Humour and Satire in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Political satire is one of the most enduring literary modes across cultures, and a comparison of Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels reveals the shared rhetorical strategies through which writers from different historical and cultural contexts use humour, irony, and exaggeration to expose the corruption of political power. This study examined how both texts construct the political world as a theatre of self-interest, incompetence, and moral hypocrisy, and how satirical narrative distance allows both authors to make devastating political critiques while maintaining fictional plausibility. A comparative satire theory methodology drawing on classical rhetoric, Augustan literary criticism, and African literary politics was applied. Achebe's Odili narrates the grotesque performance of Nanga's political populism against the backdrop of newly independent Nigeria's political culture, while Swift's Gulliver navigates a series of imaginary political dystopias that collectively indict British parliamentary corruption. Both texts deploy the figure of the naive or compromised observer as a moral lens on political venality. The analysis showed that while Swift's satirical mode is characterised by a systematic allegorical correspondence between fictional lands and British political institutions, Achebe's is more directly realist and polemical, reflecting his position as a political novelist with a specific public audience. The study recommends this pairing for courses on political literature and satire at universities in the South East geopolitical zone of Nigeria.

Keywords: political satire, Achebe, Swift, irony, postcolonial politics