Kippen is an educator and a specialist on British colonial literature and twentieth-century South African fiction. In the following essay, he explores the satirical intent of Vengeful Creditor. "

In the story "Vengeful Creditor," Chinua Achebe presents a situation similar to that of post-independence Nigeria, in which an African country's administrative class has maintained the worst attributes of the departed British colonial system. His depiction of the class conflict between the rich and the poor centers around whether or not free primary education (called universal primary education, or UPE, in Nigeria) should be implemented, and if so, how it should be paid for. Achebe's exploration of this matter becomes a scathing satire of the failures of traditional (Le., European) solutions, both liberal and conservative, to the problems of governance and inequality between classes, problems that emerged as African nations achieved independence.

Everyone has lost something by the story'...