titles above one or two which could sustain discussion as, say, No Longer at Ease, or The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town. On the one hand, this national experience has, in line with the Nigerian novel's attachment to the big event in the public sphere, given rise to a great burst of writing. No other single event has been so productive. However, this attachment to the big event seems not to have served the novel well on this occasion, hence the fewness of texts capable of sustaining critical discussion. The ones which are discussed are hardly the ones which are the most reliable relative to historical matter. In point of fact, the first qualifications of the texts selected are, first of all, that they are movements of reflection, and second, that they are morally distantiated. Moral distantiation, hardly compatible with a factual account, is the dilemma into which Iyayi's Heroes plunges. What helps to reduce the tension between the two opposite processes in this work is, on the one hand, that the character Osime experiences the war in something of a middle ground successively occupied by the Biafran and the Federal armies; on the other hand, his attitude is critical and guarded. According to the narrator who never seems to leave his side, and sees mostly only what the protagonist sees, and from his viewpoint as well, Osime is 'sarcastic and cynical' (p. 2). Right where this judgement is made, we see the man's own thinking; perhaps this cynicism is something that has come from the experience of repeated disappointments: The Biafrans call themselves liberators! Liberators! Ha! Liberators my foot! How can they be liberators when they treat the people like prisoners? The young man that they took away this afternoon and then shot afterwards? Was that liberation or murder? Yes, he wanted the true liberators, the Federal troops, to come into the city. The Federal troops would set an example. His landlord would see that he was right, his landlord who had so little faith in the decency of the Federal troops. Oh well…. It's only natural that his sympathies are with the Biafrans. After all, he is from Oganza. He is one of them. So he sympathizes. But Ohiali will find out that I have been right all along (2). Osime who has witnessed first-hand great brutalities committed by the conquering Biafran soldiers when they first occupy his city in the Midwestern state, thinks of these crimes as something tied to the character of the Biafrans. Since he sees the war in terms of two sides, of which the one has manifested evil, the war assumes for him a moral aspect, wherein the structural chain good/evil is brought into play as a mechanism of interpretation and understanding. Thus the overall interpretation is that if the Biafrans have manifested evil, they do so because they are evil; on the other hand—and for that reason—the federal troops must be the agents of good; they must be good: they are good. But the expectations of decency and good example on the part of the federal troops are, from the point of view of narration, already disappointed. For Heroes is not a diary-type narrative, but a story told after the event. In fact the decision to write is a response to the dire experiences (49). The sense of disappointment is all the more bitter and the cynicism deeper because Osime is a romantic. This romanticism is already present in his assigning the qualities of decency and so on to an army he has not yet witnessed in action. It is seen equally in his resistance to the accumulating evidence of atrocities by the federal troops, when they push out the Biafrans and take over the city: It all seemed unreal, except for the dead. There were many of them, hundreds of them on the streets. Why did they have to strip them to the waist before shooting them? Why didn't they just shoot them? Why did they have to disgrace them first, strip them down to their pants before shooting them? (9). He is very reluctant to give up what he elsewhere calls his 'illusions' (12); so he rationalizes and extenuates. But he cannot finally save these illusions. The evidence confronting them is simply overwhelming. He narrowly escapes being murdered himself, but not without being brutally beaten and repeatedly kicked in the head and groin. His landlord is not as lucky: he is murdered in cold blood before Osime's very eyes. With the realization 'that the Federal soldiers [are] not liberators but conquerors [like] the Biafrans before them' (48), Osime's cynicism is complete. He can now take a moral position as far from either side as it is possible to get. Here he makes up his mind: I am going to find out more about this war and I am going to write about it. I am going to find all that is ugly or beautiful about this war and I am going to write about it. But it will be the truth, the harsh and bitter truth. Nothing more, nothing less (49). This truth is going to be harsh and bitter because it is no one's truth, in that it is not told from the viewpoint of some interested party. This truth is its own motivation; or rather it is unmotivated. Osime, however, will uncover not one, but several truths. One of these is probably not a discovery as such, but the output of ideological thought, which means that it is interested. Moreover, it is unverifiable, insofar as it is authorized by a collective way of seeing, and holds as long as no other ways of seeing are allowed to come into play. Osime's main finding is that this war is not an accident of history, something that has overtaken the nation from the blue, so to speak. It has a prosecutor, a human agent, and it has a beneficiary as well, who is also human. We read, Human beings cause wars, human beings at the helm of affairs start wars…. They misinform the people, they trick the people into war. The people are manipulated into war only to have their children killed, their houses destroyed by bombs and grenades. And all the time the generals and politicians stand aside, away from the death and destruction of the war and shout that it is indeed a great war. A great war for them because they lose nothing and yet gain everything (63). In the logic of the above, the war is a business enterprise, the dealers being the political and military leaders on both the Nigerian and the Biafran sides. The people themselves are innocent victims. They are the fuel burnt up to keep the war machine rolling and 'raw materials' for the generals' 'factory of greed and shamelessness' (166). But they are first of all manipulated into believing that the ordinary soldier on the other side is their enemy. Therefore, no methods used against him, no manner of abuse and ill-treatment, is to be considered too degrading for him. This factory, of course, has a history. It has come about for the purpose of covering up years of fraud and large-scale theft by the politicians and others in privileged and influential positions (169). The real meaning has been disguised, however, through indoctrination and misrepresentation, with the ordinary soldiers given opportunity to commit terrible wrongs, after which they lose their self-respect and are guilt-ridden. Osime, however, thinks that the great crimes and abuses by the soldiers are not to be explained simply as an outcome of war. His view is rather that the war has been the great excuse under which human beings have authorized themselves to commit terrible wrongs. Atrocities have been committed against unarmed and innocent civilians, women and children, both by the Biafran soldiers and the federal soldiers. These are categorized under no moral code, and attributed to the war, as if it has brought them about, or somehow made them necessary. Osime does not see any necessary link. Moreover, he has met individual soldiers who are undoubtedly human beings, with human sensibilities, and capable of differentiating between a confrontation of armies in a field of battle, and the notorious abuse of arms borne in the defence of what is called the national interest. It is from here then that the bitter and harsh truth emerges as a flash of insight, taking even Osime by surprise: One thing clearly stands out now. One thing I have learnt. You do not have to be brutal to be a soldier, or rather you are brutal not because you are a soldier but because there is a sadist, a rapist, a fascist and a murderer in you who wait for war and army uniforms to give them expression (62). This flash of insight is a kind of private revelation. If it persuades, it does so without being capable of rational demonstration—for we do see persons like Kolawale whose bitterness of heart and proneness to unprovoked violence are explained by those who know him well as a result of certain experiences of the war. The narrator's insight in the above is therefore not important as a knowable in itself. It is important as a principle of structuration. It provides a means whereby an event can be rendered meaningful, and a set of events arranged in such a way as to make up an intelligible whole. This flash of insight comprises for Osime the hinge which holds all the various discrete elements of his experience together into a meaningful pattern. For example, it casts a bizarre and sinister light on the wedding of the Nigerian head of state at a moment when the war seems to be at its bitterest and the toll in human life heaviest. Brigadier Otunshi, the commanding officer of the army division Osime is held up at Asaba with, has set up an invasion plan for Onitsha across the Niger. He launches the assault on the eve of the wedding, because he has earmarked Onitsha as his personal wedding present for the head of state. As soon as he knows the attack is in progress, he departs to Lagos for the wedding, taking along most of his senior commanders. The attack proves a great disaster. Over one thousand men are lost on the Nigerian side. On the bridge alone lie hundreds and hundreds who have fallen on both the Nigerian and the Biafran sides. Osime surveys the slaughter: What we have on this bridge are the flowers, of our motherland, torn rudely from their stems, the children of farmers and labourers, the first generation of workers bleeding to death. And this morning, in Lagos, the wedding goes on with the commanders of the army, the commanders of this division, in attendance. The commanders are busy drinking the blood of the nation, the blood of soldiers, young workers of the first generation (196). Osime is one of the few who escape with their lives that night on the bridge. Afterwards a heavy price is paid. First, all the Biafran prisoners of war, one hundred and eighty-seven of them captured in other battles, with whom their captors had made friends, played draughts and chatted together, are massacred to the last man. Then Otunshi returns from the wedding, holds a court martial, and has thirty-seven soldiers and five officers executed for desertion at the battle of Onitsha. What Osime's new perception does for him is that by that means, he is able to see the evils of the war as human evil, not just in terms of what is suffered, but much more importantly in terms of the hand which releases the affliction and guides it to a chosen victim. The ethical binary now appears in all its clarity: on the one hand, the plunderer, exploiter, violator, on the other, the victim, the humiliated, and the exploited. Behind 'the blood-dimmed tide' are human agents, whose careers are in the war, whose careers consist of this war. Such a human agent we get to meet is Olu Otunshi. Here Otunshi's wife Salome tells Osime about him: 'Otunshi... what does he think of the war?' 'Oh, his whole career is there. We are hoping he will be made a Brigadier by the time he leaves for the front next week.' 'A Brigadier?' 'Yes, a Brigadier. That will make him a real commander.' 'Does he like the war?' 'No,' she said. 'His career is in the war but I don't think he likes the war.' 'I can't believe it. How can you take part in this war and not be part of it, particularly at his level,' 'Oh well, I don't know. But it is there. Not all who bear arms really hate the enemy. I have heard a lot of ugly things said about him, though. But he has always told me that the war cannot be won by being virtuous' (46). Otunshi, at this time a major, does get the anticipated promotion. He will rise still further, appointed a general on the very day the hundreds he has lost at the battle of Onitsha are being buried in mass graves by the river. General Otunshi has a glittering career out of the bloodbath because he trades with the correct currency in this war. He captures territory: he does this without regard to the human cost. In fact, the higher the cost, the better, because now he earns not only promotions, but he also pockets the salaries of his fallen soldiers. We have an impression of the man's unscrupulous methods at the party he gives for his officers, army contractors, and press men on the night before the assault on Onitsha: Before anything could start, Brigadier Otunshi had to make a speech.
'He sold our arms to the rebels,' Jato whispered to him. He sold our arms to the Biafrans and afterwards the Biafrans used our arms to kill our soldiers.' 'I don't believe it!' 'Ask any of the soldiers. Ask any of the journalists.' 'I heard about it but it's pure gossip. I can't believe it.' 'You had better because you are going to see a lot of changes here. Our casualty rate is going to go up, and the soldiers will be fighting a few days before their pay day.' The man Jato turned away, disappointed at his scepticism. But I know it is true, Osime said to himself. I know that Brigadier Otunshi sells our arms to the Biafrans…. I know that he kills thousands of men but in the end he always wins (147148). Otunshi is by rights the enemy of the federal army and the Nigerian people. At the same time, he who has betrayed his commission by abandoning his soldiers in the field to go and enjoy himself at a wedding party has power to pronounce judgement upon the very dedicated soldiers he has insulted and humiliated. He has so many of the survivors of the disastrous battle of Onitsha executed, merely to intimidate the remainder and reassert his authority. But Osime might have had a personal reason to hate Otunshi. His former lover Salome has left him and married the big and handsome officer with a brilliant career prospect. He has been getting over his disappointment, and in time enters into a new relationship with the daughter of his landlord Ndudi. He and Salome meet again when Otunshi arrives as the commander of the division chasing the Biafrans out of the Midwestern State. Immediately she begins making moves to start an affair with him, presenting Osime with a great dilemma, since his feelings for her have not really gone away. She gives him away to the military police as a subversive in revenge for his rejecting her offer of herself. It is a potential Odili-Nanga situation that Osime is faced with. But he finally renounces Salome after the betrayal to the military police, in favour of Ndudi, who is cut off behind enemy lines on a nearby front. On this front, Otunshi is going to turn his attention to distract his troops from the disaster at Onitsha. When Osime finds her, she is crushed and devastated. Ndudi welcomes him with bitter tears, having successively been raped by Biafran and Nigerian troops. He has won his bride, but his victory is equivocal. On the one hand, it is a transgressed and violated bride. On the other hand, the point is his having won. He is, after all, the leader of the third army, and has joined the battle against the two rapacious armies for this very crime. But Osime is to carry on his struggle beyond the war itself into peacetime, so that the generals, if they get away with their war loot, should certainly not get away with attempts at self-glorification after the war as the heroes of their own memoirs. Osime has countered with his own story in which the ordinary soldiers he has known, whose courage he has admired, are given their due: Otun, Emmanuel, Ikeshi, Yemi, and particularly Sergeants Audu and Kesh, so that they may 'never be forgotten. Never' (247), In the history of the ravished bride we see the civil war beginning to be grasped under the sign of metaphor. This process of metaphorization, that is, departure from the path of actuality and truth into the world of fiction and error, is equally seen in S.O. Mezu's Behind the Rising Sun, where the final movement of the narrative sweeps aside the bungling, degradation, slaughter, suffering, the hunger and disease of the war in order to unveil a Utopia. We see it especially in Kole Omotoso, The Combat and Soyinka's Season of Anomy. In Omotoso's The Combat, the history of the war is foreshortened and apprehended as one momentous day, and then surpassed and assimilated by a strange conflict between two friends, Chuku Debe and Ojo Dada. From Chuku Debe's breakfast to his meeting with his friend, the vulcanizer on the way to work, to mend for him a tube, there can't have been more than a thirty-minute interval. But that is the time it takes to go from the announcement of the coup d'état in Lagos, in which Akintola and the Sardauna are reported to have been killed (5), to that of 'another coup just now' (5), without mentioning details. The movement to the next incident in the sequence follows a cycle beginning at Ojo's workshop at a disused Texaco petrol station and terminates there as well. The street boy, nine-year-old Isaac appears at the workshop where Ojo introduces him as his friend to Chuku. The latter does not react in a friendly manner, and Isaac withdraws out of sight behind Chuku's Morris Minor taxicab, eats his breakfast of garri soaked in water, cleans a defaced coin which is in any case obsolete as legal tender, though the fact is unknown to the street boy; then he goes out to try and spend it. After two or three tries, he buys a wrap of moin-moin with it, and returns to the spot where he had had his breakfast earlier. As he begins to eat, the following news item is broadcast: From the rediffusion box in front of Armel's Coach station came the afternoon news bulletin. The military leaders of Nigeria had been meeting in Aburi, Ghana in an attempt to find a peaceful solution to the problems of the country, but it was feared that this would fail and very soon fighting would break out. The leaders would have to choose people to go to Kampala for another peace meeting, thus adding another word to the ever growing vocabulary of the over-politically conscious public. In fact, the news reader was saying, as he had been reading the news, the first shots were being fired and there was now Biafra (12). We do not here see the new word added 'to the ever growing vocabulary of the over-politically conscious public,' unless it is Biafra. But as 'Biafra' is far from the cohesive reference 'another word, so are Kampala, the firing of the first shots, and the declaration of Biafran independence future events, viewed from the reporting of the Aburi meeting. The reference to the rediffusion box itself seems to reduce Aburi as a point of origin. It is as if the past from somewhere in the colonial period, the time of the rediffusion, is also conjoined to Aburi, so that all time, from the colonial period to the present of Aburi, and to Kampala and Biafra in the future, comprises one vast and unstable present. This means that no action in this sequence can be properly localized in time. The time is now, and it is always. This time has nothing in common with the real time of succession. No more can the action be grasped by means of the realist canon. For example, Chuku is unaware of Isaac behind his taxicab when he reverses and runs him over. Isaac does not immediately die. But when Ojo Dada is attracted to the spot by his groaning, he does not rush him to hospital or go in search of help. He goes in search of Chuku, pursuing him through several streets, until he catches up with him. The demand he makes of Chuku is equally strange: Ojo quickly went up to him. Chuku saw his friend and stopped what he was doing. 'Somebody dey drive you, OD? 'Nobody is driving me. I've come for you.' 'Waten dey do you OD? Abi you dey for wahala?' 'You're the one who is in trouble CD.' 'Waten I do now?' 'You ran over that boy. 'What kind boy?' 'Does it matter what boy? You have run over somebody. That's what's important.... You must go back and apologize to him.' 'Apolor... wetin you say?' 'You must go back and say you're sorry for what you've done' (13-14). By the time Chuku reaches understanding that something is really amiss, their altercation has wandered so far from the real issue, which ought to have been attending to Isaac's injury, that a challenge is given and accepted. Chuku must either go and apologize, 'Or else you must accept my challenge to single combat. If you beat me and kill me, then you are in the right and you have not done anything wrong. God would have vindicated your cause. But if I beat you and cut you up for the birds of the air to peck at and the dogs of the streets to drag about, then you are guilty and God has indicated that I have accused you here on just ground. 'There was silence. ... At last Chuku spoke. ... 'I gree. I go fight you. Make God helep man wey lose (15-16). A new matter is hereby constituted as outstanding between the two friends, in addition to a ten-year-old one which is pending in court, and due for determination this very week, concerning the paternity of a child whose mother they both had relations with. The case has dragged on for almost ten years, and the mother, Dee Madam, formerly Moni, has become very wealthy and wants the child for herself. The child, however, has been missing for some time. They have no inkling that this same child is at the heart of their new conflict for which they are looking for sponsors and backers. A small advert to that effect has been published in the newspapers. The two travel to Lagos to take personal charge of the search for sponsorship. They do not have far to seek, as the little advert has attracted outside interests, who quickly take the matter fairly out of their hands. But the quarrel itself has acquired a strange meaning: Ojo Dada…. was preoccupied with his own thoughts. He was trying desperately in his mind to justify asking for the advice and help of the South African Republic in this his fight against his friend—no, his brother. He walked along the Marina with the sea breeze carrying the smell of rotting sewage and sweat to his nostrils. 'This is what I'm fighting against, this corruption, this is what I don't want to see in this country and anybody, anything which will help me in this fight must be a good thing' (25). The quarrel between two working class persons has transmuted into a fight against an abstraction called corruption. This physical fight is therefore surpassed in a symbolism which, however, never loses hold of it. The tension between the real event, the quarrel, and its correlates as a symbolic act is reflected in Ojo's speech to the South African Ambassador: 'I feel very strongly about this issue. It is an important issue. The continuance of good government and civilization as we know it depends on the readiness of my friend and brother to apologize for what he did and pay compensation for it. He has said that he will not do any such thing. I have no other choice than to challenge him to single combat.'
To this, the Ambassador replies, 'We are prepared to give all the help that your government may need, and we can get all the other governments on the right and left sides of the Atlantic to give you all the help you need in this inspired contest' (28-29). In return for this assistance, Ojo agrees to give up both Dee Madam and her son to the South African Republic. The Soviet Ambassador similarly offers help to Chuku Debe in return for the privilege of educating his son in the Soviet Union. Before they know it, Ojo Dada and Chuku Debe have 'become pawns in some bigger chessboard of which they had never dreamed when they began their quarrel' (80). But the judgement, when it is given, leaves matters in a jumble. His Excellency, Ojo Dada is assigned the missing child, and His Other Excellency, Chuku Debe gets the woman Dee Madam, who would rather remain independent and unattached. Negotiations for a swap do not make any headway, and an appeal is decided upon. But the negligent mother of Isaac has kept count of the years, and prepares a great tenth birthday anniversary for him. So firmly fixed is her purpose that when she finds the decomposing body of her Isaac, she makes no overt acknowledgement that he is dead, but dresses it up and brings it to the party timed to precede the combat the same day by a few hours. The narrative does not bring us to the actual combat. But we can say that this is because, as in a movement we have witnessed more than once already, the actual combat is surpassed in 'Questions,' the tragic poem, where the echoes are alive with inexpungable guilt: what paranoiac wrath drove us thus far what rain storms shall come to wash this stream of blood away what river floods shall dampen this jungle floor and wipe our guilt away make liquid this plastered blood and purge our lives again what avatar shall be to lead us to other beginnings? (83).
This air of tragic and irremediable change overhangs the last movement of the narrative, the birthday party, which ends with Dee Madam being left all alone with her dead. Everybody else hurries away to the arena of combat between two friends, who do not know precisely how they have come to this pass, but have resigned themselves to it. Throughout all their transformations, the wider political implications of the actions of the two are by playful, though grotesque representation. In Soyinka's Season of Anomy, where the clash of two great forces is also apprehended in metaphor, the issue is blatantly economic and ideological. The conflict is between the hero Ofeyi and the Aiyéró communalists, on the one hand, and on the other, a Cartel of four who run the country as a private enterprise. The latter's activities tell very heavily on the people; for what they have set up is a 'superstructure of robbery, indignities and murder' amounting to a 'new phase of slavery' (27). And one of their many 'fronts' (51), is the Cocoa Corporation for which Ofeyi works as co-ordinator of promotions and advertising. The Cartel has anticipated opposition, and so they have an intelligence agency and a censor maintaining surveillance over people like Ofeyi, who might embarrass them or make trouble. But they have left the communalist Aiyéró to themselves because they are 'selfsufficing,' and ready with the tax whenever the tax men come for it. So the community appears to them not to be a 'threat' or a 'liability.' What the Aiyéró offer Ofeyi is a different kind of experience as a result of which he is able to see the Cartel and its work in clear light as a kind of charter of enslavement. At the same time, he reaches awareness that the only chance for a change is the confrontation of the Cartel with an organized force unafraid to use violence. Here Ofeyi presents his conclusions to Ahime, the leader of the Aiyéró, as, 'What I would like you to accept. Such as the need to form a common purpose with forces which are ... well, let's just say— not exactly peaceful in their methods. Even if it contains the risk that such forces may run wild and endanger the meagre scaffolding' (24). He has no idea that what he is suggesting to Ahime is really what Ahime would like him to accept, and has already begun setting up the groundwork for. He has the approval he seeks, and immediately begins organizing the Aiyéró into a network for resistance to the Cartel. The struggle is launched at a party given by the chairman of the Cocoa Corporation with his musical performance called Pandora's Box, which plays the four plagues of the cocoa plant as four bogeymen. This is received in a manner which shows him that the message has not been missed: The applause was mild, uncertain. It hovered between a refusal to recognize the four kindred figures—the 'terrible quads' according to the christening of their own genteel circles—and realization that failure to applaud the technical display was admission of their recognition. The guests mostly began to wonder if they would ever attend another garden party. If one was not safe from such dilemmas in the very home of one of the top servants of the Cartel…! (46). As with Nanga, the people here know all about the existence of the Cartel and all their works, but having succumbed to fear, they adjust their choices and decisions appropriately, creating a seamless synergy with their conditions of existence. Nanga's people have been able to rationalize their own fear into logic, namely that anyone who attains power is entitled to its rewards. In their understanding, this means that all things are permitted that person. The people in Season of Anomy accept the occasional garden party as a kind of compensation for their acquiescence. They take it that it is in the power of the Cartel to withdraw even this. In other words, it is a privilege to be at such a party. They want to be under the eyes of the Cartel—they offer to place themselves under the surveillance of the Cartel—because they understand that in their hands resides real power. Not even a change in government, whether by the parliamentary process or by a coup d'état changes the state of affairs fundamentally (86-87). Ofeyi recalls Sekoni of The Interpreters in his commitment to his work and in his creativeness. The results are startling even to the Cartel, and this is why they have been slow to take him up on certain reports that have been filed against him. According to their chief investigator at the inquiry following his launching of his struggle against the Cartel, 'The results [of your work] were positive and what we wanted was positive results. The country became cocoa-conscious, thanks to your drive. We no longer had to rely on foreign markets to dictate their own prices to us. We have now built up a remarkable internal market for the first time in our cocoagrowing history' (54). Ofeyi's advantage which Sekoni doesn't have is an effective means of pushing his views. When he is forced into resigning his job, it is his chance to devote himself fully to a struggle which he has already inaugurated, whose framework he has already set up. In a similar situation, Sekoni's creative energies denied outward expression recoil inwards, resulting in a mental breakdown. When he recovers, that energy has found an alternative path to fulfilment, which is art. Probably, the very possibility of recovery is by this alternative path having been found. He starts sculpting as soon as he comes away from the hospital. Ofeyi, on the other hand, is so far a master of the situation that he is able to anticipate the early moves of the opponent. When he is invited to an interview as part of the investigation, he arrives with his resignation letter, which he hands to the secretary of the corporation as the man ushers him into the room. And when the interview ends, he departs through the boardroom, finding the back door and making his escape, before the Cartel's agents waiting at the main entrance to take him away know it. But he cannot have any great hopes of achieving lasting change. Chiefly through his efforts the Aiyéró, formerly 'a comic Utopia had become a moral thorn in the complacent skin of the national body' (86). To this the Cartel respond with harassment of the Aiyéró in the towns and cities where they live and work, evictions from their homes, dismissal from their jobs, and so on. This is expected, and the planned response is that those who are harassed are to leave the area to be replaced by newcomers from Aiyéró. Some others, however, besides the Aiyéró. seem to have heeded Ofeyi's Wake Up call (57), and have reacted in a scattered manner, attacking and killing mostly low-level agents of the Cartel, a judge here, a tax man there. And all is blamed on the Aiyéró. As a result, Zaki Amuri, the Cross-river member of the Cartel, orders a 'clean sweep of the region. A bloodbath had ensued, beginning at Shage, where the Aiyéró are best organized. Ofeyi finds that he has to travel quickly to Cross-river because the Cocoa-Princess, his girlfriend lriyise has been caught up in the melee, but not before he has achieved the 'paralyzing knowledge of futility in thought and motion' (91). Neither optimism nor a well-thought out plan of action and possession of the means of resistance have availed much. Ofeyi succeeds in snatching Iriyise from the Cartel's stronghold, and Ahime, who has also made his way to Cross-river, has personally supervised the regrouping of the Aiyéró survivors. The defeat of the revolt by the Cartel has not proved an absolute rout, but their power has remained intact. The opposition has not really been able to come to grips because they are separated from the real persons who constitute the Cartel by an endless series of intermediaries. In the case of Batoki, to whom Ofeyi has direct access, close personal links are for him as stultifying as the series of intermediaries that separate him from someone like the Zaki. Even Demakin is stultified by the personal acquaintanceship engineered by Ofeyi apparently to give him a chance to assassinate Batoki. Ofeyi, of course, does not come to full awareness of his real motives until later: Resentment came from knowing within himself that his intentions had been different. It had been a largely deceitful intent, a form of special plea which came from feeling that only a mercenary assassin would pursue the death of a man whom he had encountered in the most mundane domestic context. After that the victim ceased to be a faceless cipher, a factor in a social equation which must be subtracted for a working formula. The Dentist, he persuaded himself, in spite of the cold rust that seemed to fill his bones in place of marrow, the Dentist was no professional killer (189). Clearly, if there is to be a revolution, it must be one that does not draw blood, certainly not that of an acquaintance known to have the private grief of an unhappy home, such as Batoki. The intermediaries are fewer in Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, because the chief opponents of the figure of the rough beast are his boyhood friends, who hold high positions in the public service and the government itself. General Sam begins setting up the intermediaries as soon as he reaches decision that these former boyhood friends are no longer to be trusted, since they do not anticipate his wishes and make these their own. He first tries to use Chris, as commissioner for information, to get rid of Ikem, the editor of the Gazette. Since Chris refuses to oblige him, he makes use of others, apparently, elements of the police communicating directly with state security. All the time, he is also putting a distance between himself and Chris. Chris and Ikem, however, are affected by this old friendship much as Ofeyi, by the family links to the Batokis. But what it does to them is to put out of question any thought of a revolution or bloodshed in which Sam might be involved. The matter, however, is taken out of their hands, and the rough beast, the objectionable head of state is got rid of by what must have been his own security organization. All this boils down to the rough beast losing a head and immediately growing another to replace it. We have an indication of this in the manner of the disappearance of Colonel Ossai, the assassinated head of state's chief of state security—and this, in the report of an officer of state security: 'Colonel Ossai was last seen going in to see the [new] Head of State and has not been sighted ever since. You remember Idi Amin? Well, according to unconfirmed reports he used to strangle and behead his rivals for women and put their head in the fridge as a kind of trophy. So perhaps Colonel Ossai is in the cooler somewhere' (221). The new head of state, Major-General Ahmed Lango, may be the one who has done in General Sam, the former head of state. The suspicion is widespread in Kangan, with the people asking 'where this loyal officer was hiding in the first twenty-four hours after his Commander was kidnapped from the Palace by "unknown persons," tortured, shot in the head and buried under one foot of soil in the bush' (218-219). All this echoes the pessimism of A Man of the People, where the elimination of Nanga and his colleagues is by people who have acted for reasons having nothing whatever to do with the public interest. Anthills of the Savannah is the closest the Nigerian novel comes to a perception of the rough beast from the inside, so much so as to assign it a history. This history is not really in terms of when General Sam changes and becomes a Machiavellian prince, although Ikem, one of the boyhood friends, is inclined to think of the possibility of such a dramatic change taking place. He writes: The Emperor may be a fool but he isn't a monster. Not yet, anyhow; although he will certainly become one by the time Chris and company have done with him. But right now he is still OK, thank God. That's why I believe that basically he does want to do the right thing. Some of my friends don't agree with me on this, I know. Even Chris doesn't. But I am sure I am right; I am sure that Sam can still be saved if we put our minds to it. His problem is that with so many petty interests salaaming around him all day, like that Shyster of an Attorney-General, he has no chance of knowing what is right. And that's what Chris and I ought to be doing—letting him glimpse a little light now and again through chinks in his solid wall of court jesters; we who have known him longer than the rest should not be competing with them (46). Raised here along with the question of the nature of General Sam's character is the question of the business of state. On both, Ikem's judgement is questionable. He is certain that Sam is a fool; elsewhere he calls him a 'half-wit. But he can be influenced either to selfdestruction as a monster, or to salvation by doing what is right. On these grounds he sorts the persons around Sam into those who would save him and those who would help him to destroy himself. The majority are in the latter group. The former comprises a minority of one—Ikem himself. On the business of state, he seems to grant Sam's right to rule: 'basically he wants to do the right thing'—as though government were a personal appurtenance of the head of state. Some members of the cabinet, like Professor Okong and the attorney-general share the view of government as the property of the head of state. Chris Oriko is the only member who takes it that when there is a cabinet, this body has responsibility for government actions and policies, and therefore that decisions are to be based on reasonable grounds, not on the intentions and wishes of the head of state. Chris's cabinet colleagues are 'court jesters.' so far as they applaud the general, whatever he may do: they assure him that it is his prerogative to do as he pleases. So in the cabinet the source of pressure to follow constituted norms is Chris alone. Like Ikem, outside, Chris inside constitutes a minority of one. The monster may have manifested itself at a moment in time, but that is not the time of its creation. That the unprincipled and lawless rascal has always been there is reflected in certain episodes of Sam's early life, supplied surprisingly by Ikem himself. For example, young Sam is said to have abandoned his ideas about becoming a medical doctor, joining the military instead, because his European schoolmaster had told him that the army was the career for a gentleman. And Ikem concludes: There is something about Sam which makes him enormously easy to take; his sense of theatre. He is basically an actor and half of the things we are inclined to hold against him are no more than scenes from his repertory to which he may have no sense of moral commitment whatsoever (50). What Ikem calls Sam's sense of theatre is something really simpler, if more fundamental. Sam lacks a moral personality. He has no idea of a thing being good or worthwhile in itself and for itself; for him there are no moral absolutes. While the English are in control, his code is 'what [is] expected of him,' that is, what they expect of him, for he admires them 'sometimes to the point of foolishness' (49). By reason of this lack of a moral personality, he has not internalized what was expected of him, in terms of what had to be done. Sam is a different kind of rough beast than, say, Chief Nanga or Zaki Amuri or the adventurers in Iyayi's The Contract. Even though he has a history, he has no sense of history. Whatever he does is for the moment itself. He has no long-term goals. The business of government for him is simply being where he is, where, according to Ikem, he has 'stumbled into.' His wish to remain in power indefinitely is not in order to achieve anything specific. Time for him is the present instant; a life presidency is the present instant extended indefinitely. This absence of a purpose strikes Chris occasionally as playfulness. After he has been trying unsuccessfully to get a decision by the head of state to visit Abazon and the latter has to leave the cabinet meeting early apparently in great irritation, Chris has the following expression of support: 'He is not in a good mood today,' says the Chief Secretary, breaking the freeze. 'We'll bring it up again next Thursday, Chris. Don't worry.' His Excellency is probably meant to overhear this and I believe he does. I could see a smile or the radiance of a smile from the back of his head like the faint memory of light at the edges of an eclipse (8). The misreading of Sam as being only playful is the main reason why the opposition against him is slow to build up. The two persons in the narrative who are most politically aware are Sam's friends, Chris and Ikem. Their longstanding friendship has helped to cloud their judgement, because they give him every chance, and make every allowance for his actions, and regard him in the best light possible. But it is Chris who is first to realize that the rough beast has broken out. He traces the change announcing this break-out back to one year or so, though he can't say exactly what was the occasion. He is not even sure of the meaning of what he has observed. But what comes to him now is the awareness that he has misjudged Sam all along. Part of the reason why he has stayed on in Sam's cabinet is to see how all this is going to end. He writes, I have thought of all this as a game that began innocently enough and then went suddenly strange and poisonous. But I may prove to be too sanguine even in that. For, if I am right, then looking back on the last two years it should be possible to point to a specific and decisive event and say: it was at such and such a point that everything went wrong and the rules were suspended. But I have not found such a moment.... And so it begins to seem to me that this thing probably never was a game, that the present was there from the very beginning only I was too blind or too busy to notice (1-2). He has come to a late realization, and he stays on in the role of a detached witness. It does not even occur to him that he might take up arms—whatever these were, the air waves, for example—against his former friend. He imagines the thing will play itself out somehow, and does not think he might do something to hasten it or shape the outcome. But even if 'the present was there from the very beginning', Chris, nonetheless, thinks other colleagues, especially Professor Okong, are to blame for this outbreak now taking place (8). In any event, whether out of self-reproach or by reason of his detachment. Chris does not anticipate Sam's moves, though he now knows something is wrong. Despite that he is the impetuous one, Ikem does not anticipate his moves either, when at last he too realizes. Quite unlike Ofeyi and his associates, they do not see themselves as the opposition. Being the opposition is what they are forced into. Everything is belated. In principle, therefore, Chris and Ikem do not have a fighting chance against him, being so unprepared, while he has the entire state apparatuses of repression and reaction, and makes no bones whatever in bringing these down on his old friends. Still he has not moved fast enough, nor with the operational efficiency his military and state security machinery promise. Ill-prepared and fragmented, the opposition nevertheless manages to bring him down. This is because in his very military hierarchy are other rough beasts waiting for when the time is right to step in and following our metaphor, run amuck.
General Sam is different from the great figures of disorder and misrule we have seen in this chapter and in the last, in that he seeks and retains power for its own sake. For all the others, political power is simply a useful tool. Either it is a means to a purely personal end, which is material gain, or the two are apprehended as one complex, with power leading to material gain, and vice versa. Where these figures of power are confronted in a forceful manner, it is frequently by a movement of opposition against their abuse of power. Either they have used their powerful position to oppress and exploit others, as in Soyinka's Season of Anomy and Echewa's The Crippled Dancer, or they have deployed it as a protective device, while expropriation of the common wealth into a private account is going on, as in Achebe's A Man of the People and Iyayi's The Contract. Anthills of the Savannah presents a vision of power as something pursued and held on to for itself. There are characters like Izongo, of Okara's The Voice, and the Eze of Isu, in Nwankwo's My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours, who share this attitude. For these, as for Anthills of the Savannah, power is an end in itself, not a means to something else – a commodity, so to speak, as it can be bought and paid for using one's material resources. In Anthills of the Savannah, Sam's cronies are the people who understand this and are prepared to pay the specific kind of tribute required, which is worship. One such worshipper is the attorney-general. Having brought out to Sam that Chris is disloyal and incapable of paying this tribute, he proceeds: 'As for those like me, Your Excellency, poor dullards who went to bush grammar schools, we know our place, we know those better than ourselves when we see them. We have no problem worshipping a man like you. Honestly, I don't. You went to Lord Lugard College where half of your teachers were Englishmen. Do you know, the nearest white men I saw in my school were an Indian and two Pakistanis' (24). Those who have a privilege deserve it; the privilege attaches to them because they are 'good for it,' to use the words of the Singer in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. This argument follows the logic of 'similitude' (Michel Foucault, 1970), the language of primitive thought. But the attorney-general is not consistent. He does not accord the same rights of worship to Chris who had been Sam's contemporary at Lord Lugard College. For Sam has the supreme advantage of being the head of state—which proves to the lawyer that he is certainly more deserving than his former schoolmate. Convinced that Chris's mind works on the same principles as his own, he argues further that the reason this man is unable to show loyalty to the head of state in the way he approves, worship, is that 'he does have a problem; he wants to know why you and not him should be His Excellency' (24). The capacity to be enthralled by the spectacle of power to the extent of according it the status of a divine form is an attitude we find in Sam himself. We have seen that he admires the English to the point of foolishness. But his greatest idol is the emperor at the Organization of African Unity meeting, who 'never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what was going on around him.' It is his first Organization of African Unity summit; and he is enormously impressed by this man. He tells his friends all about him on his return, ending, 'I wish I could look like him,' said ...wistfully, his thoughts obviously faraway (52). He sees himself as the Kangan equivalent of people like this emperor and President-for-life Ngongo. That is why he wishes to be given the accolade president-for-life of Kangan, and to have all the entitlements which could come from a cult of power with himself at the centre. If General Sam sees himself as the subject of entitlements, he does not see himself at the same time as the subject of responsibilities. He has no idea of what is called in the Idemili sequence of this narrative the moral nature of authority' (102). The tragic potential of this partial perception is played out in that sequence (102-105) and it comprises the mythic undertow which must shape and give orientation to the narrative itself. As a factor of imbalance, the use of authority without regard to the moral aspect is what triggers off the tragic recoil in the Idemili sequence, in which both the error and the one who brings it about are swept away. The crisis and pattern of movement of Anthills of the Savannah are determined here. Ikem puts the matter this way: The prime failure of this government … can't be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable; it isn't the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it isn't even this second-class, hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students.... It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation's being (141). Ikem's demand is for a view of power in terms of service; which means the abolition of the rough beast and the Machiavellian prince— the abolition of the age, that is; not just the destruction and doing away with an individual monster. But he does not know how this can be accomplished, although at a moment of extreme bitterness of heart, the idea of a 'wrathful day of reckoning' (142) does come to his mind. But if, as we have argued, the removal of General Sam is simply the substitution of an old and familiar rough beast by a new one hitherto unknown, then no such day of reckoning comes in Anthills of the Savannah. We see that day of reckoning again longed for, unavailingly, in Festus Iyayi's The Contract. Here the writer Onise Ine prophesies revolution as an inevitable process where corruption is the order of the day, and government exists to aid and abet it. But this idea seems so commonplace that the government functionaries are not surprised by it. They have taken this eventuality into account in planning for the future: they stash away the money they have stolen in foreign banks, expecting to be able to flee abroad once the day of reckoning is felt to be in the horizon. Their prognosis from lived experience is in total agreement with Ine's prophesying: a revolution 'was only a matter of time. Oh yes, only a matter of time' (122). Ine imagines that the prospect of such an eventuality would put fear into the government functionaries and bring them to change their ways. But it leads these functionaries to act in a totally different way. There is certainly no change of heart. Rather the practice and scale of corruption and thievery from the public treasury are given a great impetus and new urgency. What was to be done was to be done as quickly as possible, and maximum profit made and put away in a safe place. The Contract, however, enacts a different myth than that of the rough beast, namely the Adamic myth of a fall from idealism and innocence to materialism and moral degeneration. This is not fundamentally different from the pattern of movement in Heroes, with Osime going from innocence to experience. The Contract is the myth of the fall in the proper sense, and those who fall are not moved to try and rise again. They only corrupt and pull down others, and in this way strive to make the fallen state ordinary and the universal norm. This corruption has spread downwards from father to son, from the political leaders and senior civil administrators to the contractors and their agents. These agents are sometimes their wives; at other times young females employed to use their bodies as a bait. All have their eyes on public money, and each is determined to make as much of it as possible his own. There are only a few examples in the Nigerian novel of the rough beast as a private individual: such is this literary tradition's fascination with the public event and the individual for whom it comprises the space of action. The other type of individual is seen in a purely domestic and private setting in I.N.C. Aniebo's The Journey Within', while in Kole Omotoso, Memories of Our Recent Boom, his career has a wider reference. The rough beast in The Journey Within comprises a husband and wife set, Christian and Janet, who are seen by the narrator in terms of having urban sophistication, of which Christianity is produced as an aspect. We are able to see them in clearer light by contrasting them with another couple Nelson and Ejiaka who, despite being urban based, have lost nothing of their rural culture. The narrator seems to see the two couples as models of westernization on the one hand, and cultural purity, on the other. One of the characteristics of this rural household ensconced in the urban space is one familiar in negritude discourse: laughter. This is utterly lacking in the sterile environment of Christian's and Janet's household. In the following conversation between Christian and Ejiaka, we see the man's explanation of this phenomenon. It is because of Janet's excessive knowledge: she is a qualified midwife, Christian a moderately educated shopkeeper. We read: 'You can't really say how good a mother a woman will be until she has had a child.' 'You are right there,' Ejiaka conceded, 'Eh-he, that is another difference between you and Janet. She would never agree that I am right. 'That is because she knows so much.' 'Yes, she knows a great deal.' 'You make it sound like a bad thing.' 'It is a bad thing. You have never lived with somebody who knows a great deal, someone who knows everything' (The Journey Within 226). Christian seeks sympathy from Ejiaka—he thinks he has won it, in fact—because Janet terrorizes him with excessive knowledge. He does not draw attention to the terrible things he says to her. What we do know is that in the matrimonial exchanges between the two, of which the currency is torture, the one who has the upper hand at all times is Christian. Janet remains doggedly in the fight, and it is her persistence that gets back to Christian in a cutting way, and spurs him to search for sharper and more hurtful darts. Her counter-strokes are few indeed, but not her power of resistance. This is what saves her in the face of Christian's determined efforts to crush her into a cowering, nervous wreck. He fairly becomes a torture machine. Christian keeps a mistress in town all the time. He suffers much on their-account, including punishment beatings and the looting of his shop, but he endures all because of a side-interest. Assured of 'his own gratification, and knowing that the childless Janet looks upon sex strictly as a function of procreation, and will not be tempted on any account to marital infidelity, he has her under siege. He holds himself aloof from her, and won't look at her no matter what she does to arouse him. Then he turns to drinking in the house all alone, and getting drunk too simply because Janet detests alcohol and is disgusted by drunkenness. He not only deliberately spoils anything he knows she is enjoying, and greets with demonic laughter any misfortune that comes her way, but he takes every opportunity to reopen and deepen wounds. Here is the couple in one of their exchanges: 'Oh yes, deliveries. You are good at that. Unfortunately your own children do not survive because you boil the poor things in your hot womb.' 'Christian. Christian, are you mad?' 'Now we are getting somewhere. But isn't it funny? When I drink I do the talking and you do the keeping quiet. Isn't it funny that as soon as you see me drinking you crawl into the shell you should never have left? Do I remind you of your father, that is before your mother turned him into a woman? Tell me. Do I?' (128). In addition to being terrorized by Janet's excessive knowledge, he is also terrorized by her excessive talking. These are both Christian's charges against her. But we never see her doing any of this. Eventually Janet will have a child, but this is a result of being raped by two soldiers in a train. If we call her a rough beast, it is because of Christian's charges, and the narrator's connivance. All we see is that she is hard and unbending, but she is no less a victim for all this, the victim of a cruel fate, but mostly that of a rough beast's unrestrained rampage. If in the public sphere, as we have seen in novel after novel, there is no final, definite casting out of the rough beast, his immunity in the private and domestic setting proves fairly unassailable in this work. His elimination in Omotoso's Memories of Our Recent Boom is, strikingly, in an accident. In Omotoso's work, the rough beast is the protagonist Seven— he ultimately changes his name to Omomeje, or Meje for short. As a child, he had survived in part through, scavenging, for though his widowed mother wishes to give all her three children as good an education as she can manage, she does not earn enough from her petty trading to provide enough food. The youngest, Sisi, is a baby in hand; so the mother takes her with her in her travels. The eldest Aburo has no head for schoolwork, and is apprenticed to a bicycle repairer, and gets fed in his workplace. Seven, younger than Aburo by many years, is not old enough for anything else than school. He suffers most from hunger, and makes up by consuming the food elements of the sacrifices the villagers leave at various places for their gods. But sometimes there are uses for the elements he does not consume: The sacrifices at the river sites were usually much bigger and sometimes mainly cooked food. There would be a lump of pounded yam with stew and pieces of meat. Sometimes it would be rice and beans and dodo. Once he even found salad; of course he did not know then that it was salad. He ate it and liked it. Another time he found a whole dog cut it up and [sold] the meat in a part of the village where nobody knew him or cared what kind of meat they ate. Whether he was in the village or in the town, he sought the places of sacrifice. And sometimes he would bring the sacrifices of the village to the town to sell and those of the town to sell in the village (6-7). Though the community and his mother strongly disapprove of this behaviour and try to get him to change, Meje proves incorrigible. Nor does he see at any time the point which his mother or anyone else may be making, because his needs and desires comprise for him what the philosophers call the necessary and sufficient cause of his actions. If he wants something, having it is both the motive of his action and its justification. This pattern already manifest in his childhood is what governs his adult life. The quarrel with his brother, which comes at the moment of his fulfilment, is owing to this rule of life. Aburo who has gone from a bicycle repairer to a soldier, and then a big contractor, has been supplying building materials to Meje's firm for the construction of the latter's showpiece building complex in their village. This building covers an area of six acres and costs millions—no one knows exactly how many millions; but Meje has put everything he can find into this building project, including the 'mobilization fees' for construction works contracted with the government and money owed for materials supplied to his firm. His indebtedness to Aburo has gone up so high that it appears to pose a grave danger to his own firm. This is a matter Aburo broaches in a roundabout way: 'You yourself have not been available for our fifteenth of the month meetings. We have a large amount of money outstanding from you. I'm finding it difficult to pay my workers. You know what that means. I need to make this trip' (203). Meje has been given a chieftaincy by the Chief of the village, and he is preparing to take the title at the same time that his new house is to be dedicated. The ceremony and festivity are planned to go on for one week. In giving Meje this chieftaincy, the village head has shown no consideration to the older brother and has passed him over, contrary to tradition, which demands that the older person be considered before the younger brother in such a case. Meje is unembarrassed that custom seems to have been violated in the matter of giving him a traditional title, and doesn't feel in any way self-conscious before his brother. Aburo therefore decides not to attend the conferring of the title. He would travel overseas with his family, and stay away until the dedication and the title taking are over. He tells Meje, however, that the journey is on behalf of his business which is threatened with collapse, but that he would try to be back in time for the ceremonies. But the fact is that Meje has committed another person's money in his own project of self-aggrandizement, and is rather disappointed that Aburo should even mention the matter. We read that he is irritated: He could not understand how his own brother would not realize that the things he was doing were eating up a lot of money and that was the only reason he could not come up with his usual payment to him. It seemed so obvious (203). What he finds disappointing is, in short, that Aburo does not see the necessity of ministering to the needs of a young man who sees nothing beyond himself and is determined to attract all the light there is to himself, and keep it trained there. His attitude towards women is equally selfish and dictated by his desires. Meje's worldly success is thanks to timely action, a sense of drive, and ruthlessness in the pursuit of a chosen path. When he is growing up he is uncertain as to a career to follow, but this is as long as he thinks of a career as a kind of work one associates one's name with. But then he comes to a realization that a career could be a means to an end. His settling for the profession of a civil engineer is when he determines that 'there is … money in it' (142). Money is really what there is before him, and as a rough beast, he is prepared to ride roughshod over people for the attaining of this purpose. The presence in the Nigerian literary tradition of the strange character we have called the rough beast is not fortuitous. Hence we have been able to trace it back to the ancestral mask of traditional society. So fundamental in the tradition is the mask-figure that some have argued that its appearance in traditional African festivals is itself drama. In the age of the novel, this mask, as monster in general, has become a given essential for the articulation of thought in the process of representation. We see it in Tutuola, as the figure of Death in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and various monsters in The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, where the human persona is a hero in the comic sense, the one who conquers all opposition or knows how to reduce the opposition to an ally. We see it in novels of social convulsion, as well as in sequences in which discourse turns upon individual experience and change. In The Stillborn, we see it in the grandmother—the Witch Mother who, in reduced circumstances and bereft of the means to inflict harm, makes do with Satanic laughter and mockery. In Munonye's Oil Man of Obange, on the other hand, the Witch Mother does not even know herself as a Witch Mother. And yet, knowingly or not, 'voluntarily or not,' as Derrida would say, she signifies by her presence the blocking and nullifying of effort, and the frustration and destruction of young life. But, of course, she never brings forth young life herself. In Aluko's His Worshipful Majesty, there is indecision as to the real rough beast. The Chairman of the Council Mr Morrison thinks of the Alaiye and his entourage as unprincipled, selfish, and anarchic, while the Alaiye thinks him impious, meddlesome, and unreasonable.
Here then the constitution of the rough beast is as a convention of thought, rather than as reality itself. This is not what comes out in Soyinka's Ake, for example, where a situation of conflict between the traditional ruler, the Alake, and Beere the leader of the women, is in terms of the binary relation: conservative/progressive, reaction/proaction. But narrative sympathy is on the side of Beere: thus the villain of the struggle is the one she thinks of in those terms, the other party. The novels of the tradition in which the figure of the rough beast is absent are a small handful, mainly Achebe's No Longer at Ease, Echewa's The Land's Lord, Nkem Nwankwo's Danda, Akwanya's Orimili, Munonye's Oil Man of Obange.