Contemporary Literary Criticism | Aidoo, Ama Ata - C. L. Innes (essay date 1995)

C. L. Innes (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: Innes, C. L. “Conspicuous Consumption: Corruption and the Body Politic in the Writing of Ayi Kewi Armah and Ama Ata Aidoo.” In Essays on African Writing, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, pp. 1-18. Nigeria: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1995.

[In the following essay, Innes discusses how political and cultural corruption relates to and influences the work of Aidoo and Ghanaian author Ayi Kewi Armah.]

At the close of A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe's novel depicting the rise and fall of a corrupt Nigerian politician, the narrator, Odili, declares:

For I do honestly believe that in the fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime just ended—a regime which inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put away safely in his gut or, in language evermore suited to the times: ‘you chop, me self I chop, palaver finish’; a regime in which you saw a...

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