Military Rules as Postcolonial Drawbacks in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of People and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat

Abstract

The main trust of the present essay is to find out the reasons why military coups have frequently occurred in newly independent African countries and why the regimes have failed parceling the state and fallen in the same evils they pretend to decipher. This way, Africa continues to be subjected to regular military coups and civilian political maneuvering and economic gambling. Dealing filthiness in politics and violence to maintain power, Achebe and Ngugi’s merit is to have predicted the phenomenon getting ready to outbreak. Achebe and Ngugi have played a full role of novelist as teacher raising alarm on the necessity to change the prevalent paradigm. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, a region prone to both internal and large-scale political upheavals at the time of the novels’ publication, the essay confirms the link between military power and violence as well as the personalization of power by civilians and violence. Throughout both narratives, theories like that of Fanon and Mbembe have helped us disentangle the process which leads African elites and men in uniforms to jeopardize their countries’ economic development, so that it lingers behind today.