No Longer at Ease (21 page)

“I’m not a member.”

“You must join,” he said. “Bye-bye.”

The wad of notes lay where he had placed it for the rest of the day and all night. Obi placed a newspaper over it and secured the door. “This is terrible!” he muttered. “Terrible!” he said aloud. He woke up with a start in the middle of the night and he did not go to sleep again for a long time afterwards.

“You dance very well,” he whispered as she pressed herself against him, breathing very fast and hard. He put her arms round his neck and brought her lips within a centimeter of his. They no longer paid any attention to the beat of the high-life. Obi steered her towards his bedroom. She made a halfhearted show of resisting, then followed.

Obviously she was not an innocent schoolgirl. She knew her job. She was on the short list already, anyway. All the same, it was a great letdown. No point in pretending that it wasn’t. One should at least be honest. He took her back to Yaba in his car. On his return journey he called on Christopher to tell him about it so that perhaps they might laugh it off. But he left again without having told the story. Some other day, perhaps.

Others came. People would say that Mr. So-and-so was a gentleman. He would take money, but he would do his stuff, which was a big advertisement, and others would follow.
But Obi stoutly refused to countenance anyone who did not possess the minimum educational and other requirements. On that he was unshakeable.

In due course he paid off his bank overdraft and his debt to the Hon. Sam Okoli, M.H.R. The worst was now over, and Obi ought to have felt happier. But he didn’t.

Then one day someone brought twenty pounds. As the man left, Obi realized that he could stand it no more. People say that one gets used to these things, but he had not found it like that at all. Every incident had been a hundred times worse than the one before it. The money lay on the table. He would have preferred not to look in its direction, but he seemed to have no choice. He just sat looking at it, paralyzed by his thoughts.

There was a knock at the door. He sprang to his feet, grabbed the money, and ran towards his bedroom. A second knock caught him almost at the door of the bedroom and transfixed him there. Then he saw on the floor for the first time the hat which his visitor had forgotten, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He thrust the money into his pocket and went to the door and opened it. Two people entered—one was his recent visitor, the other a complete stranger.

“Are you Mr. Okonkwo?” asked the stranger. Obi said yes in a voice he could hardly have recognized. The room began to swim round and round. The stranger was saying something, but it sounded distant—as things sound to a man in a fever. He then searched Obi and found the marked notes. He began to say some more things, invoking the name of the Queen, like a District Officer in the bush reading the
Riot Act to an uncomprehending and delirious mob. Meanwhile the other man used the telephone outside Obi’s door to summon a police van.

Everybody wondered why. The learned judge, as we have seen, could not comprehend how an educated young man and so on and so forth. The British Council man, even the men of Umuofia, did not know. And we must presume that, in spite of his certitude, Mr. Green did not know either.

Chinhua Achebe

The Education of a
British-Protected Child

His first new book
in more than twenty years

Chinua Achebe’s characteristically measured and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen autobiographical essays. An indispensable addition to the remarkable Achebe oeuvre.

Available October 2009 in hardcover from Knopf
$24.95 • 192 pages • 978-0-307-27255-3

Please visit
www.aaknopf.com

CHINUA ACHEBE

Chinua Achebe is the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. He was, for over fifteen years, the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He is the author of five novels, two short story collections, and numerous other books. In 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. He lives with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island.

Books by Chinua Achebe

Anthills of the Savannah

The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories

Things Fall Apart

No Longer at Ease

Chike and the River

A Man of the People

Arrow of God

Girls at War and Other Stories

Beware Soul Brother

Morning Yet on Creation Day

The Trouble with Nigeria

The Flute

The Drum

Home and Exile

Hopes and Impediments

How the Leopard Got His Claws
(with John Iroaganachi)

Winds of Change: Modern Short Stories from Black Africa
(coeditor)

African Short Stories
(editor, with C. L. Innes)

Another Africa
(with Robert Lyons)

ALSO BY
C
HINUA
A
CHEBE

ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH

In the fictional West African nation Kangan, newly independent of British rule, the hopes and dreams of democracy have been quashed by a fierce military dictatorship. Chris Oriko is a member of the cabinet of the president for life, one of his oldest friends. When the president is charged with censoring the oppositionist editor of the state-run newspaper—another childhood friend—Chris’s loyalty and ideology are put to the test. The fate of Kangan hangs in the balance as tensions rise and a devious plot is set in motion to silence the firebrand critic.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-385-26045-9

ARROW OF GOD

Ezeulu, the chief priest of several Nigerian villages, is a prominent member of the Igbo people. So prominent, in fact, that he is invited to join the British colonial administration. But when he refuses to be a “white man’s chief” and is thrown in jail, Ezeulu’s influence begins to wane, as the resentful decisions he makes from prison have adverse effects on his people. As Christian missionaries flood Ezeulu’s villages, Western culture may very well unravel the traditions he has spent his life protecting.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-385-01480-9

THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
Essays

Chinua Achebe’s characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. From a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria to considerations on the African-American diaspora, from a glimpse into his extraordinary family life and his thoughts on the potent symbolism of President Obama’s election—this charmingly personal, intellectually disciplined, and steadfastly wise collection is an indispensable addition to the remarkable Achebe oeuvre.

Essays/978-0-307-47367-7

GIRLS AT WAR
And Other Stories

Here we read of an ambitious farmer who is suddenly shunned by his village when a madman exacts his humiliating revenge; a young nanny who is promised an education by her well-to-do employers, only to be cruelly cheated out of it; and in three fiercely observed stories about the Nigerian civil war, we are confronted with the economic, ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions that continue to rack modern Africa.

Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-385-41896-6

HOME AND EXILE

More personally revealing than anything Achebe has written,
Home and Exile
is a major statement on the importance of stories as real sources of power, especially for those whose stories have traditionally been told by outsiders. In three elegant essays, Achebe seeks to rescue African culture from narratives written about it by Europeans. Looking through the prism of his experiences as a student in English schools in Nigeria, he provides devastating examples of European cultural imperialism. He examines the impact that his novel
Things Fall Apart
had on efforts to reclaim Africa’s story. And he argues for the importance of writing and living the African experience because, he believes, Africa needs stories told by Africans.

Essays/978-0-385-72133-2

HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS
Selected Essays

In
Hopes and Impediments
, Chinua Achebe considers the place of literature and art in our society. This collection of essays spans his writing and lectures over the course of his career, from his groundbreaking and provocative essay on Joseph Conrad and
Heart of Darkness
to his assessments of the novelist’s role as a teacher and of the truths of fiction. Achebe reveals the impediments that still stand in the way of open, equal dialogue between Africans and Europeans, between blacks and whites, but also instills us with hope that they will soon be overcome.

Essays/978-0-385-41479-1

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE

Chief Nanga—the powerful but corrupt minister of culture—comes to visit the school where his former student Odili is now a teacher. But Odili soon sees that Nanga is not the man he pretends to be … and eventually decides that he must run for office himself, with disastrous consequences. Perhaps Achebe’s most political novel,
A Man of the People
is a story of corruption and expectations, deceit and hope. Elegantly fusing the worlds of the traditional village and the modern city,
A Man of the People
brings together multiple identities of a country leaving behind its colonial past, while trying to make its way into an independent future.