No Longer at Ease Study Guide

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, a town in the Igbo ethnic region of Nigeria, which at the time was still under British colonial rule. His parents were Christians and gave him a Christian upbringing, but Igbo culture nevertheless permeated Achebe’s environment and inspired his deep affection for it. As a youth, Achebe was singled out among his peers for his keen intelligence and academic prowess, and in 1948 he was admitted to the inaugural class of a new Nigerian university (what is now the University of Ibadan), on a scholarship to study medicine. While in school, Achebe developed an interest in English literature. He began writing articles as an undergraduate, and he taught English after graduation, before accepting a position editing radio scripts in Lagos. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, received numerous rejections from publishers before finally being accepted. It was an instant success upon its publication, noted for being one of the first novels written in English to accurately depict African life. His follow-up novel, No Longer at Ease, was similarly well-received and earned him a Rockefeller fellowship to travel abroad, kickstarting his successful literary career that went on to include more novels as well as poetry, memoir, and critical writing. Achebe endured traumatic upheavals during the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s, and in 1972 he moved to the United States to accept a teaching position. He moved back and forth between Africa and the U.S. for the rest of his life, remaining involved in both teaching and literary activities and helping to shape the field of post-colonial studies. He died in 2013, universally lauded as the father of modern African literature.

No Longer at Ease takes place essentially when it was written, in the mid to late 1950s—the last days of British colonial rule in Nigeria. This rule technically began in 1861 with the annexation of Lagos, but Britain did not come to effectively control the whole country until the 1880s and 1890s, a period depicted in Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). The nature of the ruling authority was adjusted frequently throughout the ensuing decades, but the basic purpose of the British colonial project remained the same: to press the colonial subjects into service for resource extraction and to profit off Nigeria’s vast natural reserves, particularly oil. Following WWII, a politically and economically weakened British Empire left an opening for a Nigerian nationalist movement to arise, which campaigned for sovereignty over the following decade and a half. In parallel to many of Britain’s former colonies in Africa, Nigeria was eventually granted independence in 1960 by an act of British parliament, just after the period during which No Longer at Ease takes place.

No Longer at Ease is Achebe’s second novel, and it directly connects to his first book, Things Fall Apart (1958), which narrates the story of Obi’s grandparents in rural Nigeria in the 1890s as they confront the onset of British colonization. Achebe followed No Longer at Ease with Arrow of God (1964), a novel set in the 1920s in the same rural region of Igboland, in Southern Nigeria. These three novels are usually grouped together as Achebe’s “African Trilogy.” Other novels that deal with similar subject matter include The Interpreters (1965) by Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian novelist and contemporary of Achebe. The novel depicts people in Lagos reckoning with the end of British colonial rule. Another novel that looks critically at British colonial rule include Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Petals of Blood (1977), which deals with Kenya’s struggle to determine its direction following the end of colonial rule. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) examines Sudanese society under British colonial rule, as well as the influence of European culture on modern African society more broadly. No Longer at Ease also references much of the contemporary Anglophone literature that Obi studies, beginning with its title and epigraph, which quote T. S. Eliot’s 1927 poem “Journey of the Magi.” Also mentioned are the novels of Graham Greene and the poems of A. E. Housman.