Leadership Quote by Chinua Achebe

Achebe is doing something quietly radical here: demoting stories from decorative entertainment to political infrastructure. “Consolidating” is the tell. It’s the language of states, coups, balance sheets - not bedtime tales. He frames narrative as the mechanism that locks in a society’s version of progress, whether that progress is real (“have made”) or self-flattering myth (“imagine they have made”). The sentence doesn’t romanticize storytelling; it treats it as a force that stabilizes power and identity, sometimes by laundering uncertainty into coherence.

The subtext is Achebe’s lifelong argument with empire over who gets to name reality. Colonialism didn’t just seize land; it installed a story that made the seizure sound like destiny, civilization, improvement. Achebe’s fiction answers by repossessing narrative authority, showing that “gains” always depend on who’s counting and whose losses get edited out. Notice how he pairs “people” with “their leaders,” a subtle warning that consolidation can serve the public or the ruling class - and often both, uneasily.

Context matters: Achebe wrote against Western canons that treated Africa as backdrop or absence, and he watched postcolonial nations inherit the temptation to tell triumphalist national stories that paper over corruption, ethnic tension, or gendered exclusion. His line reads like a diagnostic tool: listen to the stories a community repeats, and you’ll hear what it wants to believe it has earned.

Why it works is its double edge. Stories can anchor dignity and memory; they can also freeze delusion into tradition. Achebe refuses to pick one, because history rarely does.