Chinua Achebes No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe (born 16 November 1930 as Albert Chinalmg Achebe) is a

Nigerian , poet, professor, and critic. He is best known for his first novel and magnum
opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in
modern African literature.
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe
excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became
fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing
stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian
Broadcasting Service and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained
worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels
include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966),
and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe writes his novels in English and has
defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975,
his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" became the
focus of controversy, for its criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a bloody racist" and was
later published.
When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a
supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new
nation. The war ravaged the population, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he
appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian
government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but
soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed.
Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian
influences, and the clash of Western and Traditional African values during and after
the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines
straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory.
He has also published a number of short stories, children's books, and essay
collections. Since 2009, he has been the David and Marianna Fisher University
Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence,
Rhode Island, United States.
No Longer at Ease- slide 2(book cover)
The novel opens with the trial of Obi Okonkwo on a charge of accepting a bribe. It
then jumps back in time to a point before his departure for England and works its way
forward to describe how Obi ended up on trial.
The members of the Umuofia Progressive Union (UPU), a group of Igbo men who
have left their villages to live in major Nigerian cities, have taken up a collection to
send Obi to England to study law, in the hope that he will return to help his people
navigate British colonial society.(slide 4- the map) But once there, Obi switches his
major to English and meets Clara Okeke for the first time during a dance.
Obi returns to Nigeria after four years of studies and lives in Lagos with his friend
Joseph. He takes a job with the Scholarship Board and is almost immediately offered
a bribe by a man who is trying to obtain a scholarship for his little sister. When Obi
indignantly rejects the offer, he is visited by the girl herself who implies that she will
bribe him with sexual favors for the scholarship, another offer Obi rejects.
At the same time, Obi is developing a romantic relationship with Clara Okeke, a
Nigerian woman who eventually reveals that she is an osu,(slide 5- definition of an
osu) Our fathers in their darkness and ignorance called an
innocent man Osu, a thing given to the idols, and thereafter
he became an outcast, and his children, and his childrens
children forever
an outcast by her descendants, meaning that Obi cannot marry her under the
traditional ways of the Igbo people of Nigeria. While he remains intent on marrying
Clara, even his Christian father opposes it, although reluctantly due to his desire to
progress and eschew the "heathen" customs of pre-colonial Nigeria. His mother begs
him on her deathbed not to marry Clara until after her death, threatening to kill herself
if Obi disobeys. When Obi informs Clara of these events, Clara breaks the
engagement and tells him that she is pregnant. Obi arranges an abortion, which Clara
reluctantly undergoes, but she suffers complications and refuses to see Obi
afterwards.
All the while, Obi sinks deeper into financial trouble, in part due to poor planning on
his end, in part due to the need to repay his loan to the UPU and to pay for his
siblings' educations, and in part due to the cost of the illegal abortion.
After hearing of his mother's death, Obi sinks into a deep depression, and refuses to
go home for the funeral. When he recovers, he begins to accept bribes in a reluctant
acknowledgement that it is the way of his world.
The novel closes as Obi takes a bribe and tells himself that it is the last one he will
take, only to discover that the bribe was part of a sting operation. He is arrested,
bringing us up to the events that opened the story.

Colonial Nigeria (slide 6- Nigeria)
During the colonial period in Nigeria (from about 1850 to 1960), the British, like any
other colonial power, asserted their dominance through a variety of media. During
colonial times, the British used education as a tool to further dominate and oppress
Nigerians, a tool to cultivate a proper' style of thinking. The inculcation of this style
of thinking came in the guise of Christianity.
The British officials who were themselves Christians were representing, the
most Christian nation' in the world. British occupation in Nigeria was therefore
synonymous with Christian evangelism, and the concept of civilising'(slide 7)
helping the benighted Africans to accept Christianity and Western civilisation
became the order of the day (Fafunwa 71)
Therefore, the first form of Western education in Nigeria was lead by the
missionaries, and they, without exception, used the schools as a means of converting
the indigenous people to Christianity. During this time, the Church Missionary
Society (C.M.S.) and the Methodist Missionary Society (slide 8) were the first British
Christian organizations to set up schools in Nigeria. Most of their work was
conducted in the southern half of Nigeria, where it was deemed safer.' Some of their
achievements included the translation of the Bible into the local languages such as
(slide 9)Yoruba, Ibo, Efik and Nupe, the introduction of vocational or industrial
education, the use of English as the vernacular, and the establishment of a proper'
code of conduct for the localities. Most of the schools set up by these missions were
boarding schools, for they believed that if children were to develop along civilised
lines, their daily life must be supervised, controlled and directed along proper
lines'. That is, if a raw' African is to be made a civilised, Christian black European,
he must be isolated from the evil influences of his pagan past and present (Fafunwa
99).
Between 1850 and 1960, the activities, discipline and style of teaching that
existed in these schools reflected the properties that the British educators' believed a
good Nigerian citizen ought to have: A good' citizen in Nigeria meant one who
was African by blood, Christian by religion and British or French in culture and
intellect (Fafunwa 71).
As seen here, the British used education as a tool to cultivate religious and
cultural hegemony in Nigerians. The colonialists oppressed the inhabitants by
subjecting them to foreign values.

Postcolonialism in No Longer at Ease
The postcolonial condition can be sensed right from the epigraph of the novel, which
is represented by
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The Journey of the Magi" details the journey of the Biblical magi (or "wise men") as they
searched for Christ. The three magi saw a brilliant new star in the east and realized it
signaled the birth of a new king. They followed it until they found Jesus, and they
worshipped him as their king.

In Eliot's poem, the speaker talks about how the journey was difficult: it was bitterly cold
and there were many times they regretted it. They had all these memories of home,
where they enjoyed warm weather and "silken girls bringing sherbet." When they finally
reached their destination, a humble tavern and a stable where Jesus is born, they
wondered whether their journey was for a birth or a death. They had met the Messiah
and though this meeting was a birth, it was a bitter birth, one more like death than birth.
In the verses excerpted here, the speaker has returned to his own home, but now that he
has met Christ, he is "no longer at ease" in his old culture with his old religion and his old
way of life. The speaker would be glad for "another death" like the one he just
experienced, perhaps because then he would feel at ease again in his old life with his
family and friends.

These short verses, the final verses of the poem, describe what many writers and literary
critics have called the postcolonial condition. The journey that the magi took parallels Obi
Okonkwo's journey from his home to England, where he experiences an intellectual and
cultural birth that is more like death. When he returns to his home country, Nigeria, he
feels culturally displaced. He is "no longer at ease" among his countrymen, with their
religion and their way of life. Not only does Obi judge their lack of education (and their
use of bribes to climb the corporate and government ladder), but he also feels many of
their other customs are barbaric and should be eradicated as citizens embrace
Christianity and/or Western education.
No Longer At Ease was first published in 1960, the year of Nigeria's
independence from England. This is significant because it is a novel that
pertains to a trend of literature called postcolonial literature that still
survives. There are many issues that arise out of post-colonialism, issues
that authors and writers around the world have had to deal with. Africa,
India, and the West Indies all have come out of the colonial era with a new
literature that must address the problems that colonialism left behind. Some
of the problems in post-colonial regions concern language, education, the
conflict between traditional ways and Western or European ways, the
presence of the English, and corruption. Those who later moved into the
land of the colonizer (for instance, Obi, while studying in England)
experience an entire set of new problems such as nostalgia for home,
memory, and the desire for the homeland. When Obi returns from his
studies in England, he is an honest idealistic young man. He takes a high
paying job in the civil service but soon finds that his salary is not sufficient
to meet the financial demands made upon him. He also gets involved with a
woman his parents and the clan despise. In the end he is caught taking
bribes and is sent to prison.
Undoubtedly, many of the problems confronting Obi Okonkwo arise from
his uneasy situation in the space between a diminishing colonialism and an
emerging Nigerian nation. The major conflict of No Longer At Ease is the
fact that Obi Okonkwo, the protagonist of the novel, is caught between two
worlds: that of a traditional Africa and that of a changing and new world
that lives amidst two cultures: the English and the African. (Slide 11)The
written word symbolizes the power of Europeans, which Achebe tells us
outright. We see that Isaac Okonkwo embraces it early on:

Mr. Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man.
And the symbol of the white man's power was the written word, or better
still, the printed word (13.24).

It isn't just the two Okonkwos who recognize the power of the written word.
The Umuofia Progressive Union is made up of poorly educated men who
recognized the power of knowing "book," and who saved their pennies
scrupulously to send one of their "sons" to England to go to college. They
knew that having an educated kinsmen would give them access to the upper
echelons of power within Nigeria.

Both Obi Okonkwo and his father Isaac embrace the written word as part of
their identity. As a result, both seem to identify with European values and
culture, at the expense of their own people. Obi becomes engaged in a life-
long pursuit of European power by relying on his literacy. He soon realizes,
however, that is not enough. Disengaged from the traditions of his people,
he nevertheless gets caught up in the corrupt African power system that
involves bribery. However, and perhaps because of his life-long pursuit of
the written word, he lacks the street smarts to be effective in his corruption.
In an ironic turn of events, he is soon caught and sentenced in a European
court system, by European values, which he had adopted by embracing the
written word. Obi finds that he cannot completely dissociate himself from
the colonial culture which he has inherited from his father, nor can he
totally identify with the Igbo culture of his ancestors. Obi got into this
conflict because of the education he has received in England. It is the higher
education he has received that put Obi in a position where he is no longer
at ease.