Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Okonkwo, who only stayed [at the gathering] in the hope that it might come to chasing the men out of the village or whipping them, now said: ‘You told us with your own mouth that there was only one god. Now you talk about his son. He must have a wife, then.’

The crowd agreed.… ‘Your buttocks said he had a son,’ said the joker. ‘So he must have a wife and all of them must have buttocks.’

But Nwoye, that day, had been impressed and moved. ‘It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question … the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.’

The missionaries ask for land to build a church and the elders give them land — in the Evil Forest, where were buried people who died of evil diseases, and which was the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died. ‘They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.’

The missionaries begin to build their church; ‘The inhabitants of Mbanta expected them all to be dead within four days.’ None of them died. ‘And then it was known that the white man’s fetish had unbelievable power. It was said that he wore glasses on his eyes so that he could see and talk to evil spirits.’ Nevertheless, the missionaries begin to make converts.

Nwoye kept his attraction to the new faith secret, for fear of his father. But someone sees Nwoye among the Christians and reports this. When the boy comes home Okonkwo is overcome with fury and grips him by the neck.

‘Where have you been.’ [Nwoye struggles to free himself.] ‘Answer me!’ roared Okonkwo, ‘Before I kill you!’ [He seizes a stick and gives the boy savage blows.]

‘Leave that boy at once’ said a voice in the outer compound. It was Okonkwo’s uncle, Uchendu. ‘Are you mad?’

Okonkwo did not answer. But he left hold of Nwoye, who walked away and never returned.

The conflict between the white man’s religion and the religion of the Ibo people of Umuofia and Mbanta is personified for Okonkwo in Nwoye, a Christian convert now at a missionary school in Umuofia from which Okonkwo is exiled. ‘… his son’s crime stood out in stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors?’

But his distress is soon to go beyond the defection of his son. Animosity and hostile acts between the Christian missionaries and converts and the people of Mbanta was threatening to disrupt the entire way of life. And ‘… stories were gaining ground that the white man had not only brought a religion but also a government. It was said that they had built a place of judgment in Umuofia to protect the followers of their religion. It was even said that they had hanged one man who killed a missionary.’ In these observations and rumours of the Ibos Achebe brings alive to the reader how what goes under the Western label ‘colonialism’ — the guise of conquest by means other than war itself — was seen, realised, experienced by the people themselves: how they visualised the church and the courthouse in their own words, their own ideas of social order. Okonkwo becomes active among the elders in their response to church and court. The decision finally is made to ostracise the Christian converts: the unity that had existed in each village through countless generations is fractured.

At this time Okonkwo’s seven years of exile are about to end. After the cassava harvest he announces his farewell.

‘I am calling a feast because I have the wherewithal. I cannot live on the bank of a river and wash my hands with spittle. My mother’s people have been good to me and I must show my gratitude.’ And so three goats were slaughtered and a number of fowls … It was like a wedding feast. There was foo-foo and yam pottage, egusi soup and bitter-leaf soup and pots and pots of palm wine.

An elder makes a speech. ‘A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes … We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. You may ask why I am saying all this. I say it because I fear for the younger generation, for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his father and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.’

Okonkwo has returned from exile.

… seven years was a long time to be away from one’s clan. A man’s place was not always there, waiting for him. As soon as he left, someone else rose and filled it. The clan was like a lizard: if it lost its tail it soon grew another … He knew that he had lost the chance to lead his warlike clan against the new religion, which he was told, had gained ground. He had lost the years in which he might have taken the highest titles in the clan. But some of these losses were not irreparable. He would return with a flourish, and regain the seven wasted years … the first thing he would do would be to rebuild his compound on a more magnificent scale.

If Nwoye is a traitor whose existence is no longer recognised by his father, that father would show his wealth by initiating his five other sons in the ozo society. ‘Only the really great men in the clan were able to do this. Okonkwo saw clearly the high esteem in which he would be held, and he saw himself taking the highest title in the land.’ Among his sons and daughters Ezinma is still his favourite child and he continues to wish she were a boy; as a compensation for what her strong character could have achieved as his son he envisages that her beauty and personality will attract a son-in-law who would be a ‘man of authority within the clan’.

Returning to his clan and village, Okonkwo seems to have left behind, along with the years of exile, the Mbata elder’s fearful warning. Okonkwo’s vision of re-establishment is that within the traditional society which has in reality changed irreparably — the tail the lizard has grown is not the same as that of the old body grown whole again. There are many men and women in Umuofia who realise that ‘The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed in Umuofia.’ They have entered the world of production not only for their own consumption, but for sale and profit. ‘… And even in the matter of religion there was a growing feeling that there might be something in it after all, something vaguely akin to method in the overwhelming madness.’

The current white missionary, Mr Brown, was not over-zealous in his task of conversion to Christianity, he was a peacemaker ‘who came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith. He made friends with some of the great men of the clan and on one of his frequent visits to the neighbouring villages he had been presented with a carved elephant tusk, which was a sign of dignity and rank.’ And the numbers of converts to the church was steadily growing. One of the great men had given a son ‘to be taught the white man’s knowledge in Mr Brown’s school’. Learning to read and write was an achievement, even if not on the same great level as the anklet of the clan’s titles. ‘… it was not long before the people began to say that the white man’s medicine was quick in working.’