No Longer at Ease, Chinua Achebe

Black Africa Project 2024

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was an Igbo man from Nigeria. It seems that prior to decolonization, identity was tribal rather than ‘national’; but after independence from Britain in 1960, Igbo people united to form their own breakaway nation, Biafra, leading to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), the eventual starving of the Biafrans into submission, and the deaths of millions.

I remember this playing out in the newspapers and on tv as I came to adulthood, as we are seeing again now. It would seem that genocide works quite well as a strategy in war, which doesn’t bode well for the Palestinians.

Achebe, already a renowned novelist, was in Biafra during the war, with his family, working with the administration, his writing restricted to poetry and short stories. After the war he became disillusioned with the Nigerian government and eventually, when he was able to leave, accepted a professorship in the US.

Achebe’s first three novels were a trilogy:
Things Fall Apart (1958)
No Longer at Ease (1960)
Arrow of God (1964)

Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God cover life in the earlier days of colonization, while No Longer at Ease is largely contemporaneous with Achebe’s own life.

Heinemann, having published Things Fall Apart, could see that it was too expensive for Nigerians, and so established the African Writers Series to produce cheap paperbacks by African writers, for sale to Africans. Achebe was made consulting editor.

As a young man, I read very little African literature, Cry the Beloved Country at school; then Black Mischief and Mr Johnson, because I read ‘all’ those authors’ books (Waugh and Cary); and later Conrad, Lessing, Coetzee, and finally Ben Okri’s Famished Road. I was so struck by the contrast between Waugh and Cary on one side and Okri on the other, that it still forms a big part of my motivation in undertaking this year’s project, reading Black Africa.

Not so strangely, I suppose, I read while researching this part of my review that Achebe was motivated to write by Conrad’s racism in Heart of Darkness, and by Cary’s depiction of Nigerians as “either savages or buffoons”.

Having ‘read’ No Longer at Ease as an audiobook early in December, I have taken advantage of the intervening time to re-read Black Mischief and Mr Johnson.

Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (1932)

This was Waugh’s third or fourth novel, written after a trip to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to cover the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. The setting is a large fictional island, Azania, off the coast of Somalia, which has a mixed African and Arab population, and is independent with an African emperor. The protagonists are Seth, who has just become Emperor, and a shiftless young upper middle class Englishman, Basil Seal, Seth’s classmate from Oxford, who is appointed the Emperor’s adviser.

Waugh makes fun of everyone, not least the lazy and stupid English consul and his family, and the devious (of course) French legation; but his portrayal of the locals – the (Irish) head of the army’s wife, “The Black Bitch”, the Armenian hotel keeper, the local tribal chiefs promoted to dukedoms and so on and so on, is unrelentingly racist.

Forget the plot, it’s just a variation on the theme of locals will fail if there are no Brits there to prop them up, which brings us to …

Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson (1939)

Cary, unlike Waugh, was familiar with Africa, having been with the Colonial civil service in Nigeria for a number of years before and following WWI. During the War he served with a Nigerian regiment. You could say Cary was quite an acute observer both of African life and of the civil service, but he is so certain of British superiority that locals are quite often characterised as monkeys or apes; locals in communities remote from town are ‘pagans’; and Mister Johnson, whose story this mostly is, is invariably portrayed as childish – telling stories (lies), unable to have money in his pocket, or even in prospect, without buying drink for the whole town, and servile to the current District Officer, most often Ruddeck (who seems to stand for Cary with his road building and marital problems).

At this distance, 90 odd years, we can see that the principal purpose of colonies was for Britain to steal other people’s wealth; but civil servants seemed to think they were doing locals a favour by running things for them. Cary probably saw himself as a generous, hard working man with no idea of the racism inherent in his unreflective feelings of superiority.

Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (1960)

No Longer at Ease is set mostly in Lagos in the 1950s, that is, in the years before Independence, and begins with the protagonist, Igbo man Obi Okonkwo, on trial for … I’m not sure if Achebe says right away, though the ‘summaries’ do, but the novel is the story of how Obi got to that point.

Although I won’t give away the final part of the book, if you are intending to read it yourself, and wish to learn developments only as the author reveals them, this is probably a good place to stop (but you can read the last para.).

Obi has received a scholarship/loan from the older men of his people who have moved into the cities and done well, the Umuofia Progressive Union, to study in England in order to return and work in Nigeria. In England he switches from Law to English; meets a young Nigerian woman, Clara; gets his degree; returns home; Clara is on the same boat; he moves in with his mate, Joseph in Lagos; gets a job in the civil service approving high school students for university scholarships; starts a relationship with Clara; they move in together.

There are interesting parallels with Mister Johnson, especially given that was the book Achebe most wanted to refute, in that Obi begins to consistently overspend his pay, to play the big man back home, undertaking to support siblings through school. And although he initially refuses the opportunity to take bribes, in the end he must.

Obi has two problems with Clara: she is osu – which is to say an Igbo of a caste he is forbidden to marry into; and she gets pregnant, with a baby they can’t keep.

This is an excellent novel on so many levels – the writing, and I’m sorry I don’t have a text copy from which I might take an extract; as a novel, the first novel by an African, of this place and time; for the Obi-Clara relationship, which is engrossing from beginning to end; and for Obi’s coming of age, which ends where we started, in court.

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Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease, Heinemann, London,1960. Clipper Audio narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez. 5.5 hours

see also, reviews by Jennifer/Tasmanian Bibliophile@Large –
Things Fall Apart (1958)
No Longer at Ease (1960)
Arrow of God (1964)