Achebe, Chinua

Achebe’s other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the
People (1967), and Anthills of the Savanna (1987), spanning a significant period of
postcolonial Africa, have equally been influential in mapping out the nature of African
culture and the institutions of literary interpretation.

Because these works occupy such a crucial place in the teaching of African literature,
there is a sense in which Achebe has become the nexus for the history and criticism of
this tradition of letters. And while there is no general consensus on why Achebe’s novels
came to occupy such an important place in the history of African literature, there is no
doubt that part of his appeal has been due to the fact that from the moment he started
writing in the early 1950s, he has produced novels whose form and content have been
driven by the desire to imaginatively capture the key moments of African history from
the beginning of colonialism to what has come to be known as postcoloniality. In both
their subject and their aesthetic concerns, Achebe’s major novels are located at the point
of contact between European and African cultures and are concerned with the political
and linguistic consequences of this encounter.

Indeed, Achebe’s novels can be divided into two categories: First, there are those works
that are concerned with recovering and representing an African precolonial culture
struggling to retain its integrity against the onslaught of colonialism. Things Fall Apart
and Arrow of God belong to this category: they are narrative attempts to imagine what
precolonial society could have looked like before the European incursion and the factors
that were responsible for the failure of Igbo or African cultures in the face of colonialism.
These novels are themselves cast in a dual structure, with the first part seeking to present
a meticulous portrait of Igbo society before colonialism, and the second part narrating the
traumatic process in which this culture loses its autonomy in the face of the colonial
encounter. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, Achebe does not seek to recover
the logic of a precolonial African culture in order to romanticize it, but to counter the
colonial mythology that Africans did not have a culture before colonialism. As he noted
in an influential essay called “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation” (1964; 1973:
London) Achebe’s works were concerned with what he considers to be a fundamental
theme—“that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans;
that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and
value and beauty.” At the same time, however, these narratives are often attempts to
explore the fissures of precolonial culture itself in order to show why it was vulnerable to
European colonialism.

In his second set of novels, No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the
Savannah, Achebe turns his attention away from the past to diagnose and narrate the
crisis of decolonization. While the novels dealing with the past have been influential for
showing that Africans had a culture with its own internal logic and set of contradictions,
and hence derive their authority from their capacity to imagine an African past derided or
negated in the colonial text, the second set of novels have been popular because of their
keen sense of the crisis of postcoloniality and, in some cases, a prophetic sense of African
history, the attendant promise of decolonization and its failure or sense of discontent.

From another perspective, Achebe’s novels have been influential because of their acute
capacity to map out the cultural fault in which African cultures and traditions have
encountered the institutions of modern European colonial society. In fact, it could be said
that Achebe’s early novels were the first to popularize the tradition/modernity paradigm
that, though constantly questioned in many theoretical works, continues to haunt the
study of African literature and culture. But as has been the case for most of his writing
career, Achebe has been able to produce novels that both set up paradigms and
deconstruct them. While Things Fall Apart derives most of its power from the ability to
position precolonial Igbo society in opposition to an encroaching colonial culture, it is
also memorable for the way it problematizes the nature of Igbo society and deprives it of
any claims to cultural purity. In this novel, it is those who seek to protect the purity of
culture, most notably Okonkwo, the hero of the novel, whose lives end up in ignominy.
In No Longer at Ease, the subjects who had subscribed to the logic of colonial modernity
are increasingly haunted by the choices they make, wondering where they stand in the
new dispensation. And in Arrow of God, clearly one of the major novels on the colonial
situation, attempts to subscribe to the idiom of tradition are shown to be as lacking as the
logic of colonization itself.

Although Achebe is now considered to be the premier novelist on the discourse of

African identity, nationalism (see nationalism and post-nationalism), and
decolonization, his main focus, as he has insisted in many of the interviews he has given
throughout his career, has been on sites of cultural ambiguity and contestation. If there is
one phrase that sums up Achebe’s philosophy of culture or language, it is the Igbo
proverb: “Where one thing falls, another stands in its place.” The complexity of novels
such as Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God depends on Achebe’s ability to bring
competing cultural systems and their languages on to the same level of representation,
dialogue, and contestation. In Arrow of God, for example, the central conflict is not
merely a racial one between white Europeans and black Africans, or even an
epistemological encounter between an Igbo culture and a colonial polity, but also a
struggle between idioms and linguistic registers. Although the novel is written in English,
as are all of Achebe’s works, it contains one of the most strenuous attempts to translate
an African idiom in the language of the other. Although we read the world of the Igbo in
English, Achebe goes out of his way to use figures of speech, most notably proverbs and
sayings, to give readers a sense of how this culture might have represented itself to
counter the highly regimented and stereotyped language of the colonizer.

Ultimately, however, the authority of Achebe’s works has depended on their role as
cultural texts. This does not mean that they are not imaginative works, or that their formal
features are not compelling, or that they are valuable primarily as ethnographic
documents; rather, Achebe’s novels have become important features of the African
literary landscape because they have come to be read and taught as important sources of
knowledge about Africa. For scholars in numerous disciplines, such as history and
anthropology, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are read as exemplary representations
of African traditional cultures at the moment of the colonial encounter. And although No
Longer at Ease has not had the same cultural effect as these other novels, it is clearly
indispensable in the mapping out of the space of transition from colonialism to
postcolonialism. For students trying to understand the violent politics of postcolonial
Nigeria, especially the period of corruption and military coups in the mid 1960s, there is
perhaps no better reference than A Man of the People.

The parallel between Achebe’s works and their historical and social referents is so close
that it is difficult not to read his major novels as major documents of the African
experience. For this reason, Achebe’s novels are notable for their sense of realism (see
realism and magical realism). Indeed, while a novel like Anthills of the Savannah is
unusual in its bringing together of techniques drawn from realism, modernism (see
modernity and modernism ), and what has come to be known as magic realism, rarely
does Achebe’s work reflect an interest in formal experimentation for its own sake. The
use of a multiplicity of forms in this novel can be connected to the author’s desire to
account for a postcolonial crisis that cannot be contained within one feature of novelistic
discourse. It is perhaps because of his commitment to realism that Achebe’s novels have
tended to be out of fashion in institutions of interpretation dominated by theories of
structuralism and post-structuralism.

At the same time, however, Achebe’s sense of realism, as a technique and mode of
discourse, is not that of the nineteenth-century European novel with its concern with
verisimilitude, the experiences of a unique bourgeois subject undergoing the process of
education, and a language that seeks to make communities knowable, although Achebe’s
novels do seek to make African communities knowable. As he himself has noted in an
early essay called “The Novelist as a Teacher” (1965; 1973: London), he started his
career envisioning the role of writing as essentially pedagogical—“to help my society
regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-
abasement.” Achebe is attracted to realism because it enables him to imagine African
cultures, especially postcolonial cultures, possible and knowable.

However, Achebe’s novels operate under the shadow of modernism and modernity for
two closely related reasons: First, his early novels were written in response to a set of
modern texts, most notably Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which African “barbarism”
was represented as the opposite of the logic of modern civilization. Since he was
educated within the tradition of European modernism, Achebe’s goal was to use realism
to make African cultures visible while using the ideology and techniques of modernism
to counter the colonial novel in its own terrain. Second, modernity was an inevitable
effect of colonization in Africa. As Achebe was to dramatize so powerfully in Things
Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the disruption of the African polity was made in the name
of colonial modernity; it was also in the name of being modern that some African
subjects would defect from their own cultures and identify with the new colonial order.
Indeed, Achebe’s “postcolonial” novels are concerned with the consequences of colonial
modernity. The sense of instability that characterizes the process of decolonization in No
Longer at Ease arises as much from doubts about the future of the imagined community
of the Nigerian nation as the main character’s entrapment between the culture of
colonialism, represented by the shaky idiom of Englishness, and the continuing power of
what were once considered to be outdated customs such as caste. Similarly, behind the
comic mode of A Man of the People is a serious questioning of the nature of power once
it has been translated into a nationalist narrative that is unclear about its idiom and moral
authority.

Ultimately, the continuing influence of Achebe’s works, and their now classical status,
goes beyond their topicality and their role as sources of knowledge about Africa.
Achebe’s novels are cultural texts to the extent that they have an imaginative relationship
to the African experience and hence cannot be properly interpreted outside the realities
and dreams of an African political configuration. This concern with the meaning of the
past in the pressure of the moment of writing is pronounced in Achebe’s short stories
(Girls at War and Other Stories) (1972) and two collections of poems (Beware Soul
Brother and Other Poems, also published as Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems)
(1972/3), many provoked by the Nigerian civil war. In all these works and four
collections of essays, Achebe has been responsible for making the African experience, in
a historical and cultural perspective, the center of an African literature. He has been
persistent in his claim that the main concerns of an African literature arise from a
fundamental engagement with what he would consider to be the stream of African history
and consciousness. In formal terms, Achebe’s novels, like his own life, reflect the variety
of influences that have gone into the making of African literature, ranging through the
folk traditions of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria, the idiom of the Bible and the
culture of the Christian missions (see Christianity and Christian missions), colonial
education (see education and schools ), the university and the institutions of English
literature.

Chinua Achebe′s novel No Longer At Ease describes the twilight zone between the
British rule of Nigeria and the country′s independence. It is a transitional period during
which the Whites are leaving the country and the natives are getting responsible for their
own lives; colonialism is giving way to a post-colonial situation. Nigerians are now
forced to negotiate the claims of both colonial modernity and their previously degraded
African mode of life. The period of transition is one in which binary oppositions (colonial
vs. African, modernity vs. tradition) seem to be collapsing, unveiling what Mudimbe calls
"the strong tension between a modernity that often is an illusion of development, and a
tradition that sometimes reflects a poor image of a mythical past" (5).

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 post-colonial 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. A young man is caught in between tradition and the ways of the West in his
homeland, toward the end of a colonial reign; he is entrapped in the dialectic of
difference and identity. 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′.

Principal themes that postcolonial fiction develops are exile and alienation; rebellion,
struggle, and opposition against colonial powers; and mixing or confusion of
identities, multiculturalism, and establishing cultural autonomy free from
imperial forces.
Exile and Alienation

Exile and alienation are represented both physically and figuratively in

postcolonial fiction. Exile occurs when the protagonist or other character,
usually a member of an indigenous people subjected to the colonial power,
travels to the land of the colonizers for the purpose of education or finding
work. Becoming a marginal member of society in the colonizing nation, the
subject takes on certain characteristics and values of the oppressing culture.
Thereafter, returning to the land of birth is nearly impossible because of
psychological changes experienced while the postcolonial subject was away.
Physical exile also occurs for political reasons: The subject either acts out
against the government and is sent away or chooses to leave the homeland
because colonial and postcolonial rules have wreaked such change on the native
environment that it becomes unlivable.

Figuratively, the theme of exile is expressed as alienation and represents a

search for the self. Colonial conditions in the native land render native culture,
language, and education inferior to the culture and governing systems of the
colonizers. Such cultural repression and validation of the imperial other
provoke in the postcolonial protagonist an identity crisis and prompt him or
her to search for a legitimate and positive image of the self. In order to embark
on this quest for the self, the protagonist must first be split, shattered, or called
into question, leading to his or her alienation from society. Alienation is similar
to exile in that the subject is no longer “at home” either physically or
psychologically in the native land. Physical alienation occurs when an otherwise
respectable inhabitant of the native land is considered criminal or subversive
 by colonial law, leading to the subject’s imprisonment or the revocation of
societal privileges. More often, alienation is represented as psychological in
postcolonial fiction: It is the state of not belonging, of not having a true home.
Postcolonial subjects are alienated by Eurocentric, imperial systems that will
never fully accept them, either culturally or racially; at the same time, they are
alienated by native cultures that have either acquiesced to the colonial system
or rejected them because they speak the language of the colonizers or have
received the education of the empire.

There is life after postcolonialism. What happens after the imperialists are booted out?
What happens to the colonized when they gain their independence? These are the kinds
of questions that place us between postcolonialism and modernity.

There is a struggle going on in Africa. It is a struggle between the old and the new,
between tradition and the hegemonic influences of the West (impact of neocolonialism.)
It is a struggle which has resulted in the cultural dislocation and confusion of the African.

This struggle creates a kind of cultural schizophrenia. A cultural schism is created and
within this schism dwells, isolation, alienation, loneliness, and dispossession. Achebe's
second novel, No Longer at Ease, addresses this gap, and the fallout of the dislocating
dilemma that faces modern African society.

No Longer at Ease, was published in 1960. It is set on the eve of Nigeria's political
independence. The protagonist of the novel is Obi, the grandson of Okowkwo (of Things
Fall Apart.) "As its title suggests, the novel explores the malaise of modern Nigeria: the
uneasy coexistence of traditional ethos and European values and the absence of a
coherent cultural framework that can give a firm direction to the country in general, and
its educated elite in particular" (Parekh 23).

Obi goes away to England and receives an excellent education at an English university.
He returns home and attains a prestigious Civil Service job. As Obi is unable to integrate
his anglicized attitudes and indigenous values, he increasingly finds himself rootless and
alienated in his own native country! "He rejects certain Igbo cultural practices, such as
the caste system that ostracizes the osu; yet he does not have the moral courage to marry
his girlfriend Clara, because his parents, violently object to having an osu daughter-in-
law" (Parekh 23). Obi seems stuck (immobilized) between the past and the future, and
this is precisely the dilemma that plagues many Africans in modern society. His failure to
formulate a coherent set of moral values ultimately destroys him. He begins to accept
bribes, which is a pervasive practice among government officials. He gets caught and the
novel ends with Obi's conviction.

Obi's failure was the post-colonial failure to achieve the necessary synthesis of
indigenous traditions and the imposed Western values into a coherent and functional
system. While individually tragic, it becomes clear that this lack also operates on a
community and national level.
The most important aspect of Achebe's writing is his dedication to the socio- political
fabrics of the societies in which he lives and has lived—that of a colonial and post-
colonial African society. Throughout the 1940s, fifties and sixties, there was a growing
sense of self-determination among the African people who had been colonized by the
English and French. It was evident that a new era would arise in which the colonized
would want to claim their independence. And, those who were writers would want to
"write back" to the colonizer. In other words, because the English in Nigeria, for example
had instilled the English language and the tradition of English literature, Nigerian writers
were beginning to write in the very same language of colonial rule, making the writing
both more complex, and, in many ways, more powerful in its intent. However, this was
no longer a literature about England—it was now a local African literature written in the
complex tongue of the ruling English.

Significantly, No Longer At Ease was 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 post-colonial 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.

This novel, like many of Achebe's others, discusses the difficulty of the
post-colonial legacy, particularly the African's. Achebe, who is
considered to be the finest of the Nigerian novelist tells the story in a
"holding my head up high in the face of defeat" kind of way. Christian
and Nigerian, Obi Okonkwo is stuck. He returns home only to find that
there is an even stronger push to accept European values. Now he has
a westernized education that landed him a job that pays well but he
has all the expectations of his people on his back. Also he has fallen in
love with an osu woman --that just makes matters worse while he
struggles to pay bills and repay money he's borrowed. Not only that
but his mothers takes ill and he's faced with committing the sin of
giving in to temptation. Obi has to put his priorities in order but can't
decide because of the traditions of his people and the new ways of the
Western world.

Many of his people have just let down their guard, couldn't resist
anymore and have allowed corruption to take place. He doesn't hold
on much longer after they fall. Okonkwo's situation caught between
two cultures in Things Fall Apart, establishes what's ahead for this next
generation of Nigerians. To understand or feel what Obi was going
through with his people, is to put yourself in the modern African
dilemma. The English language novel also enacts this dilemma, as
Achebe provides us as reader's a window to Nigeria through the
language of the colonial power. Yet, even in this English language
novel, Nigerian customs are conveyed and national history is told.
Achebe develops the Nigerian hold on their cultural history and
heritage and the rich sense of unity that bonds their culture.