Anthills Of The Savannah

The Abazon elder’s speech marks a key moment in the novel’s development of Storytelling as Cultural Preservation and Political Resistance. The elder’s assertion that “the story is chief among his fellows” establishes narrative as superior to military authority because “it is only the story [that] can continue beyond the war and the warrior” (114). This privileges storytellers as guardians of collective knowledge, challenging the regime’s attempts to control information through state media. The idea that the elder’s organic, oral tradition opposes sanitized official narratives gains additional resonance when he recounts the story of the tortoise and the leopard. Besides being a story about resistance, it is a story about memory; when the leopard asks why the tortoise is marking the dirt, the tortoise replies, “Because even after I am dead, I would want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here” (117). Like the marks in the dirt, storytelling bears witness even to doomed struggles, preserving hope for the future.

The chapters centering on Beatrice likewise speak to the importance of history, though in a different way: Her character development reveals the negotiation between postcolonial identity formation and spiritual awakening. The dinner party at Abichi Lake functions as a microcosm of neocolonial relationships, where Lou Cranford’s aggressive assertion of American economic interests reveals international forces shaping domestic policy and Beatrice’s position as the only African intellectual present highlights tokenism. Her humiliating experience catalyzes a transformation from cautious civil servant into a figure with prophetic authority. Particularly when juxtaposed against her efforts to entice Sam away from Lou—an act that she views as necessary but humiliating—her encounter with Chris becomes a ritual of empowerment where she assumes control. In particular, it represents a reclamation of female agency and spiritual authority that colonialism disrupted, as evidenced by the extended metaphor of worship that describes their lovemaking: “Clearly this was her grove and these her own peculiar rites over which she held absolute power. Priestess or goddess herself? No matter. But would he be found worthy? Would he survive?” (104). The closing questions allude to the story of Idemili, another illustration of women’s traditional power. 

Yet while it defends Indigenous history, neither the novel broadly nor Beatrice’s story in particular proposes a simple return to a precolonial era. As Ikem’s “love-letter” acknowledges, gender inequality is not a uniquely Western problem: “Nneka, [our ancestors] said. Mother is supreme. Let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives […] then, as the world crashes around Man’s ears, Woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together” (89). As much as the novel positions Beatrice as a modern “prophetess,” it does not make her the kind of exalted archetype whom Ikem describes, but rather a complex character in her own right. Like the other main characters, she is part of an elite that is quite removed from both the day-to-day experience of life in Kangan and the country’s cultural heritage. Her character arc, like theirs, thus involves grappling with The Intellectual’s Dilemma in Times of Crisis, particularly in a postcolonial state where to be an “intellectual” is to be Western educated. The national and cultural identity that emerges in the wake of imperialism must synthesize various influences into something new, the novel suggests.

These chapters further explore class tension and consciousness through Ikem’s encounter with the taxi drivers. Like Ikem’s earlier memory of the public execution, which highlighted his discomfort with the crowd’s delight, the episode reveals the gap between Kangan’s working class and its educated elite, even when those elites have defended the interests of the working class. One taxi driver’s clear admiration of status symbols like chauffeurs and luxury cars causes Ikem to doubt whether the working classes truly desire liberation, but he also recognizes subtle resistance in the way the taxi driver frames his apology: “[H]ow adroitly he had shifted the guilt for this failure round to the very same object of admiration for driving a battered old Datsun […] So in the midst of all [his] fulsome and perfectly sincere praise of Ikem [he] also managed to sneak in a couple of body-blows” (127). In keeping with its broader commitment to portraying a multiplicity of views, the novel resists investing any sector of society with full moral authority; its working-class characters are simultaneously subservient to and rebellious against the system that victimizes them.

Meanwhile, the symbolic landscape continues to establish connections between environmental and political deterioration. The drought in Abazon represents moral barrenness emanating from corrupt governance, while the delegation’s journey reveals how authoritarian regimes weaponize basic human needs—i.e., for water. This symbolism suggests that political healing requires reconnecting governance with natural cycles and community needs.