THINGS FALL APART

No Longer at Ease

Heinemann (1960)

Chinua Achebe

I first came across Chinua Achebe when obsessing over The Roots’ THINGS FALL APART. Great album, great book. It’s similar to how I encountered Norman Mailer: ‘paint a picture with a pen like Norman Mailer’ RAPPED TALIB KWELI ON GET BY in 2002. Spying Achebe’s No Longer at Ease in a recent trip to Islington Library, it made sense.

As an Englishman with a huge sense of historical guilt, Achebe’s post-colonial Nigeria has always fascinated. And so it does again in No Longer at Ease.

We follow the path of Obi Okonkwo, a young Ibo man educated in London and then forging a career in Lagos. His education was collectively paid by his village of Umuofia - a long distance geographically and mentally - from the then capital of Nigeria.

It really is a tragedy. The whole story is set in a Nigeria in the shadow of the British, and the increasing darkness of post-colonial corruption. Obi is a moralistic crusader of light, convinced his civil service role will not be tarnished by the temptation of bribery.

Since I began this blog, I’ve been intrigued by the main characters and how they compare. In Death of the Penguin and A Gun for Sale, the lead male characters were pitiful. Obi is not. Okonkwo is the first of his villagers to be educated in England - he has a much larger distance to fall. DatP’s Viktor and AGfS’s Raven find themselves in the gutter on page 1.

There’s another connection to my previous post: when Obi is interviewed for the job in the Nigerian civil service, the English interviewer asks him about Graham Greene. What are the chances?

“You say you’re a great admirer of Graham Greene. What do you think of The Heart of the Matter?”

Considering it is a piece of work from 1960, Achebe’s novel is a wonderful contemporary commentary of Nigeria.

Corruption within the civil service is SEEMINGLY AS COMMON NOW as it was then, and this novel goes some way to explaining the mindset of many Nigerians. Obi’s uneducated friend in particular, Joseph Okeke, spends the entire story encouraging Obi to backhand his way through life.

But, this is also a human tale of temptation - when Obi begins to earn more money than Umuofians could imagine, it is soon sucked out of his pocket by the excess of a big city. I understand this. I live in London.

As for strong female characters, the most notable is Obi’s love interest, Clara Okeke. As with Obi, Clara has been educated in the UK but, unlike the main character, is an Osu (an outcast).

Whilst she is ostracised by Obi’s family and friends for her heritage, Clara still offers the image of a strong women. Quite aside from Achebe’s prose, it meant I spent some fascinating time reading about the AFRICAN CASTE SYSTEM.

The final scene in which Clara appears in NLaE is heartbreaking. It is quite possibly the most moving part of the book, and that’s in a story that tends to torture the heart throughout. As a trained nurse, there’s a sense of irony that the operation Clara needs is illegal.

Women’s rights appear to be at a low ebb in Nigeria to this day. Humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) stated on the radio yesterday that many of the refugees they rescue from the Mediterranean are women fleeing Nigeria. THEIR PROSPECTS IN EUROPE DON'T SEEM ENTIRELY POSITIVE EITHER.

It’s impressive to think that 57 years ago, Achebe placed in his novel a robust female character flawed through no fault of her own (by heritage). Some technological advances aside, this could have been written in 2017.

NLaE is such a contemporary novel that it is almost a blueprint against future colonialism (or occupation). World leaders who wield such unruly policy should be forced to read it.

Achebe is well regarded worldwide as a prominent Nigerian (and African) novelist; but that does him a disservice. Achebe was one of the great novelists, and his books educate. Perhaps more than a paid education in London.

I can’t recommend this book enough. But perhaps Achebe is more convincing:

“Let them come and see men and women and children who knew how to live, whose joy of life had not yet been killed by those who claimed to teach other nations how to live.”

Before 1960, I don’t think my British family was educated or wealthy enough to have much investment in colonial outposts. But I am incredibly sorry for what my nation’s people did to other nations.

The shadow of occupation in Nigeria will take not be forgotten for generations, and the continued corruption is an illness spread by the British. And that’s not even considering the slave trade.

9/10