No Longer at Ease
First edition
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| Author | Chinua Achebe |
|---|---|
| Country | Nigeria |
| Publisher | Heinemann |
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Publication date
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1960 |
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Published in English
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1960 |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | Things Fall Apart |
| Followed by | Arrow of God |
No Longer at Ease is a 1960 novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is the story of an Igbo man, Obi Okonkwo, who leaves his village for a British education and a job in the Nigerian colonial civil service, but struggles to adapt to a Western lifestyle and ends up taking a bribe. The novel is the second work in what is sometimes referred to as the "African trilogy", following Things Fall Apart and preceding Arrow of God. Things Fall Apart concerns the struggle of Obi Okonkwo's grandfather Okonkwo against the changes brought by the English.
The book's title comes from the closing lines of T. S. Eliot's poem, The Journey of the Magi:
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The novel begins with the trial of Obi Okonkwo on the charge of accepting a bribe. It then jumps back in time to a point before his departure for England and works its way forward to describe how Obi ended up on trial.
The members of the Umuofia Progressive Union (UPU), a group of Ibo men who have left their villages to live in major Nigerian cities, have taken up a collection to send Obi to England to study law, in the hope that he will return to help his people navigate British colonial society. But once there, Obi switches his major to English and meets Clara for the first time during a dance.
Obi returns to Nigeria after four years of studies and lives in Lagos with his friend Joseph. He takes a job with the Scholarship Board and is almost immediately offered a bribe by a man who is trying to obtain a scholarship for his sister. When Obi indignantly rejects the offer, he is visited by the girl herself, who implies that she will bribe him with sexual favors for the scholarship, another offer Obi rejects.
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