‘A man who lives on the banks of the river Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.’
(Traditional Igbo proverb, No Longer At Ease, chapter 1)
‘Na so did world be.’
(Igbo proverb, p.230 and elsewhere)
Chinua Achebe’s second novel is closely linked to the first, Things Fall Apart. The protagonist of that book was Okonkwo, a big man in the village of Umuofia, of the Igbo people in what would later become south-east Nigeria. Three-quarters of Things Fall Apart depicts the culture and practice of the Igbo people in the 1890s; the final quarter depicts the slow but unstoppable arrival of British colonial rule bringing with it European religion, administration, law and order, and showing the adverse affect these had on traditional Igbo culture and on Okonkwo in particular.
This second novel leaps forward about 60 years, to the late 1950s, to describe the life of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi Okonkwo. In Things Fall Apart one of the many ill effects of the arrival of the British was that Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye, converted to Christianity and moved out of the district altogether, changing his name to Isaac, betraying his heritage and rejecting his (often violent) father. We are told that Nwoye moved to the nearest big town, Umura, where he enrolled in teacher training college. Well, the protagonist of this book, Obi, Okonkwo, is Nwoye’s son (page 159; his mother is named Hannah Okonkwo, p.158).
An executive summary is pretty simple. Obi is a smart young man who gets the opportunity to study law in Britain. After graduating, Obi returns to his native Nigeria and gets a job in the public administration. Here he is shocked to discover that local government, already, before independence (which came in 1960), is mired in corruption.
In various ways, Obi’s attempts at honesty are rebuffed or mocked. He meets a young woman and falls in love, sharing with her the moral dilemmas he is faced with. Just paying to maintain his status, for example, paying the insurance on his car, stretch his resources. then his mother falls ill and needs medical treatment. Then he gets his girlfriend pregnant and has to pay for an abortion. The bank start pressing him about his ever-growing overdraft. Obi starts accepting bribes. The climax comes when he accepts one from an undercover policeman and is subsequently arrested, charged and taken to court for bribery.
The novel opens at the end of the plot, with Obi in court on trial for corruption and the narrative takes the form of flashbacks, back to all the moments which led up to him standing in court, broken and demoralised.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 describes responses to Obi’s arrest and trial. White colonials (notably Obi’s boss, Mr Green) are depicted as dismissing all Africans as corrupt. He and his cronies are described drinking and pompously laughing at the exclusive white men’s club, served by discreet black stewards.
By complete contrast we are then introduced to the Umuofia Progressive Union, formed 6 or 7 years earlier (i.e. about 1950) by men from Obi’s village of Umuofia, with a view to subsidising the education of the best and brightest among them (p.157).
Obi was the first candidate chosen under this scheme and had been loaned £800 to study in England, to be repaid over 4 years after his return – and now here he is, on trial, bringing shame on his village and clan, harshly criticised by some in the Union. In fact, he had already outraged many in the Union, years earlier, by changing the subject he studied in England from the (useful) Law to (useless) English (p.158).
The narrative then moves further back in time to the big prayer meeting held in Umuofia and hosted by his father, the retired Christian catechist, where Obi is toasted as the pride of the community and given blessings and presents and advice for his trip, first to Lagos, then to London.
Chapter 2
Stories about big city Lagos told by soldiers who’d fought for the British in the Second World War, when they returned to Umuofia. En route to the UK, Obi looks up a friend from his school, Joseph Okeke (‘a second class clerk’), who briefs him about life in the big city.
Then the scene cuts to four years later, with Obi returned from the UK and living in Lagos, now attached to his girlfriend, Clara, and discovering seedier, poorer slums of the city which he hadn’t seen on his brief stay en route to England.
Quite quickly we are immersed in Obi’s post-British life in Lagos, complete with girlfriend Clara Okeke who is a nurse, puts up with Obi reading his poems, prefers to go to trashy violent American movies. His friend Christopher, a graduate from the London School of Economics. They have long arguments about the future of Nigeria and the role of bribery already present in the black administration.
Chapter 3
The reader is getting used to the narrative jumping around in time. Now we leap back to when Obi and Clara first met, at a dance in St Pancras Town Hall in London. Obi was clumsy and gauche. Eighteen months later they meet by chance on the boat back to Nigeria, the MV Sasa, sailing from Liverpool.
Evocative description of the sea journey, companions at dinner, the changing moods of the sea. Obi has bad sea sickness and formerly aloof Clara is kind enough to give him some pills for it. Obi becomes firm friends with a white man, John Macmillan (p.172). They discover they’re both 25 years old.
The ship docks at Funchal, largest city in the Madeira islands. Obi, John and Clara explore the city together. That evening, back on board ship, they have their first kiss.
Chapter 4
On arriving at Lagos a local official tries to extract a £5 import duty on Obi’s radiogram. It’s a symbolic re-introduction to African corruption. ‘Dear old Nigeria,’ he said to himself (p.176).
The officials of the Umuofia Progressive Union arrange a grand gala reception for the prodigal son. We learn his first name is actually Michael, Michael Obi Okonkwo (p.177). The scene is played for laughs (I think) with a big discrepancy between Obi’s informal approach (dressing in shirtsleeves, delivering an informal speech about education) which contrast strongly with the shirt and tie formality of the Union’s officials and a grandiose speech about obi representing their village in the Great Future of the Country etc.
After the reception his friend Joseph takes him to a bar for a drink. Obi wants to eat traditional Nigerian food but finds it impossible to order. Nobody with ambition eats the old-style food (roast yams and bitter-leaf soup).
A flashy car draws up outside the club and out gets the super-popular, handsome and well-groomed politician the Honourable Sam Okoli. Happening to be in a chair facing that way, Obi sees he has a female companion in his flash car. It is Clara.
Bribery and corruption
In the 20 or so books about post-independence Africa I’ve read this year, corruption emerges as such a consistent universal feature of African states and economies that you eventually realise it is the system, the way things are run and managed from the lowest to the highest levels, while the fol-de-rol about democracy or transparent governance etc are formal hoops African leaders have to jump through in order to get their next tranche of World Bank loans, half-mocking lip service paid to western banks.
So this book is a fascinating insight into how the issue of corruption was perceived, discussed and addressed by Africans at the time of independence, over 60 years ago. Just the fact that Achebe chose to make the topic a central theme of his second book, with repeated discussions of it by the characters, is itself hugely revealing. Regarded just as documentary evidence for social history, it’s a fascinating body of evidence. I was riveted by passages like this:
In Nigeria the government was ‘they’. It had nothing to do with you or me. It was an alien institution and people’s business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble. (p.178)
Chapter 5
Obi writes a paper expressing his view that corruption is caused by the older generation and will be stamped out once a new, young generation of university graduates like himself rise to the top. He interviews for a job in the civil service, led by a white man who is happy to discuss recent literature with Obi (recent literature including Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of The Matter’). This man asks him point blank if he wants to the job (Secretary to the Scholarship Board) so he can take bribes? Obi is understandably furious but also demoralised that this is the universal and low expectation of even educated young Nigerians (cf. p.212 where Joseph’s friends simply expect Obi to take bribes).
While waiting to hear the result, Obi takes a ‘mammy-wagon’ i.e. a packed bus, the 500 miles from Lagos to Umuofia.
On the way corrupt policemen pull them over for a bribe. Obi watches the driver about to pay and both participants shy away from being directly witnessed. This only leads to the driver motoring a bit further on then stopping and running back to pay the policemen. Instead of the standard 2 shillings the bribe is jacked up to 10 shillings. Everyone in the car blames Obi for his goody two shoes, over-educated fussiness which has only ended up making them worse off. Obi despairs of wiping out corruption. Educating the masses would take centuries. It has to come from changing the people at the top. Maybe a benign dictator.
An enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? (p.186)
This book was published in 1960, just as Nigeria gained independence, six years before it had its first military coup in 1966. To date there have been five military coup d’états in Nigeria. Between 1966 and 1999 Nigeria was ruled by a military government apart from the short-lived Second Nigerian Republic of 1979 to 1983 = 29 years of military rule.
The mammy wagon arrives at the famous market town of Onitsha, allowing Obi to wander round it and Achebe to slip in a description of it, before he completes the last 50 miles to Umuofia. There’s a heartfelt passage, which feels very autobiographical, on how lonely Ibo felt in London, and how he felt like a cultural traitor, studying the language of the colonist, instead of his own culture.
Back in the village he is greeted by a great assembly, featuring his father the Christian but plenty of village elders who have refused to become Christians, and speak and think in the old ways, sitting on goatskin, unable to imagine a ship which sails the oceans, only able to conceive of Obi’s trip as a voyage to the land of the spirits. The old culture lives on very powerfully in Umuofia.
Pidgin
Many of the characters, the minor uneducated ones, appear to speak pidgin English. It feels like this novel is a good source of information about the state of pidgin in 1950s Nigeria, but I am too uneducated / ignorant of the subject to comment.
Christopher’s prowess at pidgin i.e. being able to switch between English, Igbo and pidgin to suit the company, time and situation (p.238).
Chapter 6
When everyone else has left, an intimate portrait of Obi’s family, his mother, father, brother, six sisters (p.196). His father, Isaac, is officious and bossy about his Christian faith in a way reminiscent of his tyrannical father, Okonkwo. Isaac forbade his wife, Obi’s mother, Hannah, to tell her children the old folk stories (p.197). Obi remembers being a boy at the village school and humiliated because when called on by the teacher to stand before the class and tell a folk story, he couldn’t. He went home in tears and told his mother. She said wait till your father goes to his next evening prayer meeting, then she told Obi a folk tale. Then he was able to tell it in school. These all feel like pure autobiography of Achebe whose father was a teacher and evangelist. Achebe’s father took the Christian name Isaiah; Obi’s father takes the Christian name Isaac.
It’s difficult to convey how candid and moving these passages are. No great excitement, no arguments, no historical moments, just a sense of the warmth and companionableness of a large family who enjoy teasing and entertaining each other. Made me jealous.
Chapter 7
He remembers the second white man he saw, a Mr Jones who was a school inspector 20 years previously i.e. about 1937 (in fact, later in the text the narrator dates it to 1935, p.235). Mr Jones was tall and drove a big motorbike which he left half a mile from the school so he could arrive unannounced and detect faults. How he interrupted the black headmaster, Mr Nduka and then, in his rage, slapped him. How Mr Nduka was an expert wrestler and in a flash had Mr Jones on the floor in a wrestling hold. How all the children fled in terror.
Obi presumably passed his interview because we now see him starting h is first job, in government administration. His boss is the rude Mr Green, while his immediate manager is the old and cowering African, Mr Omo, who has bad teeth and can only speak pidgin.
As a new senior civil servant Obi is awarded a clothing allowance and a car. He phones Clara who is thrilled. he discovers the Honourable Sam Okoli has no designs on Clara, in fact is soon to marry her best friend. Sam lives in a massive house. There was controversy when the government blew £35,000 on each new house for its ministers. He shows off to Clara and Obi his gramophone and tape machine. He has immaculate flunkeys to wait on him. All this before independence. You can see why post-colonial critics accuse the Europeans of establishing a template of gross inequality between governors and governed which the African ruling classes simply copied.
Clara tearfully tells Obi she can’t marry him because she is an osu, a kind of Igbo version of the Indian ‘untouchable’, from a family which devoted itself to a particular tribal god and became outcasts (defined on pages 207, 208 and 256). Obi, as an educated man, consider all this gibberish, insists that he will marry her, buys an engagement ring.
The friend in Lagos, Joseph Okeke, whose place he’s still staying at, argues with him, saying his parents, Christians though they may be, will reject an osu as a bride, specially for the local boy made good Obi. (Later Clara says she doesn’t like Joseph because ‘he’s a bushman’ i.e. uneducated, close to the old tribal rural ways, p.237.)
The first educated Nigerian generation
Sprinkled through the book are references to the idea that they – Obi, Clara, Joseph et al – belong to the new young generation, they are going to do things a new way, not just re. corruption, but bringing western education, standards of behaviour etc, in exactly such things as this ridiculous superstition about osu. But some of them are aware that, being a pioneer generation means they can’t change everything at once. For example, his educated friend Christopher coming down on his parents’ side, regarding Clara:
‘You may say that I am not broad-minded but I don’t think we have reached the stage where we can ignore all our customs.’ (p.264)
Chapter 8
We learn the years is 1956 because the Umuofia Progressive Union holds its next meeting on 1 December 1956 (p.212). You can see why the UPU exists, to promote the interests of men from the village who have moved to the big city and have formed what is in effect s self-help group. But you can also see how it itself fits into the matrix of corruption in the sense that, having got ‘one of theirs’ into a good government job, they expect him to speak up for his clansmen and use his influence to get them jobs and money.
In the event Obi makes a gracious speech and a good impression until the President of the UPU (‘the father of the Umuofia people in Lagos’) very mildly starts to refer to Clara as bad company. He had barely hinted at her osu background (‘a girl of doubtful ancestry’) when Obi, trembling with fury, leaps to his feet, shouts abuse at the President and, despite plenty of voices telling him to calm down, storms out of the meeting and has his driver roar off.
Having just read Things Fall Apart I see that Obi has inherited the fiery temper which characterised and was the downfall of his grandfather, Okonkwo.
Chapter 9
At his new work Obi is given an office with Mr Green’s secretary, Miss Marie Tomlinson. She seems to be sweet and friendly although Obi suspects her of being a spy set to catch him out.
Obi has been back from Britain for 6 months when he is first tempted by a bribe. An inoffensive looking man named Mr Mark offers him a bribe to give preferential treatment to his daughter. Obi chases him out of the office, not least because Miss Marie Tomlinson has witnessed the entire thing.
Obi is as proud of himself for resisting temptation as he was after he lost his virginity (to a white woman in England, p.220).
Money pressure. Obi is paid a monthly salary of £47 ten shillings, but from this he is paying back his loan from the UPU at £20 a month, and sending £10 to his parents, and promised his father, on his visit back to Umuofia, that he would pay his younger brother, John’s, school fees.
That evening Mr Mark’s 17 or 18 year old sister, Elsie Mark (p.222) knocks on his apartment door. He kindly invites her in and she tells her sad story, that the family spent all their money on her elder brother who failed all his exams, so now it’s desperately important that she goes to university in order to get a good job with lots of money to support her family and she’ll do anything to get a recommendation from Obi in his capacity as Secretary to the Scholarship Board. I think the implication is she is prepared to sleep with him but at this moment Clara bursts through the front door, bridles when she sees the girl, helps herself to a drink from the fridge, asks about the soup she made for Obi and generally makes it crystal clear that he is her man. But she needn’t have bothered. The poor young girl is humiliated. Obi kindly offers to run her back into town (taxis are expensive) and all the way back Clara gives him a hard time.
Chapter 10
A year later the insurance on Obi’s car is due, £40. He only has £13 in the bank. Not least because he sent his mother £35 to be given private medical treatment. Then there’s his electricity bill. And the tyres have gone and need renewing.
He decides he has to take out a £50 overdraft with the bank. Which all leads to an argument with Clara. Her way of arguing is to go completely silent and, since she does most of the talking, creating a great silence, which eventually intimidates Obi into capitulating.
Chapter 11
Obi’s speculation about Mr Green, who works very hard at the job but, Obi thinks, for a vision of Nigeria which doesn’t exist, for the Nigeria of his western colonialist dreams. Clara sends a package via a messenger from her hospital, which contains £50. Obi goes to see her, to tell her he can’t accept it. They argue about it.
Obi and Clara go to see his friend, Christopher the economist, and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, who persuade them to go dancing at the Imperial Hotel. Interesting description of dancing styles to high-life music. When they emerge from the bar in the early hours it’s to discover that someone’s broken into Obi’s car and stolen the box with Clara’s £50 in it.
Chapter 12
Mr Green is depicted as a bigot who, despite having ‘served’ in the country for 15 years, makes a point of telling everyone that all Africans are corrupt and lecturing Obi on his fellow ‘educated’ Nigerians who expect the Government to pick up the tab for their lives.
He’s obviously meant to be a narrow-minded bigot but I couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for him, as I did for the bigoted ex-pats in Ronan Bennett’s novel about Congo at the time of independence, The Catastrophist. On the face of it they’re illiberal bigots except that they turn out to predict the future (political chaos, violent secessions, civil war, white flight) with perfect precision, while the sympathetic liberal characters, who hoped for the best, turn out to be completely wrong.
Mr Green is more obnoxious than that, he goes out of his way to be offensive and insulting. He’s an arse, basically. But there’s enough truth mixed up in his prejudice to make him an interestingly complicated character.
Obi receives a letter from his father saying his mother requires further medical treatment.
Then he has a day with friend Christopher going to chat up two Irish Catholic girls he knows, then onto Bisi’s place, then to his latest girlfriend’s, Florence. Obi tells him about the girl, Elsie Mark, who appeared to offer herself in order to win a scholarship. She got it anyway and is studying in England, now. Christopher calls him a fool for turning down sex with her. She probably slept with the rest of the Board. Maybe, Obi says, but can’t he see how corrupt it is. They go out for dinner and argue about definitions of bribery late into the night.
Chapter 13
February 1957 (p.249). Clara again tells him she wants to break off the engagement. She says it’s because his parents will disapprove. He reassures her, they kiss, they make love.
Obi takes a week’s leave back home. He explains how villagers like his expect the local boy who made good in the big city to shower them with largesse except that, as we’ve seen, he’s actually broke (specially as he’s just paid John’s fees for one term, £16 ten shillings), so that’s a problem (p.251).
When he gets to Umuofia he discovers his mother is very weak and ill and old, with hands like claws. He tries to contain his sorrow. Performers from a funeral pass by and stop to serenade them. His mother likes music, ‘even when it was heathen music’.
Chapter 14
Still on this week’s leave at his village, Obi finally has the conversation about Clara with his father. His father tells him point blank he cannot marry Clara. They debate it, Obi saying it’s ridiculous superstition and will have disappeared in ten years’ time, his father insisting he will curse himself, his sons and daughters, their sons and daughters, for generations to come. In a funny way Obi enjoys the argument because he feels he is engaging with his father in a way he never has before, in all his 26 years (p.257).
The next morning he is up early to attend family prayers led by his father. Then he is alone with his very sick mother who horrifies him by telling him that if he marries an osu she will kill herself and he will have her blood on his hands!
Obi retires to his bed, claiming to be too tired from the long journey to see anyone, which neighbours and people who’ve come to visit consider a great insult. In the evening his father comes quietly into his bedroom but instead of discussing the osu issue, Obi’s father tells him about how he rebelled against his father and how his father cursed him, and all his life he’s lived under this shadow.
Chapter 15
Obi drives the 500 kilometres all the way back to Lagos in one go, without stopping, nearly crashing into a mammy-wagon on the way. He washes, changes, goes to Clara’s apartment, tells her about his mother, tries to make it sound like a small impediment which can be fixed, but Clara says ‘I told you so’ and hands him back her engagement ring (p.263). Then she lowers her voice and says there was something else she wanted to tell him, but…she’ll sort it out herself. Presumably she means she’s pregnant.
Obi drives to see his friend Christopher who 1) takes his parents’ side, saying he personally would never marry an osu; and 2) he can get him the addresses of some abortionists, though again he personally thinks it’s the woman’s responsibility, not least because you can never be sure whether you’re the father.
The first doctor they go to see is an old guy who refuses point blank to perform an abortion. The second one is much younger and demands £30 in cash. Both ask Obi why doesn’t he simply marry her?
Chapter 16
Obi sweats about where to get the money, rejecting the options of a moneylender, his friends let along the President of the Umuofia Union. He settles on the smooth and handsome and rich Honourable Sam Okoli.
At 2pm the next day Obi is at the clinic and hands the doctor £30 in cash. The doctor tells Clara to stay and Obi to return at 5pm. Obi goes out and gets into his parked car, watches Clara exit the clinic and get into the doctor’s car and they drive away. After a few seconds Obi panics and lurches after them. He’s too late but he drives all over Lagos like a mad thing trying to find them.
At 5pm he’s back at the clinic but the doctor is alone, telling him he wants to keep Clara in overnight in case of complications. Next day Obi’s back at the clinic and pushes past the nurse and all the waiting patients to see the doctor. The doctor very casually says Clara had a few complications but is now at a private clinic being looked after by a colleague of his. Obi races over to the address he gives him, and is told Clara is seriously ill and cannot see visitors.
Chapter 17
Next morning Obi is back at work and the last thing he needs is the poisonous bigot Mr Green criticising the number of holidays Nigerians treat themselves too etc. He had gone to see Clara at the hospital but when she spotted him she simply turned to the wall. All the other patients saw this. Obi has never felt so humiliated.
His finances are pressing. He wants to pay Clara back the £50 that was stolen. He goes see Mr Omo about his advance. I didn’t understand this. I think he got an advance for his visit back to his parents in Umuofia but didn’t realise it was a loan and had to be paid back, retaining a sum calculated according to mileage. He does the sums and discovers he can only claim for £15 for his drive to and from Umuofia. He’ll have to lie and say he went further, say to Cameroon.
When Obi considers the total situation, he realises it’s the burden of having to pay £20 back to the Union which is screwing his finances. He decides to unilaterally stop paying it, without telling them.
He writes and rewrites a long self-extenuating letter to Clara but can’t get the tone right. Yes, great at quoting T.S. Eliot, but rubbish at managing his job, finances and relationships. Portrait of a callow young man.
Chapter 18
Clara is in hospital for five weeks then goes on 70 days sick leave without contacting him. Then he gets a demand from the Revenue for income tax £32. Then his mother dies and, although he sends money, it isn’t enough to pay for an impressive funeral, which is noted by the entire town, and reported back to the UPU in Lagos. An avalanche of troubles and failures.
By this stage it is clear Obi is a man crushed by a combination of circumstances rather than any particular Grand Flaw. Early on in the novel he had argued with the white man who interviews him for his job that tragedy isn’t a matter of one Grand Event which brings closure and satisfaction to all concerned. Real tragedy is the daily grinding down of people by circumstances. You can see how that speech was inserted as a comment on this entire narrative.
The vexing thing is, of course, that everybody misinterprets his actions. We hear a load of speeches at the Union from old timers who’ve seen it happen all-too-often, the young man who gets an education, moves to the big city, is seduced by the sweets of sin i.e. women, and forgets his family, his village and the old ways. They are like the Chorus of a Greek tragedy, or Achebe’s reimagining of a Greek tragedy as one of grinding crushing circumstances rather than a grand climax.
His work gives him leave, he goes home, cries his eyes out and sleeps like a baby. Then Joseph, the ‘bushman’, arrives with a crate of beers to be put in the fridge, and then in groups about 25 of the UPU arrive at Obi’s flat. Joseph may be a ‘bushman’ but he understands his people better than Obi. The arrivals condole with Obi who is genuinely touched, then get on with gossiping about news and current affairs.
The indictment of a young man who doesn’t respond appropriately to his mother’s death reminded me of Albert Camus’s novel The Outsider.
‘Poor mother!’ he said, trying by manipulation to produce the right emotion. But it was no use. The dominant feeling was of peace. (p.280)
Chapter 19
Suddenly the novel ends. Just four more pages, in which Obi feels as if he’s been through the wringer, been through the fire, and emerged new-forged.
It is the season when students applied for their scholarships. Obi has brought a lot of the paperwork home. A flash car pulls up in front of his apartment block. A confident flash man enters his flat and proffers £50 cash if Obi will recommend his son for the scholarship to study in Britain. He goes on to say they ought to become friends, and he will nominate him to become a member of Lagos’s premier club. Then he walks out ignoring Obi’s feeble protestations. The money lies there all the rest of the day and the night while Obi agonises.
In a few swift paragraphs we cut to a scene of Obi dancing with a young girl who is on the short list of candidates. He manoeuvres her to the bedroom. They have sex though it isn’t in the event, very fulfilling. He drives her back to her place then drops round to friend Christopher’s to joke about it.
Obi has, in other words, been thoroughly corrupted. He pays off Sam Okoli who loaned him money, he pays off his bank overdraft. Then someone brings £20. He takes it but a few minutes later the same man returns with a police officer. They search Obi, find the marked notes and he is charged with corruption. The rest is like a dream, he sleepwalks through it in a daze.
And in a quick throwaway paragraph, Achebe brings us back to the very start of the novel with Obi standing in the dock, listening to a series of witnesses to his life saying none of them understand how a fine, upstanding man with all the privileges and perks of his fine education let himself sink to the blah blah blah.
High life music
In chapter 11 Obi and Clara, Christopher and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, go to the Imperial hotel where the band plays this song and the dancefloor is immediately packed.
It’s followed by ‘Gentleman Bobby’.
Music dates stories faster, more completely, than language. This novel is as old as this music and doesn’t the music sound dated, messages from another, more innocent world?
Thoughts
Corruption is the nominal central theme of the novel, as discussed above. But from this emerges the bigger one of the clash of cultures and values over this question of osu, a clash which remains as fierce and intractable as when the missionaries first arrived in Umuofia 60 years earlier. In this respect the novel paints a really persuasive, compelling portrait of the way the old African traditions not only lived on and continued to thrive but presented an ever-wider chasm with the values of ‘the modern world’. It is this clash which the novel really presents, with the power which comes from the slow patient accumulation of thousands and thousands of tiny details, of language and description and characterisation.
Then there’s sexual politics. Clara’s abortion nearly kills her. So no-one dies but Clara nearly does and the foetus does, victims of the failure of a traditional patriarchal society to join the modern world. Mind you, as so often, the real blocker to a rational solution is not Obi’s father, who is presented as almost a victim, a sensitive man who laboured under a lifelong curse – it’s his mother, the caring woman he thought he had a special bond with, who threatens to kill herself if he should marry an osu. He thinks he can talk his father round. With his mother’s absolute ban there can be no negotiation.
Achebe is great for all kinds of reasons, for being the first great African novelist, for his style, for his loyalty to his roots, for his phenomenal ability to completely immerse you in the African milieu. All the way through I was trying to put into words the thing which makes his books so immensely enjoyable, and I think it’s his sincerity. There’s no bullshit, contrivance or pretence, for effect. It feels like he’s giving you his own experiences, slightly tweaked to fit into a novel narrative, but without pretence or contrivance. You feel like you’re reading something really profound and true. Sounds silly but it’s almost an honour to read Chinua Achebe’s novels.
Conrad and Heart of Darkness p.235.
Credit
No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe was published in 1960 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 2010 Everyman’s Library hardback edition.
Related links
Chinua Achebe reviews
- Things Fall Apart (1958)
- No Longer at Ease (1960)
- Arrow of God (1964)
- Arrow of God: Sayings of Wisdom
- A Man of the People (1966)
- The Trouble with Nigeria (1983)
- Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
Books & Boots 