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PART ONE
1: Through the Past, Darkly
‘I merely say that the dead should be better tucked away. They should not be interfered with because then
they emerge to thrust terrifying dilemmas on the living. They have no business to make impositions on us.’
Wole Soyinka: The Interpreters
In an early and now famous essay, ‘The writer in a modern African state’, first delivered at a conference in
Stockholm in 1967, Wole Soyinka criticised his contemporaries for ignoring what he termed ‘the movement
towards chaos’ that was beginning to engulf the country:
…the writer did not anticipate. The understanding language of the outside world, ‘birth pains’, that near fatal
euphemism for death throes, absolved him from responsibility. He was content to turn his eye backwards in
time and prospect in archaic fields for forgotten gems which would dazzle and distract from the present. But
never inwards, never truly into the present, never into the obvious symptoms of the niggling, warning,
predictable present, from which alone lay the salvation of ideals.
Soyinka’s barb was aimed specifically at the then dominant school of Nigerian writing which had deliberately
set itself the task of rescuing the African past from what it considered the distortions of the colonised present,
this re-writing of history being, as always, the expression of a new kind of power arrangement, and symbolised
by the end of colonial rule in 1960.
This theme – put quite simply – is 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 beauty; that they
had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African people all but lost during the
colonial period, and it is this that they must now regain.
The words are those of Chinia Achebe, Soyinka’s most celebrated compatriot, and it is not enough to say, as
Soyinka does in the same essay, that the writers of this school ‘mistook [their] own personal and cultural
predicament for their predicament of [their] entire society’ in their attempt to ‘give the society something that
the society had never lost’. One has only to consider the popularity of Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart
(1958), to understand the perceived extent of the damage to the Nigerian psyche after a century of colonial
rule. Nigerians of all backgrounds responded to the book precisely as Achebe intended, and this despite the
author’s failure to resolve the problems he poses.
Consider, for instance, the question of dignity, a suspect word in this context since it immediately begs the
related question: dignity in relation to whom? The answer – to the European – suggests that the definition of
dignity which Achebe has in mind is relative, and is to be measured purely in terms of the other, that is, the
European. So Africa is pitted against Europe, and the result, from the African point of view, is humiliation and
defeat. How, then, does one begin to negotiate one’s dignity in the face of what was, after all, a matter of
historical fact?
Achebe’s response is to suggest that there are more ways than one of measuring the worth of a society,
and that the spiritual values of pre-colonial Africa were in no way inferior to those of Europe, merely different.
In Things Fall Apart, he goes to great pains to evoke the life of a discrete community in eastern Nigeria before
the coming of the European. An important feature of the life of this community is the role of the gods within it.
The people live in harmony with each other and with the natural world around them because the acknowledge
the existence of powers which are greater than themselves and to whose dictates they willingly submit.
Whatever conflict there is in the society is resolved by the appeal to the gods, who then determine the
just punishment which alone will restore the harmony that has been ruptured. And these gods, it should be
remembered, are not remote beings but living presences in the life of the community. They speak through the
ancestors, who are themselves ‘the dead fathers of the clan’. The ancestors, in turn, inhabit the bodies of the
elders of the community, who will themselves become ancestors in their own turn. We learn, for instance, that
Ani, the powerful earth goddess and the source of all fertility, ‘was in close communion with the departed
fathers of the clan whose bodies had been committed to earth’.
Consider, then, the fate of Okonkwo, the hero of the novel. He is a man haunted by the fear of failure who
rises to greatness by dint of hard work. But just as everything appears to be going his way he accidentally kills
a fellow clansman and is banished from his village for seven years. When he returns he discovers that in his
absence the European missionaries have made great inroads, and that even one of his own sons, Nwoye, has
converted to the new religion. He is at a loss to explain why his people have permitted these strangers to
establish their rival authority so quickly and so firmly. At a meeting of the elders following a transgression
against one of their most deeply held beliefs, he urges war. His demand falls on deaf ears. Perplexed by their
inability to act decisively, he shrugs his shoulders in contempt and kills one of the native clerks bearing a
message from the District Commissioner. Then he retires to his hut and hangs himself. Because suicide ‘is an
offence against the Earth’, his corpse is cut down by strangers and thrown into the Evil Forest. It is one of the
many ironies – irony being Achebe’s stock-in-trade – that Okonkwo’s father, a failure in life against whom his
son continually measures his own successes, ‘died of the swelling disease which was an abomination against
the earth goddess’ and was similarly disposed.
Since Okonkwo is clearly meant to stand as a symbol of his community, the tragic flaw in his character
which dictates his downfall is made to mirror that of the community which he embodies. We are told that his
suicide is ‘an offence against the Earth’, who then rejects his corpse and thereby denies him a place among
the ancestors, a terrible fate beside which his physical death is nothing. In fact, he offends against the earth
goddess on three separate occasions in the course of the novel, as follows.
First, he beats one of his wives during the Week of Peace because she is late with his evening meal. That
same evening he is visited by Ani’s priest, who reminds him of the consequences of such a transgression:
‘The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to
give us her increase, and we shall all perish.’ Okonkwo, who is nothing if not a stickler for convention, atones
by offering the prescribed sacrifices, but his repentance is less than whole-hearted. Even at the time of the
beating he was well aware of what he was doing, but the knowledge of the evil he was committing did not deter
him:
In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace. His first two wives ran out in great alarm pleading
with him that it was the sacred week. But Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody halfway
through, not even for fear of a goddess.
He offends the goddess a second time when he partakes in the ritual execution of a hostage, a young boy,
Ikemefuna, whose death, ordained by the oracle, is an act of compensation for the killing of two members of
the clan by the boy’s village. Two years previously, Ikemefuna was entrusted to Okonkwo’s care while the clan
awaited the oracle’s decision. During that time he not only became a brother to Nwoye but almost a son to
Okonkwo. When the boy’s fate is eventually decided Okonkwo, reasonably enough, is exempted from
participating in the execution. However, he insists on being present, despite the contrary advice of an elder
who points out, ‘That boy calls you father’. He ignores the advice, but at the fatal moment he is driven to carry
out the deed himself as a result of his own conflicting emotions:
As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the
blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’ as he ran
towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down.
It is left to Obierika, his long-standing friend, to articulate the enormity of his action:
‘You know very well, Okonkwo, that I am not afraid of blood; and if anyone tells you that I am, he is telling a lie.
And let me tell you one thing, my friend. If I were you I would have stayed at home. What you have done will
not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families.’
Okonkwo third and final offence is the accidental killing of a clansman when his gun explodes in the course
of a funeral. One hesitates to say that this accident occurs at the funeral of the elder who had previously
warned him not to partake in Ikemefuna’s execution, or that the unfortunate victim is none other than the dead
man’s son, but one can hardly ignore the use of such self-conscious irony. Accidental or not, however, ‘It was
a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it must flee from the land.’ So
Okonkwo journeys with his family to his mother’s village, where he counts the passing of the years until he can
return home.
The funeral scene is given a further, ironic twist by the fact that Okonkwo should have succeeded
accidentally where he had previously failed intentionally. Some time before, in a fit of rage, he had shot at and
missed one of his wives, the same wife he had beaten during the Week of Peace. How much is one to read
into this? That the goddess shielded a woman from the masculine wrath? Ani, after all, represents to the
feminine principle in the cosmic life of the community just as surely as Okonkwo represents the masculine
principle in the secular world. It is significant, for instance, that Okonkwo excels in the planting and harvesting
of yam because, ‘Yams stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family from one harvest to another
was a very great man indeed.’ Conversely, he despises weakness, which he identifies with the feminine: ‘No
matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and children (and especially his
women) he was not really a man.’
That such masculine activity should provide the basis of his prominence in the society is, of course, a
comment on the society itself; and it is in this sense that his death is also the death of that same society, or so
we are to believe. We shall return to this presently; in the meantime:
The secular novel of [the novel] is actually poised on a very delicate ambiguity. Considerations of the
authenticity of spiritual inspiration, or of manifestations which may be considered supernatural, or at least,
ominous coincidences, are given alternative (secular) explications in the casual reflections of members of his
Igbo community, coloured as always by individual problems or positions taken in sectional confrontations. In
short, coloured by their humanity.
Soyinka is referring here to Arrow of God, Achebe’s other novel set in the more recent past, of which more
later. As regards Things Fall Apart, the ‘alternative (secular) explications’ for the triumph of Christianity, and
with it the end of pre-colonial Igbo society, are imported into the novel so completely as to render the position
of the goddess entirely irrelevant.
The first converts to Christianity are the rejects of the community, those who, for personal or accidental
reasons, are unable to find a place in it. Efulefu, Obierika calls them when he visits Okonkwo in exile:
worthless, empty men. Then there are those, like Okonkwo’s ‘womanish’ son, Nwoye, who are disturbed by
what they see as the degenerate values of Igbo society, such as the killing of twins and the ritual execution of
the innocent. He is drawn by the contrasting gentleness of the new religion, which provides a sanctuary for his
troubled soul:
It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new
religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to
answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the
bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed.
And, finally, there is the missionaries’ success in challenging the wrath of the indigenous gods and
surviving the encounter. Specifically, the new converts accept a plot of land in the Evil Forest and do not, as
expected, foam at the mouth and drop down dead when they proceed to build a church in the clearing they
make:
Every clan and village had its ‘evil forest’. In it were buried all those who died of the really evil diseases… It
was also the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine-men when they died. An ‘evil forest’
was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness.
All this is carefully woven into the narrative so that Igbo society appears, at last, to have been doomed by its
own harsh inflexibility, even if Achebe attempts to have it both ways by also suggesting, paradoxically enough,
that Igbo society was sufficiently tolerant of alien customs to allow the missionaries to gain their foothold in the
first place. Consider, for instance, the restraint of the elders when confronted with the second, less sensitive
missionary, who encourages an over-zealous convert to openly challenge a sacred taboo. When the elders
gather in his compound to set fire to the church in retribution for the crime committed in his name, the
spokesman confronts the missionary in the most placatory terms:
‘You can stay with us if you like our ways. You can worship your own god. It is good that a man should worship
the gods and the spirits of his fathers. Go back to your house so that you may not be hurt. Our anger is great
but we have held it down so that we can talk to you.’
This is a dignified response to an unnecessary provocation, but such levels of tolerance are belied elsewhere
in the novel. ‘The laws of the land must be obeyed,’ Okonkwo says in another context, a comment not only on
the rigidity of his own character, but on that of the society in which he succeeds. In fact, the closest we ever
come to any deeper reflection on the nature of divine law is limited to one short paragraph following Okonkwo’
s banishment:
Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in
his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had
committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into
greater complexities.
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