at seems to frame the whole enterprise: ... it is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant - like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames.9Given such views, an African novelist would necessarily not be concerned with the 'fleeing rat' but with the central problem ofthe 'burning houses' of the post-colonial period. In examining the manner in which this concern is projected through a formalliterary response, the following questions are of paramount importance: what ideological contradictions are being considered,either implicitly or explicitly (at the level of stated ideas), within the presented worlds of this novel? In what manner are thesecontradictions personalised? To what extent is a resolution of the contradictions projected or achieved? These are the questionsthat need to be asked and answered.The presented world of Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People (1966) 10 is clearly analogous to that of the Nigerian FirstRepublic - the period that stretched from Independence to the first of a plethora of military coups. It is a world of demagogicpoliticians, idealistic young men, and the struggle for political power that has been activated by the possibilities of self-rule. Thenovel is concerned with the nature of events that are almost exactly contemporary with its writing. A wide field of values, arange of ideological contradictions is under consideration here.In the opening paragraph of the novel, the narrator (the self-inquiring young Odili) describes Chief Nanga as "a man of thepeople". The importance of this phrase is stressed, by Achebe, from the outset. Odili goes on to remark that it is necessary toadmit the appropriateness of the title "or else the story I'm going to tell will make no sense". His comment emphasises thecentral importance of the...
