Chinua Achebe's fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, was first published in 1987, some fifteen years after his fourth novel, A Man of the People. In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe states his abhorrence of any theory of radical transformation of society. "Society is an extension of an individual," he says through Ikem Osodi, his protagonist. "The most we can hope to do with a problematic psyche is to re-form it."

Achebe leaves no one in doubt regarding what he means by reform. No psychoanalyst, he argues further, would strive to alter the core of the personality of a problematic person. All he is expected to do is to alter "some details in the periphery." But, to be fair, Achebe wrote his novel without the benefit of further insight that the political turmoil, which overtook the nation in the nineties would have offered him.

In Chapter Nine of Anthills of...
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