S.O. Amali, et. al., (eds.), Consolidation and Sustenance of Democracy: The United States of America and Nigeria, American Studies Association of Nigeria/Hope Publications Ltd., Ibadan, 2002, 306-320 APPEASING EMBITTERED HISTORIES: POLITICS AND HISTORY IN CHINUA ACHEBE AND ISHMAEL REED Harry Olufunwa Department of English University of Lagos, Akoka Considered together, history, politics and fiction constitute a strange trio. The broad distinctions that obtain between the first two and literature are well known. Aristotle declares that “poetry tends to express the universal, history the familiar.” 1 Plato excludes poets from his ideal state, claiming that they are at best irrelevant, at worst subversive because they weaken the reasoning of the citizenry. 2 There is also the long-standing query into whether literature “does” anything, crystallized in the rhetorical questions posed by Rene Wellek and Austine Warren: ... can we precisely define the influence of a book on its readers? Will it ever be possible to describe the influence of satire? .... How great was the influence of literature on the rise of modern nationalism? 3 This paper examines the intersection of history, politics and fiction in the work of a Nigerian and an American novelist with the aim of seeing how their work impinges on the notion of institutional models for the consolidation and sustenance of democracy in Nigeria and the United States. In doing this, it seeks to show the ways in which their writing offers alternative political models – if they may so be called – for the strengthening of democracy in their respective countries. Chinua Achebe and Ishmael Reed both occupy positions of great significance within the literary firmaments of their nations. Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, for example, are outstanding for their delineation of pre-colonial African life, as well as their portrayal of the dynamic tensions which undergirded the arrival and establishment of British colonial rule. Ishmael Reed is one of the first American authors to point out the inherently multicultural nature of the United States, and has produced fiction such as Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada whose eclecticism has incorporated numerous genres from varied ethnic and