Anthills of the Savannah Literary Elements

Political novel

The novel is set in the African state Kangan. The time period is not specified but it is post-independence.

Omniscient narrator with a third-person point of view, as well as Chris, Beatrice, and Ikem with first-person points of view.

Tone: questioning, objective
Mood: anxious, suspenseful

Protagonists: Ikem, Chris, and Beatrice || Antagonist: corrupted government system, as represented by His Excellency

Ikem speaks out about the government's corruption and ignorance of important issues, and he is assassinated by the government.

Chris gets shot on his way to Abazon while protecting a young woman's honor.

A police officer hands a sheet of his notepaper to Ikem like a death warrant. It foreshadows Ikem's impending death.

"We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us without implicating the others."

Ikem understates the consequences of meeting with the leaders of Abazon.

Allusion to the movie The Exorcist: "I don't find it funny, people shaking hands like this...while their neck is turned away at right angles, like that girl in The Exorcist, and grinning into the camera."

There is imagery of a desert on Chris's way to Abazon that intensifies the poor state of those areas.

"Because it is my funeral, that's why."

"What hideous abomination forbidden and forbidden and forbidden again seven times have we committed or else condoned, what error that no reparation can hope to erase?"

Metonymy: Power brokers - the advisers to the President who help him make decisions and have influence over current affairs in Kangan.

Synecdoche: "Tomorrow no taxi go run" (182). This phrase means that none of the taxi drivers will be driving their taxis because there will be a strike.

"The trees had become hydra-headed bronze statues so ancient that only blunt residual features remained on their faces, like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year's brush fires."