Man of the People, A

a novel by Chinua Achebe, published in 1966. This satire deals with corruption and the cult of personality in a newly independent African state. The two main protagonists are government minister Chief Nanga, ‘the most approachable politician in the country’, and his idealistic former pupil Odili, who narrates the story in a style characteristic of the author, effectively blending African proverbs and pidgin English with evidence of the encroachment of Western mores. Invited to stay with Chief Nanga, Odili finds himself in an unfamiliar but seductive social world, where Nanga enjoys an opulent arriviste lifestyle while at the same time subscribing to traditional customs, including polygamy. Things take a turn for the worse for Odili when his sometime girlfriend succumbs to Nanga's charms, leaving Odili smarting with resentment and hatching plans for revenge. He sets out to influence Nanga's intended second wife, Edna, away from Nanga though in the process he begins to value her qualities. At the same time Odili, on behalf of a dissident political party, decides to contest Chief Nanga's seat at the coming election, and the repercussions have adverse effects not only for Odili's friends and family but for his whole village. The two rivals clash publicly and physically at Nanga's inaugural campaign meeting, as a result of which Odili is hospitalized and briefly arrested on a trumped-up charge. Although Odili's political ambitions come to an abrupt end, and Nanga is re-elected, by the end of the book the corrupt government—‘a regime which inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put away safely in his gut’—has fallen, and Odili has won Edna.