5 - Courting the voters: A Man of the People

Summary

Arrow of God had been concerned with the nature of Igbo religious belief and believers, portraying not fetishes and ju-ju, ‘so crude and stupid’, as Louis Aladai describes Rimi civilization in The African Witch, but a metaphysic, constructed and questioned by Igbo intellectuals and leaders, a system of beliefs fashioned to respond to and balance the demands of individual and communal well-being and to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge and power. With A Man of the People, Achebe takes up some of the other themes significant in Cary's novels, and especially The African Witch: these are the themes of interlinked political and sexual jealousy, of the young westernized idealist and would-be leader of his people, of political demagoguery, and of political abuse in a situation where African and European forms of political leadership and participation each have a particular kind of appeal and function.

Odili, the narrator and chief protagonist of A Man of the People, is like Louis Aladai a nationalist who has nothing but contempt for the traditions of his nation. He does not ‘care too much for our women's dancing’, he speaks as any foreigner might of the members of the hunters' guild as ‘these people’, ‘bush’ is the nastiest epithet he can think of, and he scornfully dismisses the people with whom he works and whose children he teaches:

Here were silly ignorant villagers dancing themselves lame and waiting to blow off their gunpowder in honour of one of those who had started the country off down the slopes of inflation.