All posts tagged Obi Okonkwo

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe (1966)

‘Big man, big palaver’
(The one-eyed thug, Dogo, describing Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga in A Man of the People, page 15)

The Africa trilogy

Achebe’s previous three novels – Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) – are grouped together under the title of the ‘African Trilogy’. They are all told in the free indirect style, meaning they have an omniscient third-person narrator but that narrator tells everything from the point of view of a central protagonist, at moments entering deep into their minds and thought processes so we see the world from their point of view.

Books 1 and 3 of the trilogy are entirely set within the world and mindset of ‘backward’ ‘primitive’ tribal people from a subset of the Igbo people of south-east Nigeria. Their whole point is to immerse you in the mindset, beliefs and practices of these people and make you understand that they in fact had a deep and rich cultural and spiritual life, complicated customs, laws and processes for managing themselves, most of which were brutally over-ridden with the advent of white Europeans, specifically British imperial administrators.

Book 2 is set in the contemporary world (i.e. around 1957/58) but is also told in the free indirect style, and has the protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, frequently returning to the undeveloped village of his birth and ancestors. It’s also tied into the trilogy because the protagonist, Obi, is the grandson of the central figure of the first book, Okonkwo.

A Man of The People

The point is that A Man of the People marks a significant break with the trilogy. It is still set in Nigeria but it is a) very much the contemporary Nigeria of 1964 and b) above all, it is told in the first person.

It is a first-person narrative told by a young male teacher, Odili Samalu (full name p.23). It is a mazy narrative, punctuated with lots of flashbacks. In these we learn about Odili’s boyhood in the village of Urua, his success at the local school, winning a scholarship to university, his womanising student days, travelling to London to do a post-graduate certificate in teaching, then his decision to take up a teaching post at an out of the way private or grammar school in the town of Anata. He has been teaching there for 18 months (p.8).

Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga

The present part of the narrative kicks off in 1964 when this school is paid a visit by an eminent Nigerian politician and cabinet minister, Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga.

It turns out that Odili has a history with Nanga. Back in 1948 Nanga had been Odili’s teacher in standard three and Odili had been one of his favourite pupils. Then the narrative jumps to 1960 and political events which first disillusioned Odili with his country’s politicians.

A general election was imminent. The world price of coffee had collapsed throwing the Nigerian economy into crisis. The Minister of Finance, Dr Makinde, who had a PhD in Economics presented a well worked out plan for dealing with the public finances which would require cuts to public services. Because of the election, the Prime Minister said no and abruptly sacked not only the Finance Minister but also the majority of the cabinet which had backed him. He instructed the central bank to start printing money, which led to the high rate of inflation which is still dogging the country as the narrative opened. But much worse, he launched fierce attacks on the Finance Minister, calling him and those who backed the plan conspirators and traitors and saboteurs working with foreign powers to undermine the country. Press and radio echoed these cries and ambitious MPs in Parliament joined in, yelping like jackals, like a ‘pack of bench hounds, at their prey.

Odili happened to be in the public gallery of the Parliament when the Prime Minister made this speech and was appalled at the naked greed, the unleashing of public hatred, and lickspittle sycophancy he saw on display. Among the lead jackals baying for a place in the cabinet was the Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga who Odili is welcoming to his private school.

From the day a few years before when I had left Parliament depressed and aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how. We complained about our country’s lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high places – sometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn’t believe existed in the country. But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one’s teeth into. (p.39)

So a central strand of the novel is a portrait of this corrupt politician who embodies everything Achebe thinks is wrong with Nigerian politics in the first few years after independence.

he presents himself as a great benefactor of his people, dispensing largesse at every opportunity
despite having two wives, Nanga has a mistress (a ‘parlour wife’, p.22) he has appointed to various profitable positions within his portfolio with the result that she is festooned with expensive clothes and accessories
he is accompanied everywhere by a journalist writing down his wit and wisdom and feeding positive stories to the press
and by an entourage which includes ‘a huge, tough-looking’ security guard
full of himself, Nanga has had numerous streets, avenues and so on named after him

And he’s stupid (see below). Nanga invites Odili to look him up next time he’s in the capital (of the region, Bori, not Lagos, capital of Nigeria), saying ‘we must promote clever people like you’ etc.

First Odili goes to visit his father, Hezekiah Samalu, in his home village of Urua. They have an argument because his father is about to marry his fifth wife (Odili’s mother died in childbirth).

With Nanga in the capital

Then Odili takes Nanga up on his invitation, pays a social call on him in Bori and finds himself invited to stay in the minister’s huge mansion, being taken the houses of his fellow cabinet ministers,

What comes across loud and clear is that within a few years of independence all the elements are in place for Nigeria’s decline and fall. Universal corruption. Politics seen as not an opportunity to serve the country but to garner position, power and wealth for yourself, your family and clan. Over indulgence in the trappings of power i.e. big cars, huge houses, every mod con, bodyguards, multiple wives. Extreme rhetoric whereby ministers or authority figures constantly scream about murder, poisoning, conspiracies and so on, and are correspondingly hysterical in their threats of punishment, torture, death and so on. The assumption right from the start that the press is not there to be a free and critical part of the system of checks and balances but a medium of propaganda to be whipped into line.

Achebe is well aware of all this, it’s the issue at the core of the book:

A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation – as I saw it then lying on that bed – was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say ‘To hell with it’. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best – had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase – the extension of our house – was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house. (p.37)

We see plenty of examples of Nanga creaming off backhanders and bribes which are called ‘dash’. Odili’s own father is more in turn with general opinion than his priggish son:

My father’s attitude to my political activity intrigued me a lot. He was, as I think I have already indicated, the local chairman of P.O.P. in our village, Urua, and so I expected that his house would not contain both of us. But I was quite wrong. He took the view (without expressing it in so many words) that the mainspring of political action was personal gain, a view which, I might say, was much more in line with the general feeling in the country than the high-minded thinking of fellows like Max and I. (p.114)

According to the publisher’s summary on the cover the book is intended to be a comedy (‘a very funny satire’ opines Angus Wilson) but: 1) nothing in any of it made me laugh except for one sentence at the very end (see below), and 2) instead it felt like a grim anticipation of the 60 years since independence during which Nigeria has become one of the most violent, unequal and corrupt places on earth (ranked 150th out of 180 countries for corruption by Transparency International).

Plot summary

Odili is a schoolteacher at a country grammar school. Cabinet minister the Honourable N.A. Nanga comes to address the school. Odili reminds him that he was his teacher back in 1948 and tells him he want to university, then did a PGCE in Britain, before returning to become a teacher. Nanga invites Odili to come and stay with him in his luxurious government mansion in Bori. Here Odili has sex with a white married woman guest of Nanga’s but when he then invites his own girlfriend, Elsie, to stay the night, she prefers to have sex with the chief, prompting Odili to storm out and go and stay with his friend, the lawyer Maxwell Kulamo. Maxwell inducts him into a new political party they’re setting up named the Common People’s Convention (CPC). There’s a meeting of the small steering committee which includes a trade unionist and someone from an Eastern Bloc country, though they’re all careful to emphasise that they’re not communists. Also, none of them are working class i.e. the people. Odili is surprised to learn the party’s backer is a minister in the existing government. At a stroke I guessed he’s encouraging the CPC as part of an internal powerplay. Odili goes back to his town, and pays two visits, one to Chief Nanga’s ‘bush wife’ who is tired and bitter that he’s taking up with a new young parlour wife; and then the young wife-to-be of Nanga, Edna, and her protective greedy father. Odili offers to give Edna a lift on the back of his bicycle to visit her mother in hospital, taking a home-made lunch but like an idiot manages to crash it, spilling all the food in the sandy road and grazing her knee. Ouch. Odili is in a campaign to seduce and sleep with Edna, maybe taking her virginity, in revenge for Nanga bedding Elsie. It’s like a children’s game with women as the winnings.

A corruption scandal blows up and brings down the government. An election is called. Odili announces he is going to contest Nanga’s seat which consists of five villages, including his home village Urua and Nanga’s base, Anata. This is on page 100 of this 150-page book so exactly two-thirds through. He encounters resistance in Anata. The principle of his school, Mr Nwege, sacks him. Like all the characters, Odili can’t behave politely but starts insulting Nwege who is instantly enraged and runs to get his shotgun, so Odili flees (p.102). Everyone is so quick to anger, insult then violence. When Odili tries to gain admission to Edna’s hospital the gateman doesn’t tell him private cars aren’t allowed in but shouts at him ‘like a mad dog’. I don’t see how this is comic. It is symptomatic of the high levels of anger and intemperance throughout the text. They even frighten the protagonist:

I reflected on the depth of resentment and hatred from which such venom came – and for no other reason than that I owned a car, or seemed to own one! It was depressing and quite frightening. (p.104)

He then drives over to Edna’s place and when she lets him in she is petrified that her father, who’s popped out for a poo, will kill him when he returns. She is literally shaking with fear (p.104). And when the father sees Odili, he does, indeed, run to fetch his machete with the aim of hacking him to death. I don’t see how this is funny. They manage to calm him down but as Odili leaves, Edna’s father threatens to beat her. Funny?

The election campaign commences and Odili has to hire bodyguards, a main on, Boniface, a violent thug, and three assistants, plus load up on weapons which eventually included machetes and two shotguns. The youth wing of Nanga supporters carry violent placards and attack his rallies. In his essay ‘The trouble with Nigeria’ Achebe claims it’s the corrupt and badly educated leadership – he says nothing about this resort to anger and violence which characterises every level of public discourse.

Anyway, Chief Nanga drives up in a Cadillac full of bodyguards to Odili’s father’s house and very smoothly converts the father, over a new bottle of whisky describing how abominably his son behaved in abusing his hospitality etc. Then Nanga offers Odili a scholarship for further study plus £250 to pack in his campaign. He’s going to lose anyway, Do what his buddy Maxwell has already done, which is take the money and stand down.

In fact Nanga was lying and the next day max and the rest of the team (a dozen organisers) roll up to help Odili with his campaign bringing a car, a minibus and two new Land Rovers with loudspeakers fitted on the roofs. They hold a rally with Max declaiming through the speakers but the crowd is apathetic and replies with two points: 1) the politicians may be corrupt, but so is almost everybody down to the lowliest council official and storekeeper, so an attack on ‘corruption’ is actually an attack on the very ‘people’ the CPC claims to be standing for, and 2) nobody expects the CPC to be any different, everybody expects them to join the existing political parties, the P.O.P. and P.A.P. on the gravy train (p.125).

Max tells Odili he did take a bribe from his opponent in his constituency (Max and Odili are fighting campaigns in adjoining constituencies), £1,000 from Chief Koko – it’s what paid for the shiny new Land Rovers – but he won’t honour the terms of the deal, he won’t stop campaigning.

Things start to go wrong. Odili’s father is expelled from his party (just to be clear, his dad was a treasurer of the established opposition party the P.O.P.), then tax inspectors came demanding a new, much bigger payment, and could only be persuaded not to arrest him with the payment of a cash bribe (£24). How can Odili, Max and their dozen friends hope to change the embedded practices of an entire society?

Next day the village Crier announces there is only one candidate worth voting for, Chief Nanga. The message is repeated on the radio. A message comes that his father’s expulsion from his party will be reversed if he simply signs a document dissociating himself from his son’s (Odili’s) subversive activities.

A day or two later Nanga holds the inaugural rally of his campaign. Foolishly, Odili decides to attend. He tries to mingle with the crowd but one of Nanga’s creatures spots him and Nanga immediately tells the crowd to seize him. So Odili is manhandled to the front of the crowd and then taken by minders up onto the stage where Nanga reads out the long list of his bad behaviour, treachery and scheming, as the roars of anger get louder. Then Nanga playfully hands the microphone to Odili so the crowd can hear his excuses but he doesn’t get further than ‘I came to tell the people that you are a liar…’ before Nanga slaps him, then lots of other fists are pummeling then something hard feels like it is cracking his skull and he loses consciousness.

When he awakes it is to find he has a cracked skull, a broken arm, and bruises to his groin where he was heartily kicked by Nanga’s henchmen. He is confused for weeks and only slowly finds out he is under arrest for having dangerous weapons in his car (the machetes and shotguns), a car Nanga’s thugs ransacked, turned over and set on fire. In fact the charge was dropped once it was clear Odili wasn’t going to sign his nomination papers to stand as a candidate (he thought he’s already submitted them but they were intercepted by Nanga’s thugs).

Anyway the day of the election comes and goes and Odili is still in bed recovering. When he hears that his good friend Maxwell was killed in his electioneering, in the process of investigating vote rigging, he suffers a relapse. Max was run over as he was getting out of his vehicle by thugs of Chief Koko’s. For some reason Koko is nearby and Max’s girlfriend, Eunice, gets a gun out of her handbag and shoots Koko dead, before she’s arrested.

On election night the gangs assembled by these ruling MPs, Nanga and Koko, get out of control and go on the rampage, attacking markets, burning and looting, which lasts for days.

At first the Prime Minister is re-elected and selects all the cabinet who had been disgraced, including Nanga. Violence continues across the country and he assures foreign investors the country is safe and stable.

Meanwhile, in the love interest part of the story, Edna has been visiting him. Turns out she refused to marry Nanga. Turns out she loves Odili. This is very inconsistent with the scene where she shouted at him to leave her house (?) but it does provide the standard happy ending of the slight comic novel.

When he finally gets out of hospital he and his father go and see Edna’s father to begin a ‘conversation’ about marrying her. Edna’s father says no but then history takes a hand. In the only thing that made me smile in the whole book, I liked the phrasing of:

But the Army obliged us by staging a coup at that point and locking up every member of the Government. The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over. We were told Nanga was arrested trying to escape by canoe dressed like a fisherman. Thereafter we made rapid progress with Edna’s father who, no doubt, saw me then as a bird in hand… (p.147)

So there’s a military coup, the entire existing government is thrown in prison, and Odili ends up with the girl. Happy ending, of sorts.

The final thought of the book is Odili’s complete disillusion with the people of Nigeria, because the day after the coup the entire population, from the loftiest intellectuals to the lowliest latrine cleaners, like the population of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, completely and absolutely switches its allegiance from the old regime, which it now reviles, to the new one, which it fulsomely praises.

So the novel ends on a note, I thought, of real despair. In his essay The trouble with Nigeria Achebe famously wrote that it’s Nigeria’s main problem has been its appalling leaders. The implication, in fact the explicit conclusion of this book, is that this is not the case. But the real trouble with Nigeria, the last pages of this novel imply, is its people.

Note

I now proceed to say some very blunt things about the stupidity, childishness, ignorance, quickness to anger and swift resort to violence which characterises the world of the novel and, if it is in any way intended as a depiction of his native country, of Nigeria as a whole. I felt nervous doing this but have just finished reading Achebe’s 1983 essay The Trouble with Nigeria and have discovered that everything I comment on is raised and worried over in that essay. In other words, the negative qualities I discuss in the next few sections are aspects of Nigerian life which Achebe himself lamented. In other words, the novel deliberately paints Nigerian political and social life in almost as unflattering light as he could manage, almost as if he wanted to stun his country into reform.

Stupidity

It’s a tactless thing to write but what really comes across from the book is not that Nanga or any of his cabinet colleagues are especially corrupt – they are, of course, but the real take-home is that they’re just stupid, very stupid; stupid, ignorant and uneducated. All Nanga’s charisma and loud-talking makes it easy to forget the surprising fact that he is, as Odili tells us, ‘barely literate’ (p.47). And he was a teacher!

I know the novel is packed with the moral fol-de-rol which GCSE students are told to waste their time writing essays about (‘Was Odili right to do x?’, ‘What options does Edna have in a patriarchal society?’ etc) – but surely the important dynamic is established early on, in that story about the Minister of Finance, who had a PhD in public finance and a sound plan, being sacked and vilified by the Prime Minister and the lickspittle press and replaced by Nanga, who is a loudmouthed ignoramus.

It’s not me imposing this on the text – the young university-educated characters (Odili, Maxwell, Kadabie) themselves comment on the ignorance of their leaders. Here’s Odili’s friend, the lawyer Maxwell:

‘That’s all they care for,’ he said with a solemn face. ‘Women, cars, landed property. But what else can you expect when intelligent people leave politics to illiterates like Chief Nanga?’ (p.76)

And one of the villagers, an elderly man. Max addresses in a campaign rally freely admits the people’s ignorance:

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

Not everyone can go away to university. Hardly anyone gets to go and be educated in Britain. Meanwhile 99% of the population continues illiterate and soaked in its traditional beliefs, namely that the tribal chieftain’s first job is to provide for his people. Out of that venerable, traditional, tribal, people’s assumption comes the corrupt structure of most African countries’ political and economic systems.

Quick to anger

I’ve highlighted the little sequence of characters getting irrationally furious (the hospital gatekeeper, Edna’s father, gangs of Nanga’s supporters). But the protagonist, Odili, is like this, extremely quick to take violent offence. And so is his father. When Nanga visits them at their house in Urua, Odili refuses to put his newspaper down so his father, instantly super enraged, steps towards him as if to hit him (p.115). When Edna’s brother doesn’t immediately go and fetch Edna when he pays her family a visit, Odili immediately starts shouting at the poor boy (p.129). After Edna has given him a good dressing-down, the brother warns Odili that the minder set on her by Nanga will castrate him (Odili) if he finds him there in Edna’s house (p.129). Then, of course, Odili is badly beaten up on Nanga’s campaign stage. And then his friend Max is murdered by his political opponent, Chief Koko.

Can’t everyone just try to calm down and be civil to each other?

Childish

Much of the behaviour of a lot of the characters, comes over as petulant and childish. The narrator is touchy:

‘Hello, Jalio,’ I said, stretching my hand to shake his… He replied hello and took my hand but obviously he did not remember my name and didn’t seem to care particularly. I was very much hurt by this and immediately formed a poor opinion of him and his silly airs. (p.62)

A trait which forms the spine of the plot when he makes his juvenile determination to get his own back on Chief Nanga for sleeping with his girlfriend, by sleeping with his future wife (Edna).

The same tetchy quickness to feel insulted comes over in Nanga’s touchiness about what journalists write about him and his heartfelt wish to muzzle and silence them.

It explains why all the characters’ political ideas are blunt and stupid as a child’s: to acquire more money and power; muzzle the press; intimidate other political parties; throw anyone who disagrees with them in prison. In fact most of the satire is at Odili’s expense because he never has any idea how to run a country or an economy, he has no policies or ideas of any kind except to get his own back on Chief Nanga.

It’s not that it’s corrupt or wicked so much as that it’s childish, a childishly inadequate mentality for running a country.

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

And it’s this childishness, this immature petulance and resentment of any criticism, which the outside world was to hear in the angry speeches of African leaders like Patrice Lumumba, lashing out at the West for not helping him tackled Congo’s chaotic crises, the angry rants of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe or Thabo Mbeki, over the decades to come.

Over-symbolising

This is connected to something else I noticed, which is the way all the characters (the meaningful characters i.e. the men, in this patriarchal narrative) madly over-inflate even the tiniest incident into being symbolic of The State of Nigeria. When Nanga shags Odili’s ‘good-time girl’, the latter delivers a long aggressive diatribe to the startled older man, but what stood out for me is when he says ‘What a country!’ as if one man sleeping with another man’s girlfriend somehow typifies an entire nation.

But that is exactly how the narrator thinks. Everywhere he looks he sees symbols and allegories of Nigeria’s present and portents of its future. It explains his conviction in the novel’s last 30 pages or so that the gimcrack little ‘party’ he and his schoolchum have cobbled together is somehow ‘our society’s only hope of salvation’ (p.128). Similarly, when Edna tells him to buzz off and leave him alone, Odili is immature enough to make it hugely symbolical:

What I felt was sadness—a sadness deep and cool like a well, into which my hopes had fallen; my twin hopes of a beautiful life with Edna and of a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country. (p.130)

I think it was this incorporation of a supposedly ‘political’ element in the novel which led critics to praise it and give it its status. Yet just having your character constantly worrying that every little event somehow threatens the very future of his country, nay the whole of Africa!! doesn’t really amount to political analysis. The opposite. It makes him sound like any saloon bar bore droning on about the country going to the dogs.

Sex

Odili is highly sexed and lets us know it. He describes his sexual exploits at university. He tells us he slept with his current girlfriend, Elsie, a nurse, within an hour of meeting her. There’s a dinner for some foreign guests of Nanga’s and he ends up sleeping with the white American, Jean. This doesn’t stop him going to see Elsie the next day and trying to sleep with her. He has a role model in his father who has four wives and is about to wed a fifth, thus being able to have sex with any of five women.

And it spills over into Odili’s initially tolerant attitude to Nanga, who has two wives, a mistress, and is expected to have sex with any of his (especially foreign) guests who are up for it – ‘a man who had so many women ready to make themselves available’ (p.60), who has sex with an educated woman lawyer paying her £25 a pop (p.127).

While he stayed in his household, Odili and Nanga ‘swapped many tales of conquest’ (p.59) and the text shares some humorous anecdotes about these sexual ‘conquests’ with us. When Nanga asks about Elsie Odili dismisses her as a ‘good-time girl’ (p.59) i.e. not marriage material. In a taxi with Elsi, Odili throbs with anticipation, Elsie dressed up for a party ‘looks ripe and ready’ (p.68), sex indeed throbs through many of the pages.

This may well be an accurate depiction of a modern (1964) Nigerian young man but it felt like a shame. One of the many appeals of the African trilogy was its tremendous chasteness about sex which was almost never mentioned. Both casual sex and adultery barely seem to have existed in the tribal culture Achebe describes in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and this is one of the aspects which gives them such a chaste, monumental, timeless aspect, like Homer.

Not so in this novel which throbs with sweaty male sexuality and often feels as seedy and sordid as the nastier Kingsley Amis novels. We learn about ‘ the unsettling effect which imminent fulfilment always has on’ Odili and that his fantasies about Elsie are so intense that one night he had a wet dream so messy he had to change his pyjamas. When Elsie decides to sleep with the rich cabinet minister instead of Odili, the latter goes on a long soulful walk round Bori and calls her a ‘common harlot’ (p.71), all of which feels insufferably childish.

The book cover tells us that Anthony Burgess included A Man of The People in his personal selection of the 99 best novels in English since 1939. To be unfair, maybe this was partly because Achebe had managed to reproduce the casual sexism and political simple-mindedness of a British writer like Kingsley Amis in an African setting.

Pidgin

A pidgin or pidgin language:

is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common. Typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages…A pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language.

All the African characters in A Man of The People slip into pidgin very easily and have extensive conversations in it:

‘I think I tell you say Chief Nanga de go open book exhibition for six today,’ I said.
‘Book exhibition?’ asked Elsie. ‘How they de make that one again?’
‘My sister, make you de ask them for me-o. I be think say na me one never hear that kind thing before. But they say me na Minister of Culture and as such I suppose to be there. I no fit say no. Wetin be Minister? No be public football? So instead for me to sidon rest for house like other people I de go knack grammar for this hot afternoon. You done see this kind trouble before?’ (p.60)

According to the narrator pidgin has an inbuilt ‘levity’ or lack of seriousness so that merely switching to it lightens the mood or indicates jokiness. Similarly, switching out of it implies a refusal to be jokey or a switch to more serious subject matter (p.87).

I understood occasional words and phrases (this exchange starts out reasonably comprehensible) but almost all of it was impenetrable to me and so I ended up skipping all the dialogue in pidgin.

Beyond the novel

In case you think my judgements on the worldview and political and cultural situation depicted by the novel are harsh, here are some excerpts from Martin Meredith’s book The State of Africa (2011), from his chapter describing the build-up to the Nigerian military coup which took place in 1966, the year A Man of The People was published:

By nature, Nigerian politics tended to be mercenary and violent. Political debate was routinely conducted in acrimonious and abusive language; and ethnic loyalties were constantly exploited. The tactics employed were often those of the rough house variety… (p.194)

Of the 1965 general election in the Western region of Nigeria, he writes:

The campaign was fought on all sides with brutal tenacity; bribes, threats, assault, arson, hired thugs and even murder became the daily routine. Akintola’s new party – the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) – used its position in government ruthlessly to rig the election at every stage – blocking the nomination of opposition candidates, kidnapping election officials, destroying ballot papers and falsifying results… (p.198)

It was this environment of political chaos and violence which triggered the military coup launched in January 1966. Meredith describes it with a blunt candour which is worth reproducing for its shocking effect:

The hopes that Nigeria would serve as a stronghold of democracy in Africa came to an abrupt halt on 15 January 1966. In a series of coordinated actions, a group of young army officers wiped out the country’s top political leaders. In Lagos they seized the federal prime minister, Sir Adubakar Tafawa Balewa, took him outside the city and executed him by the side of the road, dumping his body in a ditch; in Kaduna, after a gun battle, they shot dead the premier of the Northern Region, the Sardauna of Sokoto. In Ibadan they killed the premier of the Western Region, Chief Ladoke Akintola. The wealthy federal finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, a notoriously corrupt politician, was dragged screaming from his house, flung into a car ‘like an old army sack’, and driven away to be murdered… (p.193)

The army leaders claimed to be not just staging a coup but sweeping away the entire old order, managed by corrupt elders. Two points:

1. Odili and Max talk about sweeping away the old regime, as if a dozen or twenty utopians with a few loudspeakers could ever do such a thing, but a) that was obviously always hopelessly naive and b) there are hints in the text that even if the CPC had won the election (impossible) they would have been sucked into the same patterns of corruption as the old guard. So only an actual revolution which decimated the old ruling class could have hoped to effect change.

2. But it didn’t effect change. Instead the country sank into further chaos triggered by the fact that most of the young military leaders were Igbo, which triggered resentment and then anti-Igbo violence in the north then west of the country, leading to huge flight of the Igbo minorities in both places back to their homeland in the south-east, and then the secession by the Igbo authorities, the declaration that they constituted a new independent country, Biafra. Which led to the Biafran War or The Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970) in which up to 2 million Igbo civilians died from famine.

This catastrophic background makes the naive political dreaming and petty personal feuds of A Man of the People‘s protagonist, Odili, look even more childish and superficial. In the real world this half decade of Nigeria’s history showed that it had basically three options: corrupt but essentially peaceful civilian rule; military coup and rule by the army; ruinous civil war. Of the three the first one, the one Idoli and his friends so fervently want to overthrow, is quite clearly the least bad.

In a sentence

Critics praise A Man of The People as a ‘political’ novel or for its ‘political’ content but, in my opinion, its so-called ‘political’ element is shallow, childish and completely inadequate to the catastrophic political and historical moment it purports to describe.

Credit

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe was published in 1966 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1988 Heinemann African Writers series paperback edition.

Chinua Achebe reviews

Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe (1964)

Arrow of God was Chinua Achebe’s third novel. It forms, along with 1) Things Fall Apart and 2) No Longer at Ease, the so-called ‘African Trilogy’. It shares similar settings and themes as its predecessors, being set among rural tribal people in the south-east of colonial-era Nigeria.

Book 1 of the trilogy, Things Fall Apart, is set in the 1890s and concerns Okonkwo, a big man in the local village, Umuofia. Book 2, No Longer At Ease, is about Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi Okonkwo, now living in Lagos but who frequently revisits his parents in his ancestral home, Umuofia, and is set 60 years later, in the 1950s.

Arrow of God is set chronologically between the two previous books, in the 1920s. It tells the story of Ezeulu, the chief priest of a set of six villages in Igboland, so not the Umuofia of books 1 and 2, though very similar in developmental level (very basic), diet, culture and religion. And Umuofia is mentioned several times as being a nearby village, so it’s still very much in the same region.

The phrase ‘Arrow of God’ comes from an Igbo proverb in which a person, or sometimes an event, is said to represent the will of God, an idea which is only fully explained right at the end of the narrative.

Arrow of God is twice as long as either of its predecessors, the chapters are longer, and Ezeulu has a larger extended family than Okwonkwo in the first novel. Just some of the reasons I found Arrow of God the hardest to read of the three books but, in the end, possibly the most rewarding.

Chapter 1

Ezeulu is the chief priest of Ulu, which seems to comprise the six villages of Umuaro (later listed as Umuachala, Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani and Umuogwugwu). He is old. His eyesight is failing. He has an extended family:

Ezeulu’s first wife, Okuata who died years ago, mother of:
- Ezeulu’s eldest son Edogo, ‘quiet and brooding’, carving a tribal Mask, married to Amoge, has a small child
- eldest daughter, Adeze, tall and bronze skinned (p.361)
- daughter, Akueke, marries a man who beats her, so comes home for a year
  - Akueke’s daughter, Nkechi
Ezeulu’s second and senior wife, ‘head wife’, Matefi (feels ignored by Ezeulu who favours his youngest wife, Ugoye):
- Matefi’s son, and Ezeulu’s eldest son, Obika, tendency to anger, boastfulness and drunkenness
- Matefi’s daughter Ojiugo
Ezeulu’s third and youngest wife, Ugoye:
- Oduche, the son sent to Church to learn the ways of the white man
- Obiageli, a girl child
- youngest son, still a boy, Nwafo
Ezeulu’s younger brother, Okeye Onenyi

To recap, Ezeulu’s sons are, in order of age:

Edogo
Obika
Oduche
Nwafo

The narrative opens with Ezeulu fulfilling one of the duties of his role which is to scan the skies for the arrival of a new moon. When he sees it, Ezeulu ritualistically roasts one of the 12 holy yams set aside to mark the 12 months of the year. When the twelfth and final yam is eaten, it triggers the Feast of the New Yam. Only then are the villagers allowed to set about harvesting the next crop of yams. This custom, which has the weight of religious belief behind it, will be the cause of the crisis which brings to book to its climax…

For the time being, it’s during this process of Ezeulu waiting for, then sighting, the new moon, that we meet most of the members of his extended family, arguing and bickering or going about their daily activities.

There are flashbacks to notable events. Most striking is the time his daughter, Akueke, came back to Ezeulu’s obi or compound, after being badly beaten, yet again, by her abusive husband, Ibe. This threw Ezeulu’s son, Obika, into a fury and he stormed off to the other village where the husband lived, beat him badly and returned carrying him tied to his bed. Ibe was left on this bed, under a tree for several days, before his kin arrived to reclaim him and complain about his treatment. They accepted that his beating Akueke was wrong but complained at him being abducted.

The point of this kind of anecdote is it shows how the tribal people had their own set of values and their own ways of sorting out disagreements or addressing unacceptable behaviour, according to custom and tradition.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 describes how the six villages of Umuachala, Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani, Umuogwugwu and Umuisiuzo came together for protection against slave raids from a place called Abame. They named themselves Umuaro and commissioned medicine men to create a god for them, who was named Ulu. When they banded together like this, the town of Okperi gave them land to build on as well as the deities Udo and Ogwugwu to worship.

But now, several years later, the leaders of Umuaro want to go to war with Okperi. The issue is some farmland which has lain fallow for years, whose ownership Umuaro and Okperi are contesting.

The chapter focuses on a big meeting of the tribal elders at which Ezeulu explains all this and counsels peace. But he is defeated by a big speech by Nwaka, who tells a different narrative about the founding of Umuaro and implies that its menfolk have become lazy cowards.

The meeting agrees to send Akukalia, who is aggressively for war, as an envoy to Okperi, to sound them out. Ezeulu counsels caution but isn’t listened to. Akukalia and his two companions go to the compound of one of his relatives, Uduezue, where he is rude and graceless, ignoring rituals of friendship and demanding to see the Okperi elders. Uduezue takes him to see Otikpo, they are joined by Ebo, all of them insisting that serious business cannot be conducted on a market day like today.

The conversation degenerates into shouting during which Ebo implies Akukalia is impotent so the latter attacks Ebo, beating him round the head. Ebo runs off to get a machete but Akukalia beats him to it, rushing into his hut, grabbing his ikenga or personal fetish and splitting it in two. Everyone is horrified at this sacrilege, Ebo loads his musket and, as Akukalia charges him, shoots him dead.

So war breaks out. First there is another big meeting of the elders. Ezeulu again takes a critical role, saying it was a mistake to send a hot-head like Akukalia and advising calm. But the war party, led by Nwaka, say that it is insulting that Okperi haven’t sent envoys to apologise for Akukalia’s death. Nwaka organises a separate meeting to which Ezeulu isn’t invited and makes a speech saying the High Priest isn’t a king, and can’t advise about policy, his only job is to conduct religious rituals. This meeting opts for war and there follow two days of fighting.

Maybe the most significant single aspect of all this is the scale of the so-called war. For on the first day Umuaro kills just two men from Okperi. On the following day Umuaro kills four men and Okperi kills three. Nine dead. Peanuts compared to the post-independence African wars I’ve been reading about, minuscule numbers.

Anyway the whole thing grinds to a halt when the local white man, who they call Winterbotta, intervenes with armed troops. Winterbotta confiscates the guns from both sides and publicly destroys them.

The thing about this entire event which I found hard to decipher from the text is that it is a flashback. The Ezeulu of the present, the man watching for the new moon, is remembering events which happened five years ago. The thing is he is still bitter/upset at having been ignored, and still upset that a large part of the elders of the six villages continue to think he was wrong, and continue to support Nwaka.

Chapter 3

The chapters about the natives, locals or Africans, alternate with chapters about the handful of British administrators working in the Okperi region. These are:

Captain Winterbottom, District Commissioner, been in Nigeria 15 years
Mr Clarke, Assistant District Officer, only been on station for 4 weeks
Roberts, an Assistant Superintendent of Police in charge of the local detachment
Wade, in charge of the prison aka the Assistant Superintendent
Wright, doesn’t not really belong to the station, a Public Works Department man supervising the new road to Umuaro

Winterbottom considers himself an old hand. He fought against the Germans in the Cameroon campaign of 1916, where he gained the rank of captain. He has had to tell Wright off for sleeping with local women. He also suspects he’s using bad methods, including whipping, to get his road made.

It is bloody hot. Everyone is awaiting the arrival of the rains. He is awaiting the arrival of young Tony Clarke for dinner. Clarke’s only been out four weeks. For his part, Clarke is nervous and irritated at having to wear a formal dinner suit in the stifling heat.

As conversation, Winterbottom points out the collection of native guns he has and explains that he confiscated them from the natives to end a small conflict. This, of course, is the war we’ve seen described in chapter 2. there is a point here which is that Winterbottom’s explanation is significantly wrong, or glosses over the subtler details which Achebe’s account included. It’s the kind of simplifying which any administrator might apply to a situation, but the gap between the native understanding / explanation and the colonial one is significant and symbolic.

Anyway Winterbottom proudly tells Clarke it was this act that won him the local nickname of Otiji-Egbe, the Breaker of Guns. And a key feature of the whole little incident is that Winterbottom found that the only native who didn’t lie, who had integrity and told the truth, was a local high priest named Ezeulu.

Clarke is reading a book about Africa, ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’ by George Allen. This is notable because mention of this very book is made in the last sentence of Things Fall Apart. In that book the long complicated life story of the protagonist, Okonkwo, is reduced to a few sentences in the larger book being written by the administrator under whose rule Okonkwo is alienated and, eventually, kills himself. It is mightily symbolic that Clarke is reading the book. In its position at the end of Fall Apart it demonstrated how native traditions and entire life stories were almost completely ignored, misunderstood, reduced to a handful of sentences. Now the reference here shows how such misunderstandings and simplifications were handed down through the generations of colonialists, becoming accepted fact, becoming part of the discourse of power and administration.

We hear Winterbottom criticising London’s policy of indirect rule i.e. the policy of wherever possible creating local chiefs and leaders. Winterbottom thinks this is misconceived and is leading to all kinds of petty tyrants being artificially created.

Chapter 4

So five years pass after that ‘war’ and Nwaka gains increasing influence in Umuaro. He has an important backer, Ezidemili who is the priest of Idemili, the personal deity of one of the six villages, Umunneora. Ezidimili points out that Idemili has existed since the beginning of time whereas Ulu was created by the villagers.

When Winterbotta asked Ezeulu to nominate a member of his family to go to church to learn the ways of the white man he nominated his son Oduche, In fact it took 3 years for Ezeulu to enact this decision i.e. Oduche only started going to church two years ago.

On this particular morning the church bell is ringing and Oduche has dressed to attend Sunday service. Ezeulu regrets his decision. When his young son Nwafo interprets the church bells as saying: ‘Leave your yam, leave your cocoyam and come to church’ Ezeulu reflects that this is a ‘song of extermination’ i.e. calling the natives to neglect their work, their farming, their food and, by extension, neglect their traditional culture.

Then one of the family notices a box in Oduche’s hut is moving. To cut a long story short, the church had a new teacher, John Goodcountry, who told the congregation to aggressively overthrow the old customs. One of these was worship of the python who was considered a holy animal. So Oduche decides to kill one of the pythons that live in the roof of his mother’s hut. But when he’s manoeuvred it with a stick down to the ground he is scared of smashing its head in, in case he is cursed, and so manipulates it into a box which he locks, telling himself that it will die but he won’t be responsible for killing it.

It’s this moving box which has freaked the family out. When Ezeulu prizes it open with a spear everyone sees the imprisoned royal python (which quickly slithers to freedom) and word gets round the village that Oduche has committed a great blasphemy.

Ezidemili, the trouble-making priest of Idemili, sends a visitor to Ezeulu to ask what reparation he is going to make for the abomination his son has committed against his god. Ezeulu, incensed at being placed in this position, tells the visitor to return to Ezidemili and tell him to ‘eat shit’. I was surprised at the use of this swearword, as Achebe’s prose is usually so chaste and restrained. Must have had much more force in 1964.

Chapter 5

Back with Captain Winterbottom, his bitternesses and disgruntlements. The British policy is to create local leaders based on tribal values and culture so as to effect indirect rule. Cheaper and better. But Winterbottom thinks it is fake and is creating a generation of petty tyrants.

The great tragedy of British colonial administration was that the man on the spot who knew his African and knew what he was talking about found himself being constantly overruled by starry-eyed fellows at headquarters.

He remembers the case of James Ikedi, a native who he appointed officer for Okperi. After a while Winterbottom learned that this man was abusing his position to take bribes and kickbacks, plus selecting the best young women to take to bed. After 6 months he had to suspend him but then the Senior Resident came back from leave and reinstated him. And then Winterbottom learned that the man had set himself up as king, calling himself His Highness Ikedi the First, Obi of Okperi.

This was what British administration was doing among the Ibos, making a dozen mushroom kings grow where there was none before.

What prompts all this is an overbearing message from the Senior District Officer ticking Winterbottom off for delaying in selecting local chiefs. What makes it worse is that this man used to be Winterbottom’s subordinate but has been promoted over him.

Anyway, if he’s forced to appoint local leaders, he has in mind the chief priest Ezeulu.

Chapter 6

Back in the village Oduche is hiding from his father who is livid with him for trapping the royal python. He eventually returns, afraid, but Ezeulu doesn’t harm him.

Ezeulu’s in-law, Onwuzuligbo, comes to negotiate about the return of the beaten wife, Akueke, to his village. It is a friendly discussion. Ezeulu offers kolanut, Onwuzuligbo draws lines on the ground with white chalk and then colours the big toe of his right foot white. (Only near the end is it explained that these lines are the visitor’s ‘personal emblem’.) The negotiations are quite detailed, including recompense for the year that Ezeulu has been feeding her.

On the back of this Ezeulu sends the town crier around the village to announce the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves.

Chapter 7

The Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves involves all the villages so on this one day the men of Umuachala and Umunneora meet as friends. We are shown the preparations of Ezeulu’s wives, Matefi, Ugoye, and daughter Akueke. The marketplace is packed. Grand arrival of Nwaka’s five wives, each wearing showy ivory leg decorations and fine velvet.

Then the central ceremony of the Festival which involves the big drum Ikolo and Ezeulu performing various acts, including recounting the story of the arrival of the god Ulu, and then asking the god for purification. There is a lot of running about, plus the women of each of the villages taking it in turn to perform ritual dances, trampling the pumpkin leaves which have been scattered on the floor.

This whole chapter has focused on Ezeulu’s womenfolk, gossiping about each other and in-laws. It ends with Akueke explaining that she is soon to return to her husband who beat her but now the entire village promises will do so no longer.

Chapter 8

Cuts back to the Brits and specifically Mr Wright who is in charge of getting a road built (with local labour) from Okperi to Umuaro, home of the novel’s protagonist Ezeulu. Wright hasn’t enough money to pay the labourers and toys with cutting their wages in order to recruit more. (In details like this Achebe captures the lofty indifference to the natives’ lives of their white masters.)

In the event Wright gets Winterbottom’s permission to recruit unpaid labour from Umuaro. The elders of Umuaro offer Wright two groups who have recently come of age (the natives seem to organise themselves into generations by year group, as at western schools). There’s some jokes about the cordial rivalry between the two groups and the nicknames they give each other, relating to the smallness of their penises.

Moses Unachukwu had been the first Christian convert in the region. Being a carpenter, he helped build the church. All this means he is the only native who speaks English (after a fashion) and so he acts as interpreter between Wright and these new recruits, which increases his kudos throughout the villages.

The story of Ezeulu’s son Obika and his friend Ofoedu being late turning up for the road work assignment because they are hungover from a drinking party the night before (a party which included much knowledgeable discussion of the sources and potency of palm wine). Despite being late Obika swaggers up to the labouring party and provokes Wright to lose his temper and lash out with his whip. Obika charges him but Moses wisely holds him back, then Wright’s assistants hold Obika while Wright gives him six lashes of the whip on his bare shoulders (p.369).

This leads the men to down tools and have a big discussion about whether to carry on working, which stirs up the whole issue of why they’re working for the white man, what right he has to tell them what to do, and so on, quite heated discussions in which Moses, Obika and his trouble-making friend Ofoedu take a leading part. Moses preaches submission because the material and religious power of the white man are unstoppable:

‘I have travelled in Olu and I have travelled in Igbo, and I can tell you that there is no escape from the white man. He has come. When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. The white man is like that. Before any of you here was old enough to tie a cloth between the legs I saw with my own eyes what the white man did to Abame. Then I knew there was no escape. As daylight chases away darkness so will the white man drive away all our customs. I know that as I say it now it passes by your ears, but it will happen. The white man has power which comes from the true God and it bums like fire. This is the God about Whom we preach every eighth day…” (p.371)

(I should explain that this place named Abame was the centre of the local slave trade and when its inhabitants murdered a white man sent to talk to them, the whites returned in force, with African soldiers, and killed every man, woman and child in the place. News of this massacre spread round the region and is routinely invoked whenever anyone suggests any kind of rebellion against white rule.)

Ezeulu hears that his son has been whipped and considers reporting Wright to Winterbottom, but when Obika and Ofoedu arrive back at the compound and admit to being late and drunk and insubordinate, Ezeulu decides not to. He hates Ofoedu, who he considers a ‘worthless young man who trails after his son like a vulture after a corpse’ (p.376).

(Incidentally, we see Ezeulu’s opinion of Wright who, unlike tall and commanding Winterbottom, Ezeulu finds short and thick and hairy as a monkey.)

Chapter 9

The homestead of Edogo and his wife Amoge. Their first child died in a few months and now the second infant is sick, too. He ponders Ezeulu’s partiality for some of his sons over others and wonders who will succeed him as chief priest.

Ezeulu’s old friend and one of the few people he listens to, Ogbuefi Akuebue, comes to visit. This is because Ezeulu is still recovering from his energetic exertions at the Festival. Akuebue carries out the drawing of the four white chalk lines, colouring of the big toe of the right foot.

Nothing very significant comes of this visit. Ezeulu’s sons attend, the youngest, Nwafo, fetching first a kola nut, then some water, Edogo entering, greeting the guest and offering palm wine which has just been sent him by the client who’s commissioned him to carve a wooden door. Akuebue repeats a profound tirbal saying about booze:

‘The only medicine against palm wine is the power to say no.’

As a teetotaller that struck a chord. I think the point of these slow domestic scenes is precisely that, to immerse the reader in the etiquette and manners of these people, every bit as detailed and precise as the ladylike manners of Jane Austen’s characters.

They discuss a bit the fate of Obika being whipped, and discuss whether anyone can know the truth who was not there. A conversation about epistemology and morality.

Chapter 10

Tony Clarke is hosting his boss, Winterbottom, to dinner. Clarke has been in Nigeria for 6 weeks. He’s just back from a tour of the region (also known as the division or district) during which he stayed a night in the official rest house where Wright is staying as he supervises construction of the road, and discovered he likes Wright very much. They have a massive gossip about Winterbottom, uttering the word ‘captain’ with sarcasm. Wright tells Clarke that part of Winterbottom’s problem is that during the Cameroon war of 1916, his wife left him for another man. They go on to agree that ‘Old Tom’ as he’s known is a figure of fun back at headquarters in Enugu.

During the gossip we learn that Winterbottom came out to Africa in 1910 and has been there 16 years. So it must be 1926 (p.391).

All that is told in a flashback, a memory in Clarke’s mind. Achebe uses flashbacks a lot. They add depth to the narrative but also contribute to it being confusing, for example it took me ages to realise that all of chapter 2 with its account of the lead-up to the brief village war, was a flashback.

Back in the present Clarke hosts the dinner (consisting of small dry chicken cooked over a wood fire by his cook). As in almost all the British chapters, there’s a moment symbolising British ignorance and slackness. Winterbottom had specifically asked Clarke to enquire into rumours that Wright was whipping the native workers. Only when he returned does Clarke remember that, despite or because of a boozy evening with Wright, he completely forgot to ask. Anyhow, he didn’t really know how to make enquiries: who should he ask? who would translate for him? who could he trust?

The point is that Clarke therefore wrote in his official report that there was no whipping. Winterbottom is mildly puzzled because word has got to him of the whipping of Obika. On balance, he decides to trust Clarke and his report will enter the official record, but it’s another example of the British authorities not understanding or getting the full story.

Anyway, their little conversation returns to Winterbottom’s bugbear, namely the ill-advised policy of setting up local chiefs, and Winterbottom repeats the story of James Ikedi who, given a little authority, turned himself into a corrupt abuser and now king of his own people.

‘The man was a complete nonentity until we crowned him, and now he carries on as though he had been nothing else all his life. It’s the same with Court Clerks and even messengers. They all manage to turn themselves into little tyrants over their own people. It seems to be a trait in the character of the negro.’

This little speech was probably intended to be hair-raisingly patronising and insulting in the fresh optimistic days of 1964 as African nations were gaining their independence. Now, 60 years later, after tyrants and dictators such as Mobutu and Amin, after Bokassa, Sani Abacha, Mugabe, Macias Nguema, Sekou Toure, Siad Barre, Mengistu, Omar al-Bashir and Hissene Habre, Paul Kagame, Isaias Afwerki, after countless civil wars (Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia), coups and massacres, it sounds more like a prophecy than a slur.

Chapter 11

Ezeulu visits his friend Ogbuefi Akuebue. Akeubue tells his son, Obielue, to go to his mother and ask for a kola nut, the standard food broken at visits. Akeubue has a back problem which means he can’t straighten up after sitting a long time. In this and a thousand other domestic touches, Achebe humanises his characters, normalises them, seeks to erase the barrier of incomprehension which we see the colonial rulers erecting in the narratives themselves.

During the conversation they hear gunshots which, interestingly, neither man attributes to violence i.e. fighting let alone shooting in anger, are things of vanishing rarity. Instead Ezeulu immediately realises they are shots fired to ward off evil spirits. In other words, someone is seriously ill. It is Ogbuefi Amalu and Ezeulu goes to visit him allowing the text to give us a very detailed description of the traditional medicines, fetishes and objects festooning his room to effect a cure.

A few days later Ezeulu is back at his obi when Obika’s bride arrives, accompanied by all her womenfolk, 20 in total, while Ezeulu’s compound is packed with family and relatives. In other words, a grand occasion. She is named Okuata, is tall and strikingly good looking. Again this is an opportunity to display detailed knowledge not only of the etiquette of such an occasion but what everyone is wearing, especially the bride, her hairstyle, the strings of jigida covering her privates. The full ceremony, including the sacrifice performed by a medicine man, and the anxious thoughts of bride and groom, are thoroughly described.

Unusually, the medicine man, Aniegboka, does not bury the hen the family brought along with the other symbols of the past which must be buried in the roadway back to Okuata’s village, as is the custom, but instead says he will take it home and eat it himself. This worries Obika, who, when the procession returns to his obi, asks his father if this is usual. Ezeulu says no but it is no worry because he performed his part; what the diviner does with the holy objects is not his concern.

But Achebe observes that Ezeulu is mightily pleased that his son was a) concerned about the proprieties and b) asked his father about it i.e. showed reverence and filial duty. Maybe he is growing up now he is married.

Chapter 12

Next morning the newly married and deflowered Okuata is pleased to wear the loincloth of a married woman and immensely relieved that her virginity has been confirmed. Obika sends a goat to her parents in thanks for her ‘virtue’ being intact. It’s probably obvious, but isn’t the entire way women were treated in this society a textbook definition of ‘patriarchy’.

Edogo goes to visit Ezeulu’s friend Akuebue because he is worried about (what he thinks are) his father’s plans for succession to the priesthood i.e. his positioning of Nwafo to inherit it.

Meanwhile, almost the entire extended household went to the stream to fetch water and an argument breaks out. The new bride Okuata pays just a bit too much attention to Oduche the Christian, whereupon his sister Ojiugo rather loudly tells Okuata that this is the infidel who killed the royal python, which infuriates Obika who confronts Ojiugo, who slaps him, who beats her back, and the entire family has to separate them. They and onlookers take sides and there are further micro-disputes.

Obviously, when Ojiuga gets home, crying, with slap marks on her face, her mother Matefi sets up a loud howling prompting Ezeulu to stride into her hut and tell her to ‘shut your mouth’ (p.415). In my Conclusion I suggest the book has many more characters, with their own storylines, than the previous two novels and this makes it rather like a soap opera.

His friend Akuebue visits Ezeulu, ostensibly to talk about Oduche but the conversation spills out into a rehash of the clan’s accusations that five years ago, in the little village war, Ezeulu betrayed his clan to the white men. This triggers a lengthy justification from Ezeulu, saying the coming of the white man and the overpowering of their people is nothing to do with him. It was nothing to do with him when the white man massacred Abame. And now, it is absurd of people like his enemy Nakwa to blame him, Ezeulu, for the rise of the white man. Do they think that if they overthrow or kill Ezeulu, the white man will go away? Of course not. Leading up to Ezeulu’s comment on himself:

‘I can see things where other men are blind. That is why I am Known and at the same time I am Unknowable. You are my friend and you know whether I am a thief or a murderer or an honest man. But you cannot know the Thing which beats the drum to which Ezeulu dances. I can see tomorrow; that is why I can tell Umuaro: come out from this because there is death there or do this because there is profit in it. If they listen to me, o-o; if they refuse to listen, o-o. I have passed the stage of dancing to receive presents.’ (p.419)

Akuebue realises that Ezeulu sent his son Oduche to the church not as a sellout of the clan but as a sacrifice to staunch the white man’s power.

To everyone’s astonishment a black messenger from Winterbottom arrives, dressed in a fancy uniform. After a fuss of etiquette, he announces that Winterbottom has summoned him to go to Okperi. He then throws in some corruption, saying that Winterbottom is busy to Ezeulu might have to wait several days but if he gives the messenger a big meal, he’ll make sure he’s seen the next day. Ezeulu is calm and dignified and says he goes nowhere to attend anyone; Winterbottom must come to him. The messenger is outraged. Ezeulu offers that his son Edogo will go in his stead. The messenger refuses to take the message.

Chapter 13

Ezeulu calls a big meeting of the six villages. As usual the formalities and etiquette are described in some detail. First Ezeulu describes to them the arrival of the white man’s messenger. Then there is a general debate in which his enemy, Nwaku, is predictably critical. And then Ezeulu concludes proceedings by saying he will travel to Okperi to see Winterbottom.

Description of the estrangement between Ezeulu who became a priest and his half-brother, Okeke Onenyi who inherited their father’s skills as a medicine man. Family soap opera. Okeke is fond of his nephew, Edogo, which is part of the reason Ezeulu dislikes them both.

Cut to a complete change of scene. Winterbottom is coming down with his annual bout of fever. He brags about being an ‘old coaster’ to Clarke who is shrewd enough to realise that, as the new boy, he needs to act impressed. He is just tipping over when he receives the message that Ezeulu refused to accede to his summons. In a fury Winterbottom orders that officers be sent to arrest Ezeulu, bring him to Okperi, and throw him in prison until Winterbottom has returned from the visit he’s planning to make to headquarters in Enugu. But then he falls into a delirium and is taken to hospital.

In the hospital he is treated by the missionary doctor Mary Savage who inadvertently reveals the fact to the local staff that she adores the sick man.

Meanwhile, two officers are dispatched to arrest and bring back Ezeulu, in handcuffs if necessary. After much prevarication by the villages, they find Ezeulu’s compound and, after terrifying the family, finally establish that Ezeulu has already departed and is heading for Okperi. Now the two messengers are afraid of looking like fools, and so decide they will take two members of the family back with them as security, to be released as and when Ezeulu appears. Old Akuebue talks them out of this with a counter-offer of gifts, so they are presented with a feast of yam and chicken and palm wine, given two live cocks and two shillings. Here as in all other dealings with the so-called Court Messengers, as in the career of James Ikedi, you can see how the presence of the white man encouraged black-on-black corruption and extortion which hadn’t been there before, which tribal customs and processes had prevented. The white man brings the threat of arbitrary and extreme violence which his middle men can use to extort gifts from terrified villagers.

Meanwhile all the natives on Government Hill connect the fact that Winterbottom fell seriously ill just after ordering the arrest of the Chief Priest of Ulu as proof of Ezeulu’s power, proud of the might of their customs despite the white man’s bullying.

Clarke returns from the hospital anxious for Winterbottom’s life so when his steward tells him that Ezeulu has arrived, he irritably orders him to be locked up. All the black staff on Government Hill are now terrified of Ezeulu’s power. So the officers of the guardhouse sweep it out and pretend it is a guest room for Ezeulu and Obika. Their wives bring lots of food which Ezeulu refuses.

Then two messengers who went to Umuora are revealed as frauds because Ezeulu got there under his own steam without them. What’s more, they begin to suspect they might be liable to Ezeulu’s magic and so consult an old dibia (medicine man) who tells them to bury the two cocks and the money Ezeulu’s family gave them.

Thus great fear of Ezeulu’s power spreads through the entire black staff on Government Hill, their families and villages.

Chapter 14

Later that night Ezeulu has a dream-vision of his grandfather confronting the obstinate men of Umuora, of the villagers of Umuora as his enemy.

Clarke decides to follow through on Winterbottom’s feverish determination to teach Ezeulu some manners and so leaves him in prison for four days. En route to the hospital he and Wade come across a more than usually lavish sacrifice (the same cocks and money the two messengers dedicated) and stop to examine it. When Wade sees the money, he pockets it. Clarke is alarmed at this desecration of a native offering.

Initially hostile to the clansman who had brought the messenger to his compound and is now looking after him in ‘prison’, John Nwodika, the latter’s insistence on being a good host and getting his wife to prepare fulsome meals brings him round.

Obika returns to Umuora. As you can imagine every member of the family is alarmed and upset. We have gotten to know them so well that we register the different responses of each one. When Akuebue hears the Ezeulu is being fed by the wife of Nwodika, he instantly declares he is setting off to see Ezeulu. He doesn’t trust the people of Okperi one inch.

So later that day his son, wife (Ugoye) and friend (Akuebue) arrive at the prison. They find Ezeulu extremely relaxed about his extended stay. He jokes that if the white man dies and requires him to be sacrificed that will be fine, though his family immediately let out storms of protest.

Winterbottom’s steward, John Nwodika, the man who’s been looking after Ezeulu now tells them all the story of how he came into the white man’s service and then his excitement at promoting his clan (Umuora).

Ezeulu has come to trust Nwodika. Edogo is grateful to him for looking after his father. So they perform the ceremony to become blood brothers, namely breaking a kola nut, cutting their thumbs and smearing some blood on a nut, then eating the nut smeared with the other’s blood.

Eventually, after being kept waiting four days, Ezeulu is summoned to the presence of Clarke who treats him disrespectfully before finally getting round to telling Ezeulu that the British want to make him the warrant chief of Umuaro. There’s a silence then Ezeulu says he will nobody’s chief except Ulu’s. Infuriated, Clarke has him sent back to the cells.

Chapter 15

Word gets around that Ezeulu has refused to be the white man’s puppet. Clarke goes to see Winterbottom who’s been in hospital for two weeks and looks very ill and weak. Apprised of the situation, Winterbottom tells Clarke to keep the priest locked up till he caves in and co-operates with the administration. Clarke is relieved not to have to make the decision but troubled by the lack of legal justification for locking up an old man who’s done nothing wrong.

After 32 days during which his reputation has spread far and wide, Ezeulu is told he is free to leave. All through this period he has not cared about the white man’s decisions at all – it is the battle with his own people he is determined to win. He wants to lay to rest forever the accusation made by Nakwa and his ilk that Ezeulu collaborated with the white man and even brought the white man to Umuora. Now nobody can say he is a collaborator.

Clarke took the decision to release Ezeulu partly on his own, partly influenced by a letter from a report by the Secretary for Native Affairs recommending that the policy of appointing new chiefs be suspended.

Chapter 16

So Ezeulu sets out for Umuaro, accompanied by the faithful John Nwodika who wouldn’t hear of him making the long journey alone. En route the rains start, really heavy continuous freezing cold rain, so that Ezeulu arrives home drenched, much to the concern of his kin.

They warm him, rub him with oils, and he has over 50 visitors, not counting women. For most of the time he leans against the wall not saying anything, letting his friend Akuebue answer all their questions. When he was at Okperi the entire village seemed to be The Enemy, but once he’s back he hears all kinds of conflicting opinions (especially on the key issue of whether to confront the white man or not) and realises it’s not so simple.

Suddenly Ezeulu has a religious revelation, a key moment which changes his entire attitude to himself and the problem of his enmity with his own people. The god Ulu speaks in his ear and berates him for thinking that this is his fight. What if he is only part of a wider plan? Ulu explains that he has his own fight with another deity, Idemili.

Since it’s at the core of the narrative and its interpretation it’s worth quoting at length:

‘Ta! Nwanu!’ barked Ulu in his ear, as a spirit would in the ear of an impertinent human child. ‘Who told you that this was your own fight?’

Ezeulu trembled and said nothing.

‘I say who told you that this was your own fight which you could arrange to suit you? You want to save your friends who brought you palm wine he-hehe-he-he!’ laughed the deity the way spirits do – a dry, skeletal laugh. ‘Beware you do not come between me and my victim or you may receive blows not meant for you! Do you not know what happens when two elephants fight? Go home and sleep and leave me to settle my quarrel with Idemili, who wants to destroy me so that his python may come to power. Now you tell me how it concerns you. I say go home and sleep. As for me and Idemili we shall fight to the finish; and whoever throws the other down will strip him of his anklet!’

After that there was no more to be said. Who was Ezeulu to tell his deity how to fight the jealous cult of the sacred python? It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god. This thought intoxicated Ezeulu like palm wine. New thoughts tumbled over themselves and past events took on new, exciting significance. Why had Oduche imprisoned a python in his box? It had been blamed on the white man’s religion; but was that the true cause? What if the boy was also an arrow in the hand of Ulu? (p.476)

He should stop worrying and agonising about scruples and details. His god has a plan. He is just a part of it.

Chapter 17

You might have expected the white people to make an appearance, maybe Clarke to send more soldiers, and relations with them become more fraught, as they do at the end of Things Fall Apart – the whole situation building up to some grisly climax… But no. Back in Umuora life returns to normal.

Life went on as though nothing had happened or was ever going to happen.

Achebe summarises the way each of the family members carries on being themselves (having gotten his new wife pregnant, Obika returns to his normal behaviour of drinking too much palm wine). The six villages celebrate their various festivals. The rains stop, allowing the yam tubers to ripen.

The chapter then turns into a very detailed, evocative, immersive description of the inauguration of the new Mask Edogo has spent a lot of the narrative carving. A huge crowd assembles to watch the procession accompanied by flute and led by Obika, by far the most handsome manly man in the village, then the ritual slaughter of the two rams. It is a masterful description.

Chapter 18 – the crisis

It approaches the Feast of the New Yam which marks the new year. Emissaries from the six villages visit Ezeulu to tell him they are worried that 12 moons have passed and he has not set the date for the feast. Ezeulu reprimands them for infringing on his powers but when they leave he is youthful and gay. He is going to get his own back on the village which ignored his advice all those years ago.

Word gets round that Ezeulu is refusing to name the day of the feast and so ten wise men come to see him. Argument. They say that delaying setting the feast time will delay harvesting, their yams will rot in the ground and they will all starve. Ezeulu for his part says he still has three holy yams left to eat before he can declare the date. The point is that he only eats these yams at the arrival of each new moon. So his ruling implies everyone will have to wait two more months before harvesting their yams. Well, can’t he eat them all on one day, the elders ask? Don’t be ridiculous, that would be blasphemy. Well, can’t the elders take the blasphemy and penance on themselves? Various attempts to solve the issue, until they leave.

It turns into a real issue. Ezeulu’s delay means the people of the six village of Umuaro will have to wait two more moons before harvesting their yams, their main crop. Meanwhile the rains come to an end, the earth hardens and the harvesting becomes daily more difficult.

Ezeulu becomes public enemy number one. His family are sneered at. His grandchildren are called names. Women refuse to sell his wives goods in the market. Elders of the villages discuss the rights and wrongs of his behaviour. Ogbuefi Ofoka shrewdly observes that Eleuzu has been spoiling for a fight with Umuora for some time, and now this has given him the opportunity.

Abruptly the focus of the narrative shifts completely to the local Christian church, run by the zealous John Jaja Goodcountry, Catechist of Still Mark’s C.M.S. Church, Umuaro. Achebe gives a complicated account of the fortunes of Goodcountry’s church, which takes in events in other districts, religious conflicts with the natives etc. The point is, Goodcountry hears about the growing controversy about the Feast of the New Yams and sees it as an opportunity for recruitment.

He has it put around that anyone who brings one yam to the Christian church will win the support of the Christian God who is far more powerful than Ulu, and who will permit them to then commence their harvesting (which has been dangerously delayed by Ezeulu’s obstinacy).

Chapter 19

Ezeulu’s obstinacy has resulted in famine. The neighbouring peoples to Umuaro are making a fortune selling them yams at market while Umuaro’s own yams rot in the ground unharvested. An eminent man dies but his family cannot hold a wake because there are no yams.

A deadly silence descends on the famine-stricken village. Nobody visits Ezeulu. A new moon comes and Ezeulue eats the twelfth yam, But there is still a whole 28 days till he eats the last one and the harvest can begin. People will be starving by then.

The climax is dense and spooky. the family of Ogbuefi Amalu who died in the rainy season approach fine handsome Obika to perform the role of ogbazulobodo on the night before the dead man’s second burial. The performance requires him to adopt the personality of the spirit and then race through all the pathways of the village repeating time-honoured proverbs. Although Ezeulu’s family is unpopular, Obika is still the best at running and chanting, and so he accepts the invitation.

As usual, a detailed and utterly convincing description of the preparation of the ritual, Obika’s dressing and then becoming the spirit and setting off running. But he returns to the preparers and mourners much sooner than expected and collapses at their feet and dies.

They bring Obika’s body to Ezeulu. He breaks. Why did the god do this to him? He followed his rules to the letter. Why has he been punished? Lost in the endless labyrinth of theology, Ezeulu cracks and goes mad, like his mother before him.

The very end of the narrative (like that of Things Fall Apart) returns to the whites. Winterbottom had been recuperating from his illness in England. Now he returns to his post, marries the doctor and never even hears a word of Ezeulu’s fate. The entire complex story with its numerous interlocking relationships, its entire world of values and motivations, simply doesn’t exist for the white rulers. But:

It looked as though the gods and the powers of event finding Winterbottom handy had used him and left him again in order as they found him.

So was he, also, part of Ulu’s plan? Was Winterbottom, also, an arrow of god?

What happened?

So what happened in the central storyline? There are six possible interpretations:

1. Was Ezeulu right to follow his interpretation of his religious duty, to hold out to the letter of the law dictating that he only eat one of the holy yams per month, and thus throwing the village he was meant to be protecting into crisis? Was there no compromise, no way he could have eaten the other two yams on the same day and blamed the elders, who would have done penance to appease Ulu? I.e. was he only doing his duty?

Or 2, was he being obstinate and taking advantage of the crisis in order to wilfully punish the village he had a grudge against? I.e. was the situation caused by his obstinacy?

Or 3, was it all the white man’s fault? By arresting him and keeping him in prison on Government Hill for just over a month, through two new moons (which he couldn’t celebrate by eating the holy yams set aside for each one) was it white man’s interference in the natural scheme of things which caused the crisis?

Or 4, as per Ezeulu’s vision of Ulu, was this all part of Ulu’s plan which Ezeulu didn’t agree with but which he had to follow. Was Ezeulu just a pawn in the god’s larger plans, an arrow of god, in which case the six villages themselves, and the famine they suffered, were all part of some larger plan which no mortal could understand?

Or 5, did the god punish Ezeulu for taking against the village the god exists to protect? In the villagers’ opinion:

Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and thus upheld the wisdom of their ancestors – that no man however great was greater than his people; that no man ever won judgement against his clan. (p.512)

Lastly, 6, the novel ends with the thought that the only ones to benefit from the situation were the Christians. Many families ignored Ezeulu’s ruling and took advantage of John Goodcountry’s offer, taking a yam to sacrifice to the Christian god in the hope that this would supersede the blasphemy done to Ulu. In other words, the entire complex tangled sequence of events turns out to be just a footnote in the white man’s cultural and religious conquest of Igboland.

Traditional sayings

Part of the power and authority of Things Fall Apart derives from the wealth of folk stories and, especially, traditional sayings or proverbs which the characters utter as a regular part of their dialogue. There are so many, it gives an impression of a great plenitude, that there’s an indefinite storehouse of folk wisdom to draw on.

The thing is, some of these recur in No Longer At Ease. And the same ones occur again in Arrow of God. This rather undermines the initial impression of a huge storehouse, and begins to give the impression of the opposite, of a finite set of saying which are endlessly regurgitated by characters. In all three books occurs the saying about the little bird, nza, who ate and drank and got over-confident and challenged his personal god to single combat. There’s also the proverb about the outsiders who weep louder than family at the funeral. And then the story of the bird Eneke-nti-oba. When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: ‘Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.’

‘When an adult is in the house the she-goat is not left to suffer the pains of parturition on its tether.’ (cited three times in chapter 2, in chapters 13 and 18)
‘When the roof and walls of a house fall in, the ceiling is not left standing’ (quoted twice, in chapters 2 and 8)

For reference, I’ll publish a list of all these wisdom sayings in my next blog post.

Conclusion

There are many more characters in Arrow of God than Achebe’s previous books and they’re more densely crowded. It’s not only longer, it feels a lot more busy. And unlike the first two books it doesn’t focus so much on one central protagonist. Instead the extra length allows Achebe to describe in much more detail other characters such as Ezeulu’s wives and children, his sons and daughters. There are also many more sub-plots, for example, about the domestic abuse of his daughter Akueke, or Oduche attending the Christian church, or Obika being a swaggering braggart, or descriptions of the quiet son, Edogo, as he works on the Mask he is carving. It feels more like a soap opera, with multiple characters and storylines all going on at the same time, alternating and interweaving.

This made Arrow of God significantly harder to read than the first two books, which are shorter and more focused, with just the one central storyline concentrating on the protagonist. At quite a few places I got lost and had to reread paragraphs or pages to figure out who was doing what and what was going on.

So it’s a harder and more demanding read than the first two. But, on the plus side, being longer and more copious than its predecessors means the reader is more thoroughly immersed in the range and diversity of native life, immensely immersed, soaked.

Maybe this is why Achebe, many years later, wrote in a brief foreword that Arrow of God was his favourite among his novels. It feels the most encyclopedic, giving a really comprehensive overview of the tribal life and customs of the time. It stands alongside Things Fall Apart as a mighty achievement.

Credit

Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe was published in by Heinemann Books in 1964. References are to the 2010 Everyman’s Library edition.

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by Simon on January 19, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged Abame, Adeze, African Trilogy, Akuebue, Akueke, Amoge, Aniegboka, Arrow of God, Breaker of Guns, British colonial administration, British Empire, Cameroon, Captain Winterbottom, chief priest, Chinua Achebe, Christian church, Christianity, cocoyam, colonialism, Court Messengers, dibia, District Officer, Edogo, Eneke-nti-oba, Enugu, Ezeulu, Ezidemili, famine, Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves, fiction, First World War, folk stories, George Allen, Government Hill, head wife, His Highness Ikedi the First, hubris, Ibe, Idemili, Igboland, ikenga, James Ikedi, John Goodcountry, John Jaja Goodcountry, John Nwodika, kola nut, kolanut, Lagos, Mary Savage, Mask Edogo, masks, Matefi, medicine man, Moses Unachukwu, Mr Clarke, narrative, Nigeria, Nkechi, No Longer at Ease, novel, Nwafo, Nwaka, Nwodika, nza, obi, Obi of Okperi, Obi Okonkwo, Obiageli, Obika, Oduche, Ofoedu, ogbazulobodo, Ogbuefi Akuebue, Ogwugwu, Ojiugo, Okeye Onenyi, Okonkwo, Okperi, Okuata, Old Tom, Onwuzuligbo, Otiji-Egbe, Otikpo, palm-wine, personal fetish, proverbs, racism, religion, Roberts, sacred python, Secretary for Native Affairs, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, Things Fall Apart, Tony Clarke, Traditional sayings, Tragedy, Udo, Uduezue, Ugoye, Ulu, Umuachala, Umuagu, Umuaro, Umuezeani, Umunneora, Umuofia, Umuogwugwu, Wade, Winterbotta, Winterbottom, Wright, yam

Posted by Simon on January 19, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/19/arrow-of-god-chinua-achebe/

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)

‘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.

Images of a mammy-wagon

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.

Nigerian pidgin

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.

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1 Comment

by Simon on January 17, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged #democracy, Abortion, Africa, African literature, Albert Camus, Bisi, bitter-leaf soup, Bribery and corruption, Britain, British colonial rule, British Empire, bushman, Chinua Achebe, Christianity, Christopher, Clara Okeke, corruption, Elsie Mark, fiction, folk stories, Funchal, Gentleman Bobby, Graham Greene, Hannah Okonkwo, High life, Igbo, Igbo people, Igbo proverb, Isaac, John Macmillan, Joseph Okeke, Lagos, Liverpool, London, London School of Economics, Madeira, mammy-wagon, Michael Obi Okonkwo, military coup, Miss Marie Tomlinson, Mr Green, Mr Jones, Mr Mark, Mr Nduka, Mr Omo, narrative, Nigeria, Nigerian pidgin, No Longer at Ease, novel, Nwoye, Obi Okonkwo, Okonkwo, Onitsha, osu, Pidgin, post-independence Africa, River Niger, roast yams, Ronan Bennett, Sam Okoli, Second World War, St Pancras Town Hall, T.S. Eliot, text, The Heart of The Matter, the Honourable Sam Okoli, the MV Sasa, The Outsider, Things Fall Apart, transparent governance, Umuofia, Umuofia Progressive Union, Umuofia Union, Umura, UPU, World bank

Posted by Simon on January 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/17/no-longer-at-ease-chinua-achebe/

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All posts tagged Obi Okonkwo

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe (1966)

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A Man of The People

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Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe (1964)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18 – the crisis

Chapter 19

What happened?

Traditional sayings

Conclusion

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No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Bribery and corruption

Chapter 5

Pidgin

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

The first educated Nigerian generation

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

High life music

Thoughts

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