Realities of Opportunism Schaueble Kagoni Meja College

A Man of the People is a satirical story of mentorship, romance, revenge, and chance. The story is told in the perspective of Odili, the protagonist and a young educated man who is used symbolically to represent the younger generation that was changing. The main antagonist in the story is Odili’s former teacher, Mr. Nanga, now commonly referred to as Chief Nanga, who ideally represents West African traditional customs that were inspired by Nigeria. Chief Nanga currently is an elected official and the country’s Minister of Culture while Odili is a teacher at a village school. Chinua Achebe wrote this novel in 1966, which was set in a fictional postcolonial African country, unlike his first three novels that were set in Nigeria Igbo villages. This shift in setting was deliberate as Achebe strived to represent African literature on the realities of the African continent as a whole. There is no mention of a specific cultural or ethnic group throughout the novel, and the English used in writing is British English as indicated by the use of words such as “lorry” instead of “truck”. The problems of corruption and political tyranny that are covered in the novel were the dominant problems that the postcolonial African countries were...