Monday, July 14, 2008

Summer reading: "Anthills of the Savannah"

What Chinua Achebe says about Africa and corruption:

"The prime failure of this government began also to take on a clearer meaning for him.  It can't be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable; it isn't the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it isn't even this second-class, hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students and the destruction and banning thereafter of independent unions and cooperatives.  It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation's being."

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