The Enduring Message of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Pan-African Dreams. Buy the issue here.

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.

— Chinua Achebe: No Longer At Ease

Chinua Achebe’s second novel, No Longer At Ease, is set in colonial Nigeria, on the cusp of Nigeria’s independence. Chronologically the last of the Achebe trilogy, it tells the story of Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the great Ogbuefi Okonkwo, protagonist of the author’s seminal first novel, Things Fall Apart. No Longer At Ease opens with Obi on trial for corruption. Although we learn of his conviction early on, Achebe is concerned with exploring the deeper underpinnings, perhaps to help the reader resist the temptation to see Obi as bad and instead understand how a flawed system consumes even the most idealistic of people. Reading No Longer At Ease in 2023, 63 years after it was first published, the story offers a historical reckoning and a prophetic warning about Nigeria’s future. Did a refusal to heed this warning have a calamitous effect on Nigeria and its people?

Obi embodies the convergence of multiple societal changes. Educated in 1950s England through the collective efforts of his poor kinsmen, he returns as Umuofia’s hope and as one more young Nigerian in a generation destined to lead the country after independence. He is the first of his people to get a foreign education and, subsequently, land a prestigious senior civil role. His journey and its implications are not lost on Umuofia. Not only will the repayment of his fees allow the Umuofia Progressive Union to educate others, but his senior civil service position will also open doors of opportunities to them—or so they think. The difference between their expectations and Obi’s becomes clear at his welcome event when the union secretary speaks of how their town ‘could now join the comity of other towns in their march towards political irredentism, social equality and economic emancipation,’ while Obi spouts his high ideals, preaching ‘Education for service, not for white-collar jobs and comfortable salaries.’

For Obi, four years of geographic dislocation have now given way to cultural and ethical dislocation. He neither fits in with the Africans nor the Europeans. Obi is proud of his culture; still, it is possible to love one’s heritage and baulk at certain aspects and beliefs, like his kinsmen’s insistence that he cannot marry his fiancée, Clara, because her family is considered Osu. There’s a constant ideological struggle between his education and daily reality, the Christian faith in which he was raised and the traditional customs of his people.

THEORIES OF A CORRUPTION-FREE NIGERIA

From the jump, Obi’s return is riddled with complications. His time in England had him convinced that the corruption plaguing the Nigerian public service was due to the ‘old Africans at the top’. He believes that replacing those officials with ‘young men from the universities’ will fix things. Upon his return, he’s confronted with the depth of the problem. From a minister of state who publicly condones bribery to everyday citizens who berate Obi for foiling an attempted bribe, corruption seems omnipresent. As the chairman on Umuofia warned at the welcoming party, ‘white men… eat more (bribes) than black men nowadays.’

No Longer At Ease takes place in a Nigeria on the brink of autonomy, a nation in flux, and Obi stands at the crossroads of change. His ideals put him at odds with almost everyone: his kinsmen, family, friends, and even his racist boss, Mr Green, who believes all Africans are corrupt.

Achebe’s prose is, in places, sublime storytelling, almost as though he were recounting events according to traditional formats and merely helping us access it in English. In other places, it is academic, reflecting Obi’s scholarly interests. It is these scholarly interests that engaged my curiosity as I tried to consider the protagonist’s predictions and convictions in light of the future Nigeria of which he dreamt—a future we now inhabit. When Obi thinks about solving the problem of corruption, he ponders,

Where does one begin? With the masses? Educate the masses? …Not a chance there. It would take centuries. A handful of men at the top. Or even one man with vision – 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?

The irony is palpable when one juxtaposes Nigeria’s dictatorial anti-corruption efforts with the stark reality of corruption among the military leaders themselves. Their anti-corruption schemes abound. From the first coup’s lofty promises to eradicate the menace of bribery and corruption to Murtala Mohammed’s Pedro Martins Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau and Shehu Shagari’s Ethical Re-Orientation Committee and the Code of Conduct Bureau. Even General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s last dictator, took the reins of leadership with a promise to tackle both corruption and indiscipline. This is the same dictator about whom Bola Ige, the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General, wrote:

The late dictator General Sani Abacha. He and his collaborators are estimated to have embezzled assets of at least $5 billion. That sum includes monies allegedly derived from the systematic misappropriation of funds from the Central Bank of Nigeria, bribes received from foreign companies and kickbacks on inflated contracts with Nigerian companies under the control of the Abacha family.

It’s an unsettling truth that some of Nigeria’s past military leaders orchestrated some of the country’s largest heists. Thus, while one part of Obi’s question has been answered by the failure of so-called enlightened dictators from the 1960s to 1998, today, the wider question is still valid, especially in the wake of a Nigerian democracy that has become entrenched with corruption. Obi’s challenges in the novel are not limited to ideology. He easily embraces the perks of his position, including a 570 pounds annual salary, clothing allowance, car advance, leave bonus and an apartment in Ikoyi which had only recently been opened up to Africans in European posts. Obi, however, does not realize what the system will take from him, so he is constantly caught by surprise—by income tax, car insurance, accountability for leave allowance, etc. Despite the relative privilege of his position and salary, he often finds himself ill-prepared to navigate the nuances of his new life.

Having received an education by the sweat of his kinsmen, Obi’s future is mortgaged before it has even begun. Umuofia is described as a place, ‘where men and women toiled from year to year to wrest a meagre living from an unwilling and exhausted soil;’ so Obi’s senior civil service role makes him wealthy to them. Expectations abound: that Obi will help his parents, repay the loan from his kinsmen, pay his brother’s fees, pay for his mother’s treatment and later, her funeral, and that he will not marry a woman from what they consider an unsuitable family. He does all that, even when it leaves him with next to nothing financially and emotionally.

Subscribe to our free newsletter

You're in — welcome to The Republic

Complete your onboarding

Read

Connect

Apps

More

Read

Connect

Apps

More

The Enduring Message of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease

THEORIES OF A CORRUPTION-FREE NIGERIA

You’ve Reached Your Limit of Free Reading.

Ad-Free Reading Experience

Unlimited Access to Exclusive Archives

In-Depth Deep-dive Reporting

You’ve Reached Your Limit of Free Reading.

Ad-Free Reading Experience

Unlimited Access to Exclusive Archives

In-Depth Deep-dive Reporting

Comments

SHOP THE REPUBLIC

Related Stories

Who Will Succeed Pastor E. A. Adeboye?

The ‘Electronic Imam’ Who Rewrote Nigerian Islam

A Bird in Flight

Good News

Reclamation Across the Atlantic