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“Chinua Achebe’s Beautiful Soul”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2017

Alexander Adkins
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Abstract

This essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s exemplary satire of African disillusionment, No Longer at Ease (1960). Published the year of Nigeria’s official independence from Britain, the novel describes how Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant and colonial subject, tries but fails at the threshold of independence to navigate a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism. Torn between the moral and financial demands of his rural, traditionalist kin and those of the colony’s urban elite, Obi succumbs to corruption, voicing his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal. A frustrated idealist betrayed by the high promises of anticolonialism, Obi mirrors a lost generation of African writers and intellectuals, figures the novel satirizes for their self-absolving cynicism.

Keywords

satireAfrican literaturecynicismdisillusionmentChinua Achebe
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 398 - 408
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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7 Achebe, No Longer at Ease, 159.

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32 Note, for example, Pierre Landell-Mills’s more optimistic interpretation: “The proliferation of associations at all levels . . . is a powerful factor constraining abusive central government authorities and the predatory conduct of dominant elites. By empowering groups throughout society to both voice their concerns and take direct action to achieve their ends, the trend is strongly in favour of more participatory politics, greater public accountability, and hence basic democracy,” in “Governance, Cultural Change, and, Empowerment,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 30.4 (December 1992): 543–67.

33 Barkan, McNulty, and Ayeni, “‘Hometown’ Voluntary Associations, Local Development, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Western Nigeria,” 457–80, esp. 459.

34 Achebe, No Longer at Ease, 38.

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36 Ibid., 14.

37 Ibid., 13.

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43 For more on this see Bennett, Jane and Shapiro, Michael J., The Politics of Moralizing (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar.

44 Achebe, No Longer at Ease, 159.

45 Ibid., 112.

46 Achebe, Chinua, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975), 71 Google Scholar.