Man of the People

Odili Samalu is a young school teacher, the narrator of this witty tale of love and politics in an unnamed West African country. Caught at first by the charisma of Chief Nanga, a government minister, he then discovers the amiable, semi-liberate Chief of Culture stealing his girl and, as novels of education do prove, life becomes both more difficult and more rewarding. Samalu joins a budding opposition group and seeks to run against Chief Nanga in the next election. What he learns about himself, his friends and enemies, his people, his nation, is told with a balanced humor and a large grasp of life’s ironies. Where it took over a quarter of a century for Irving’s dry comedy to yield to Melville’s cosmic humor, in Africa these days things move faster. One of the first of the independent nations’ novelists,