Like a drift of quail, I had remained in the literary doldrums until I laid my hands on No Longer at Ease, authored by the eclectic blessed memory and patriarch of the African Novel Chinua Achebe.
He
brought out the stark difference between the artistic prowess in me and
the rudderless school boy of yester-years when he conjured up images
and motivations through its chief protagonist Obi Okonkwo.
Strange
enough, this left me with a deeper and more rewarding appreciation of
the place of challenges in the lives of mortals. It further stirred up
the literary eye in me to see the unseen and to think the unthought-of.
Nikolai Gogol’s’ comic and political genius in his satire, The Government Inspector came
in calling and left me with an insatiable hunger for more of literary
nuggets when he humorously depicted Mayor, the chief protagonist as an
honest fool in furthering the theme of corruption in a hierarchical and
imperialistic Russian society of the 1850s.
But still, No Longer At Ease remained perched at my highest echelon, while I intermingled my reading with the James Hadley Chase concoction.
SOLEMN, DIGNIFIED PORTRAIT
This
solemn, dignified portrait that Achebe draws of Obi Okonkwo is serious
in tone, which created a sympathetic and a remorseful mood in me that
verged on the seismic due to the fall of Obi Okonkwo.
It is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the short story genre and master at developing moods of gloom. For in The Fall of the House of Usher,
he said, “During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the
autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the
heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback through a singularly
dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of
evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
Achebe’s main social-political criticisms in No Longer at Ease, a sequel to Things Fall Apart
is that of corruption in Nigeria during the political interlude of the
pre and post-colonial era. With the conflict coming at the beginning of
the novel, one is left puzzled at the mastery of Chinua Achebe in
crafting a story.
Obi is doomed from the start with external and inner conflict epitomising his life.
On returning to Nigeria, Obi gets a job with the Scholarship Board in the
Colonial
civil service that comes with a car, money, and respect. A bribe is
dangled in front of him in form of cash and later sex, but he navigates
it only for it to become his Achilles heel when he is caught and
arraigned in court.
At first he is as
critical as Achebe of bribery and sees himself as an idealistic and
educated pioneer in Nigeria to bring corruption down in the civil
service as the Nigerians geared themselves into self-rule from the
colonialists.
Obi thought he would instigate sanity in Nigeria but falters when push comes to the shove.
Umuofian
Progressive Union is a group of Igbo men who have left their villages
to live in Nigerian primary cities. They take a collection to send their
son Obi to England to study law under the aphorism, “For a kinsman
cannot be bought in the market”, with an intention that he will return
to help his people navigate British colonial society.
But
once in England, Obi switches his major to English where he studies
poetry as a self-willed man. Conflicting Ibo and European traditions
seen through Obi’s eye shows Achebe’s negative opinion about
colonialism, though, paradoxically, the white man’s education has
brought him status and high appeal in society.
Romantic relationship
Obi
later develops a romantic relationship with a Nigerian woman, Clara
Okeke the outcast descendant and the marriage stalls at the altar of the
Igbo traditions with his Christian father and mother confounding the
conflict further.
When finally Obi
informs Clara of the events, she intimates to him that she’s pregnant,
and the botched abortion which Clara reluctantly undergoes causes her
complications and terminates the relationship.
Obi
sinks deeper into a financial mire due to his poor planning, a need to
repay his loan to Umuofian Progressive Union and a burden to pay for his
siblings’ education.
Achebe foreboded the abominable spread of the tentacles of corruption, the ever evasive multi-hydra behemoth in Africa.
Even
with a plethora of winding and inconclusive commissions and task forces
having fired blanks and later degenerating into journalistic butt of
jokes in Kenya — “The anti-corruption tribunal investigates the
anti-corruption task force which probes the anti-corruption committee
which investigates the anti-corruption commission which probes the
anti-corruption inquiry” — one can only hope that this ghost will one
day be fully annihilated in Africa and pacify the physically departed
but literary alive soul of Chinua Achebe, the enigmatic pacesetter of
African writing.
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