Anthills of the Savannah: Development of Chris’s Character as a Perfect Tragedy. Royal Giovanni College

The Anthills of the Savannah is a novel by Chinua Achebe set in a fictional country in West Africa, Kangan, during the 1960s postcolonial period. Arguably, this novel represents Achebe’s ideology of the postcolonial African social and political situation in a very articulate fashion. This is a riveting story that opens with the enlightenment of a coup that happened about two years ago and ends in another coup. The story encompasses the lives of three friends, Sam, a newly installed military dictator, Chris Oriko who is a Minister of Information and Ikem Osodi, an outspoken journalist and editor of the National Gazette. The three friends emanate from a common background and they all were educated abroad in England. The past two years, however, forced the trio to grow apart both politically and temperamentally. Sam is a selfish and paranoid dictator, Ikem is a fervid critic of the government policies while Chris is the calm one and the voice of reason that acts as the mediator between the two friends. For this reason, this paper looks at the transformation of Chris to illustrate how the author developed Chris to propagate the story.

At the beginning of the narrative, we see Chris as a powerless and desperate character. We get to...