Postcolonial Disillusionment:

A Historicist Reading of Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People

Abstract

The primary purpose of Chinua Achebe’s writing was to help the Nigerian people retrieve what they lost due to years of colonial exploitation. To construct a sense of dignity for African communities and nations, that educative purpose inspired him to reexamine social, political, economic, and historical realities of Africa. That concern obviously worked as a stimulus behind the production of A Man of the People in which Achebe pictured the failure of postcolonial leadership in a fictional country which in many ways coincided with post-independence Nigeria. The incident of the military coup at the end of the novel due to the failure of political leadership prophetically coincided with a similar incident in Nigeria only six years after its independence. This was mostly because of the politicians’ indulgence in euphoria and self-interest. Due to the lack of a vantage political vision, the country experienced a disastrous collapse of economic, moral, and social values. National consciousness went through a vulnerability in the face of rival tribal consciousness in a multi-ethnic state. In A Man of the People Achebe explores how the so-called man of the people fails to uphold the public interest for his indulgence in sexual motives and private politics. This paper seeks to approach Achebe’s A Man of the People from a historicist perspective and examines how the author depicts the disillusionment of a postcolonial nation