BRAINSTORMING ABOUT ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH
I still did not finish writing anything about Anthills of the Savannah but I want share with you, folks, the first ideas I had in my mind during the reading of it.
First of all, I was thinking about the year in which it was published: 1987. During that year I was born, but the stunning fact for me was that the winner of the Sanremo’s festival was SI PUO’ DARE DI PIU’! It should be an invite from someone higher to us to dedicate my life to help my fellows and my neighbours around the world? In my thirties, I am aware that a person can help another one in many different ways. I would help people to understand better this world and the unknown through this blog and my ancestral passion of the reading and the writing.
Chinua Achebe himself in this novel had disclosed a truth about the writers that confirmed that my ambition is suit also for me: indeed, he wrote that: “Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!”
I am the right person who is able to talk about a topic for hours and I have many witnesses aware of that! Since my childhood my main purpose of my life is becoming a writer and I found bracing Chinua Achebe’s words!
The common assumption nowadays is that be a writer should not be a real job. Chinua Achebe, instead declared that “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”
In the contemporary world, I think that other people are doing a work that is not a real job, and I am thinking about fundraisers, in order to individuate all the people who are totally illiterate but they use the hubris to achieve their goals, following the saying “homo homini lupus”. In a better world, I am dreaming that the companies using fundraising agencies keep an eye on the procedure of recruitment and formation to give enough safety to the customers and to the fundraiser himself.
The Italian translation of the title at the beginning was lovely for me, but later I found it was not exactly the same of the original chose by his author: if Anthills are common in the African continent and Savannah is another name to call it, Farwarers of the History should indicate indistinctively every kind of people. In the words that I read in The Indipendent from Richard Dowden I identify the reason of the translation: Anyone ruling or in danger of ruling an African State should read this book. So should the rest of us. It brings humanity to a world in which we feared it did not exist.
Another ideas spreading on my head during the reading of Anthills of the Savannah was the representation of unhealthy relation among the so-called Third World and the West, unfortunately a condition that is still being now.
The other relationships represented in the novel, instead, demonstrate that the love is able to destroy any barriers. Chikaima Maitea should shout around the world from now her thinking and her needs, common to the rest of human beings of the earth.
