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http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2101310,00.html

Man Booker International judges honour Chinua Achebe

'Father of modern African literature' beats formidable shortlist including Carlos Fuentes and Doris Lessing, signaling the £60,000 prize's status as an authentic world award


John Ezard
Wednesday June 13, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Chinua Achebe: 'a joy and an illumination to read'. Photograph: Jerry Bauer
 


The £60,000 Man Booker International prize goes today to the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in a decision which confers equal lustre on giver and receiver.

In choosing to give the award to a man who is regularly described as the father of modern African literature, the judges have signalled that this new global Booker has achieved the status of an authentic world award in only its second contest.

By honouring Achebe they have redressed what is seen in Africa - and beyond - as the acute injustice that he has never received the Nobel prize, allegedly because he has spent his life struggling to break the grip of western stereotypes of Africa. One of his most famous essays is an onslaught against Joseph Conrad's masterpiece Heart of Darkness, a novel about a European's descent into savagery in Africa.

The choice of a 76-year-old also establishes the MBI as a lifetime achievement award. The shortlisted author thought to have come nearest to beating Achebe is the great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who is 78.

Among mostly younger writers on a towering shortlist were Britain's Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, Ireland's John Banville, the Americans Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, the Canadians Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje, and the dissident Israeli Amos Oz.

Achebe, the son of a mission school teacher, grew up to become the most widely translated writer Africa has produced thanks to the novel considered to be his masterpiece, Things Fall Apart (1958). The story is set in the Igbo community of Umuofia, in the years preceding colonial government. When the Christian English missionaries arrive, Achebe's protagonist, Okonkwo, fails to convince his fellow villagers that their own society will fall apart if they exchange their cultural core for that of the English.

The decision crowns an astonishing few days for the Igbo people of southern Nigeria whose doomed bid to secede touched off the Biafra war in the late 1960s. Last week a young fellow-Igbo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a disciple of Achebe, won the Orange fiction prize with her novel about the war, Half of a Yellow Sun.

The first MBI award in 2005 went to the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. The Booker judges announce the winner of their biennial award today with a chorus of accolades. The chairwoman of the judging committee, the academic and critic Elaine Showalter, said: "In Things Fall Apart and his other fiction set in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe inaugurated the modern African novel. He also illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies."

Showalter was joined on the judging panel by the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer and the author Colm Toíbín. Gordimer said of Achebe that he has achieved "what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer's purpose: 'a new-found utterance' for the capture of life's complexity. This fiction is an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the post-modern breaking of sequence. He is a joy and an illumination to read."

Toíbín, meanwhile, said that Things Fall Apart "manages to capture an essential moment in the colonial drama; it dramatises momentous change with clarity, sympathy and astonishing fluency and ease."

The passion of Achebe's convictions is shown by his refusal for many years to allow his novels to be translated into Igbo, which he still considers a bastardised missionary version of authentic village dialects. However, Things Fall Apart has been translated into 50 other languages and sold 10m copies.

His other most influential work - discussed in classrooms worldwide - is the essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1975), which accuses Conrad of dehumanising Africans and rendering their continent as "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril".

Achebe was once asked which authors had told the story of Africa well. Hundreds, he said, "including many we don't normally talk about and regard as literature - the oral tradition", the village storytellers who had been active long before colonisers introduced pen and paper. "Humanity," he said, "will always attempt to create a story."

Achebe will receive the award and a trophy at a ceremony on June 28 in Oxford.

[dextrous]

Good news. I teach his "Things Fall Apart" piece in conjunction with Heart of Darkness.

[feverpitch]

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/06/achebe_is_a_model_writer_of_th.html

The exemplary chronicler of an African tragedy

Chinua Achebe's richly textured Biafra war stories have inspired and informed my own writing, so I'm particularly thrilled about his Booker prize.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie



Humane and pragmatic ... Chinua Achebe. Photograph: Frank May/AFP



Chinua Achebe's war fiction was a huge inspiration to me when I was writing my novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. The Biafra stories in his Girls at War and Other Stories are about what happens when the shiny things we once believed in begin to rust before our eyes.

In the light and funny Civil Peace, for example, Jonathan Iwegbu is amazed at his good fortune: the survival of his family and even his bicycle, which he buried to keep it safe from the soldiers. Post-war eastern Nigeria is in a state of flux. Iwegbu loses his job and is given, as were most ex-Biafrans, a miserable ex gratia amount in exchange for his Biafran money. But he is too grateful to notice the injustice of this and even when he is robbed of the money, he remains philosophical. The war has drastically reordered his values and priorities.

Achebe's trademark compassionate irony - he respects his characters but at the same time is amused by them and expects the reader to be so, too - is less obvious in the collection's second story, Sugar Baby, which is the best piece of fiction I have read about Biafra. It starts with the narrator watching his friend Cletus fling a handful of sugar out of the window.

A symbolic act: Cletus has an extremely sweet tooth (something he must have developed as a student living in Ladbroke Grove) and the unbearable sugar scarcity in Biafra brought him humiliations, one involving the loss of his girlfriend, another the rage of an Irish priest. Now that the war is over, Cletus and his friends are eager to tell self-flagellating stories of hardship, they "had become in those days like a bunch of old hypochondriac women vying to recount the most lurid details of their own special infirmities." The narrator is reluctant to join in. For him, there is something still too painful, too sacred, about their recent history; he is not yet ready to laugh at their corroded hope.

Cletus represents the Biafran middle classes, who lived through the deprivations of war but were not completely flattened, as were their poorer compatriots. Achebe shows this clearly in his third story, Girls at War, in which Reginald Nwankwo, a deep-thinking chauvinist who works for the Ministry of Justice and has a driver, is collecting food from a relief centre while the starving crowd at the gate shout insults at him. He is embarrassed by the "independent accusation of their wasted bodies". But what can he do? There is too little food and too many people and at least he helps the best he can; he always shares his food with his driver who has six children.

Nwankwo later gives most of the food to his new love interest, a girl for whom he has complex and condescending feelings: he expects her to have sex with him after a casual acquaintance but is judgmental of her willingness to do so. Whether Nwankwo has really done the best he can is something Achebe leaves the reader to decide.

His indictment of the complacent middle-class is less equivocal, however, where he writes of Biafran heroism often happening "below the eye level of the people in this story, in out of the way refugee camps, in the damp tatters, in the hungry and bare-handed courage of the first line of fire". The story's lasting image for me is that of the soldier whom Nwankwo's driver is asked to give a lift by the roadside. The soldier is starving and wounded from the front and when the car stops for him, he is not only grateful but "greatly surprised". Girls at War portrays a world inhabited by people who feel their metaphysical losses more strongly than their material ones. Their disillusion, their manic self-mockery, their fixation on survival, are all corollaries of their deep faith in their cause.

Achebe's war fiction then, humane and pragmatic as it is, becomes an oblique paean to the possibilities that Biafra held. The stories have an emotional power that accumulates unobtrusively and stun the reader at the end. There are sentences in them that will always move me to tears.

[colonel]

Amen.

[feverpitch]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2102660,00.html

The unseen literary world

Chinua Achebe's long wait for recognition highlights the invisibility of non-western writers

Maya Jaggi
Thursday June 14, 2007
The Guardian

There was a writer, Nelson Mandela recalled of his 27 years in jail, "in whose company the prison walls fell down". Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, whom Mandela honoured on his 70th birthday as a fellow "freedom fighter", was yesterday named the winner of the £60,000 Man Booker international prize. A biennial lifetime achievement award for fiction that cynics had thought designed to embrace famous Americans excluded from the Man Booker remit has again - after the initial award to Ismail Kadare of Albania in 2005 - been vindicated by a relatively obscure but richly merited choice.

The question arises, obscure for whom? Achebe, aged 76, is revered across continents as a founder of the modern African novel in English. Things Fall Apart, his 1958 debut about the devastating impact of Christian missionaries on Igbo culture amid the scramble for Africa in the 1890s, is one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century. Nor was Achebe obscure to the galaxy of writers - including Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer - I heard pay birthday tributes to him at Bard College in upstate New York, where he has taught since a car crash in Nigeria 17 years ago left him in a wheelchair.

Yet making the case for profiling Achebe in this paper in 2000, I was struck anew by how towering figures in world literature can fall beneath the radar in the west, or slip from memory. It may be worse for those not writing in English, as I was reminded by the death on Sunday of Senegal's Ousmane Sembène, aged 84, a francophone novelist and founding father of sub-Saharan African cinema. Hardly a household name - though, like Achebe, he deserves to be.

In Achebe's case, a form of novelist's block may be partly to blame. His most recent novel, Anthills of the Savannah, published 20 years ago and shortlisted for the 1987 Booker prize, came after a 21-year gap. As anti-Igbo pogroms raged, and absurdly accused of complicity in a coup plot, he had retreated to his home state of Igboland on the eve of its breakaway bid as Biafra. Failing to avert the 1967-70 civil war with a mission to Senegal's poet-president Léopold Senghor ("We talked about Biafra for 10 minutes and literature for two hours"), he was, he told me, shattered. His house was bombed and his best friend, poet Christopher Okigbo, killed. It was in poetry and short stories that he voiced with moral clarity his searing disillusionment at his country's sleepwalk into war. His stand and writing inspired others, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who, in an astonishing week for Nigerian literature, won the £30,000 Orange prize for fiction for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Yet many attribute Achebe's never having clinched the Nobel to his self-avowal as a "missionary in reverse", whose early impulse was to counter colonial myths about his homeland. His attack on Joseph Conrad as a "thoroughgoing racist" in a 1975 lecture on Heart of Darkness made him enemies, as perhaps did his view of VS Naipaul as a "new Conrad". Yet his calm analysis in essays of Europe's self-serving falsehoods about the "dark continent" can be seen to have presaged Edward's Said's Orientalism (1978) and Morrison's scrutiny of US literature, Playing in the Dark (1992).

Ikem, the rebel poet in Anthills, says: "Whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something however small from the other to make you whole." He could be making a case for world literature, as this prize does, however uncomfortable competing narratives can be. Telling the truth, Achebe said some 40 years ago, is "the only way, in the long run, you get listened to". For some, it can be a long wait.


· Maya Jaggi was a judge of this year's Orange prize for fiction; she introduces Anthills of the Savannah in Penguin Modern Classics

mljaggi@aol.com

[colonel]

If anything, he deserves a nobel for his children's literature alone - Chiki and the River, for example, is an alltime favourite (it was translated into Bengali in the early 80s, incidentally). As for African writers missing the bus, Soyinka deservedly got the nobel; Gordimer and Morrison, in my humble opinion, do not deserve it.

[feverpitch]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2122625,00.html

A long way from home

Chinua Achebe, 'the father of modern African literature', talks to Ed Pilkington about inventing a new language, his years in exile from his beloved Nigeria - and why he changed his name from Albert

Tuesday July 10, 2007
The Guardian

 

By rights I should be talking to Chinua Achebe in Ogidi, his home town in Nigeria. He should be telling me about his efforts as chairman of the village council to build schools, improve the water and bring health to the people. We should be talking about whether and when the rains will come, and how the yam harvest is doing this year.

Instead, we are sitting in a bungalow on the banks of the Hudson, upriver from New York, surrounded by clapboard houses, rolling green hills and cows chewing the cud. The nearest restaurants have names such as Rose's Kitchen, Pat's Place and Hickory. As I arrive, Achebe is sitting at his desk at the window overlooking a gravel front drive.

It seems a strange place to find the writer credited above all others with inventing the modern African novel. Nadine Gordimer, one of the many writers indebted to Achebe for the ground that he broke, described him last month as the "father of modern African literature". She was one of the judges who awarded Achebe, now 76, this year's Man Booker international prize, given every two years for an exceptional lifetime's achievement. A writer as driven and as political as Achebe neither needs nor solicits such recognition, yet he is grateful to receive it.

"I'm a practised writer now," he says, as we start to talk in his small, homely sitting room. "But when I began I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it."

That "something inside me" was his first, and enduringly monumental, novel, Things Fall Apart. Rereading it before I see Achebe, I find the book has lost none of its power to shock. Set in the 1890s, the first two-thirds of the story steeps you in the ancient ways of Achebe's Igbo people, with their several gods, elaborate ceremonies and hierarchies, and the tough but effective policing mechanisms that force Okonkwo, the subject of the book, into exile for accidentally killing a boy.

And then comes the memorable line: "During the last planting season a white man had appeared in their clan." The white missionaries, and the terrible destruction they brought, had arrived.

Published in 1958, Things Fall Apart turned the west's perception of Africa on its head - a perception that until then had been based solely on the views of white colonialists, views that were at best anthropological, at worst, to adopt Achebe's famous savaging of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "thoroughgoingly racist". As research for his 1975 essay on the Conrad book, Image of Africa, Achebe counted all the words spoken in Heart of Darkness by Africans themselves. "There were six!" he tells me, laughing luxuriously. The rest of the time Conrad's Africans merely make animal noises, he says, or shriek a lot.

By contrast, Things Fall Apart was, Achebe says now, "A story that only someone who went through it could be trusted to give. It was insisting to be told by the owner of the story, not by others, no matter how well meaning or competent."

And it was not just the ownership of the story that was revolutionary - the language was too. Achebe's novels are part standard English, part pidgin, part language of folklore and proverb. His writing crackles with vivid, universal and yet deeply African images. "Living fire begets cold, impotent ash"; "If you want to get at the root of murder ... look for the blacksmith who made the matchet". "Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly," he writes in Things Fall Apart, "and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."

Achebe says he is particularly pleased that the Booker judges recognised the way in which he created a new language for Things Fall Apart. "The story is so different from what I had read as a child; I knew I couldn't write like Dickens or Conrad. My story would not accept that. So you had to make an English that was new. Whether it was going to work or not, I couldn't tell."

If bald sales statistics are any measure, it did work - handsomely. Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10m copies and has been translated into 50 languages. More importantly, it spawned a whole generation of African writers who emulated its linguistic ingenuity and political vision. In the same week as Achebe won the Booker, one of his great admirers, fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, took the Orange prize for Half of a Yellow Sun.

When he was first writing Things Fall Apart, Achebe intended the novel to tell the story of three generations: the traditional villager Okonkwo, his son Nwoye (who is converted to Christianity by the missionaries), and Okonkwo's grandson Obi, who is sent to England to study. When Achebe realised that the novel was becoming too thinly stretched, he planned to break it up into three parts. The trilogy would relate the colonial destruction of Africa in three acts: the land as it was before the white man, the arrival of the missionaries, and finally the internalisation by Africans of colonial ways. It would also tell Achebe's own story, with Okonkwo representing his grandparents, Nwoye his Christian convert parents, and the English-educated Obi being Achebe himself.

In the end, part one became Things Fall Apart and his next novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), following Obi to London, was part three of the story. The middle volume remains unwritten. Why is that, I ask him?

"When I came to write it I found I didn't want to do it. This is the generation who accepted the missionaries. That seemed to me requiring some explanation. Why would anybody leave his father's belief and go for some foreign religion?"

Achebe's own parents lived the life of converts, changing their names to Isaiah and Janet and Christening him Albert. Born in 1930, he lived a childhood full of the Bible and hymns, and he learned English from the age of eight. Later, he was sent to the University of London - located in the Nigerian city of Ibadan (it is now called Ibadan university).

Through his early years this goodly Christianity was life as he assumed it should be. Villagers in Ogidi who remained aloof from the church were considered "lost" by his family. "We called them the people of nothing," says Achebe.

But as he grew older he puzzled over the fact that others, especially an uncle who resisted conversion, were leading different lives. They would hold "heathen" celebrations and offer food to "idols", as his parents would have it. What began for the young Achebe as curiosity grew into bemusement and finally anger about the lies that he had been told as a child.

"The difference between what I had been told and what I saw was very powerful. The language the church people used - of 'idolisation' - was in itself an assault. And it hasn't changed. Missionaries today still believe they are going to save lost souls. And it is a great lie."

The paradox, I suggest, is that if it weren't for the missionary influence, for that very English education, he would not be the writer he is today. "Our lives were nothing but paradoxes," he replies.

The dawning realisation that his childhood world was founded upon a lie provided the rocket fuel that propelled him into writing, and made him swap the name Albert for the local name Chinua. In his more recent work he has turned the focus of that anger from the colonial intruder on to the African interloper - the corrupt and corrupted leaders who inherited the mantle of power from the white man and went on to abuse the hopes generated by independence.

In A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) he tears into the greed, egomania, lust and laziness of post-independence African rulers, giving us a chronicle of Nigeria's descent into the autocratic rule under which it still labours today. In those books, and in a stream of non-fiction essays, he has been a consistent irritant to the powerful.

And he has paid the price. His literary life has been punctuated by threats and periods of semi-exile. The most bizarre incident arose out of his depiction of a fictional coup in A Man of the People. At the time west Africa was a stranger to military revolts, but he decided to include a coup in the story, he says now, simply to "frighten my readers. I wanted to scare the hell out of those politicians who were misbehaving so badly".

On the Friday before the book was published, he was attending a meeting of writers in Lagos when a friend who had just read the proofs of the novel burst in, exclaiming: "Chinua, you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened, except the coup."

The next morning, however, Nigeria's first military coup was set in train. On the Sunday Achebe's British editors contacted him via the embassy to check he was OK and to see if he wanted to go ahead with publication. Yes, he said, and the novel went public on the Monday.

The coincidence of that fictional description and the real-life coup that was led by plotters from his own Igbo people put him under suspicion. Drunken soldiers came by his office looking for him. Eventually, he fled to his home in Igboland. In the Biafran civil war that followed, he acted as part-diplomat, part-proselytiser, making the case for the short-lived Biafran republic. He captured the tragedy of the war, and the famine that it prompted, in poetry. He wrote of the starving boy with "large sunken eyes stricken past boredom to a flat unrecognising glueyiness".

Meanwhile his political activities were monitored closely from the north - "I was not popular with the military," he says with admirable understatement - and in the end he was forced to spend periods in America, where he took up university teaching.

More recently, he has had to live in America once again, but for very different reasons. In 1990 he was driving between Ogidi, where he had just been made chairman of the village council, and Lagos, when his car crashed. Achebe was knocked unconscious. "Apparently the car rolled over and over and was virtually lying on top of me. My son couldn't do anything himself so he ran to the road and shouted 'This is Chinua Achebe' at people to make them stop. Crowds came to lift the vehicle off me."

He spent six months in a hospital in London. "It changed my life," he says, unnecessarily - the impact of that crash is visible. Achebe sits in a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down. He says he feels "continuous, curious" pain and as we talk he rubs his knees from time to time as though trying in vain to soothe them.

The fact that he cannot sit for long periods makes it difficult for him to do anything quickly, and he regrets that his work has suffered. His desk is covered in unfinished essays and manuscripts, or in his peculiarly precise diction: "There is a need for a number of things on my table to move to the finish spot."

Two things stand out among that pile of unfinished business: a new novel that he says is well under way, though he won't talk about its narrative. And a translation of Things Fall Apart into his mother tongue - remarkably it has yet to appear in his Igbo dialect.

The other huge impact of the crash is simply his location. He came to the US after London in search of the best specialist treatment. He teaches at Bard college in New York state, but says he is really here because of the medical care he is getting. He intended to stay for a year, but 15 years later there is still no end in sight for his medical exile.

I ask him what he misses most about Nigeria. "I miss having to be told how things are there. When the old people came and told me they wanted me to be chairman of the council of my village I had to respond. That's what I intended - to strive to develop, to build schools and hospitals ..."

The accident has left him weakened, and the longer we talk, the softer his voice becomes. When I come to transcribe the recording of our conversation, I have to turn the volume up.

Achebe is not lonely: he has his family with him by the Hudson. There are African masks and ivory carvings all around the room. But you can almost touch his longing to be back home.

Someone asked him recently, he says, to write about his favourite place. It got him thinking about why he loves Ogidi so much when it has no great mountain or cathedral and even the River Niger is miles away. So what is it that explains this deep longing?

His voice rallies just a little as he replies: "I can't really explain it. But for me this place, this village, is significant. It is where I formed my identity".

[pipsqueak]

nice.

here's one of his stories  - familiar plot for most of us from india!


MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR - Chinua Achebe
 
(1930-; Nigeria)


'HAVE you written to your dad yet?’ asked Nene one afternoon as she sat with Nnaemeka in her room at 16 Kasanga Street, Lagos.
‘No. I’ve been thinking about it. I think it’s better to tell him when I get home on leave!’

‘But why? Your leave is such a long way off yet—six whole weeks. He should be let into our happiness now.’

Nnaemeka was silent for a while, and then began very slowly as if he groped for his words: ‘I wish I were sure it would be happiness to him.’


‘Of course it must,’ replied Nene, a little surprised. ‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘You have lived in Lagos all your life, and you know very little about people in remote parts of the country.’

‘That’s what you always say. But I don’t believe anybody will be so unlike other people that they will be unhappy when their sons are engaged to marry.’

‘Yes. They are most unhappy if the engagement is not arranged by them. In our case it’s worse—you are not even an Ibo.’

This was said so seriously and so bluntly that Nene could not find speech immediately. In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city it had always seemed to her something of a joke that a person’s tribe could determine whom he married.

At last she said, ‘You don’t really mean that he will object to your marrying me simply on that account? I had always thought you Ibos were kindly disposed to other people.’

‘So we are. But when it comes to marriage, well, it’s not quite so simple. And this,’ he added, ‘is not peculiar to the Ibos. If your father were alive and lived in the heart of Ibibo-land he would be exactly like my father.’

‘I don’t know. But anyway, as your father is so fond of you, I’m sure he will forgive you soon enough. Come on then, be a good boy and send him a nice lovely letter . . .’

‘It would not be wise to break the news to him by writing. A letter will bring it upon him with a shock. I’m quite sure about that.’

‘All right, honey, suit yourself. You know your father.’

As Nnaemeka walked home that evening he turned over in his mind different ways of overcoming his father’s opposition, especially now that he had gone and found a girl for him. He had thought of showing his letter to Nene but decided on second thoughts not to, at least for the moment. He read it again when he got home and couldn’t help smiling to himself. He remembered Ugoye quite well, an Amazon of a girl who used to beat up all the boys, himself included, on the way to the stream, a complete dunce at school.

I have found a girl who will suit you admirably—Ugoye Nweke, the eldest daughter of our neighbour, Jacob Nweke. She has a proper Christian upbringing. When she stopped schooling some years ago, her father (a man of sound judgment) sent her to live in the house of a pastor where she has received all the training a wife could need. Her Sunday School teacher has told me that she reads her Bible very fluently. I hope we shall begin negotiations when you come home in December.

On the second evening of his return from Lagos Nnaemeka sat with his father under a cassia tree. This was the old man’s retreat where he went to read his Bible when the parching December sun had set and a fresh, reviving wind blew on the leaves.

‘Father,’ began Nnaemeka suddenly, ‘I have come to ask for forgiveness.’

‘Forgiveness? For what, my son?’ he asked in amazement.

‘It’s about this marriage question.’

‘Which marriage question?’

‘I can’t—we must—I mean it is impossible for me to marry Nweke’s daughter.’

‘Impossible? Why?’ asked his father.

‘I don’t love her.’

‘Nobody said you did. Why should you?’ he asked.

‘Marriage today is different . . .’

‘Look here, my son,’ interrupted his father, ‘nothing is different. What one looks for in a wife are a good character and a Christian background.’

Nnaemeka saw there was no hope along the present line of argument.

‘Moreover,’ he said, ‘I am engaged to marry another girl who has all of Ugoye’s good qualities, and who . . .’

His father did not believe his ears. ‘What did you say?’ he asked slowly and disconcertingly.

‘She is a good Christian,’ his son went on, ‘and a teacher in a Girls’ School in Lagos.’

‘Teacher, did you say? If you consider that a qualification for a good wife I should like to point out to you, Nnaemeka, that no Christian woman should teach. St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians says that women should keep silence.’ He rose slowly from his seat and paced forwards and backwards. This was his pet subject, and he condemned vehemently those church leaders who encouraged women to teach in their schools. After he had spent his emotion on a long homily he at last came back to his son’s engagement, in a seemingly milder tone.

‘Whose daughter is she, anyway?’

‘She is Nene Atang.’

‘What!’ All the mildness was gone again. ‘Did you say Nene Atang, what does that mean?’

‘Nene Atang from Calabar. She is the only girl I can marry.’ This was a very rash reply and Nnaemeka expected the storm to burst. But it did not. His father merely walked away into his room. This was most unexpected and perplexed Nnaemeka. His father’s silence was infinitely more menacing than a flood of threatening speech. That night the old man did not eat.

When he sent for Nnaemeka a day later he applied all possible ways of dissuasion. But the young man’s heart was hardened, and his father eventually gave him up as lost.

‘I owe it to you, my son, as a duty to show you what is right and what is wrong. Whoever put this idea into your head might as well have cut your throat. It is Satan’s work.’ He waved his son away.

‘You will change your mind, Father, when you know Nene.’

‘I shall never see her,’ was the reply. From that night the father scarcely spoke to his son. He did not, however, cease hoping that he would realise how serious was the danger he was heading for. Day and night he put him in his prayers.

Nnaemeka, for his own part, was very deeply affected by his father’s grief. But he kept hoping that it would pass away. If it had occurred to him that never in the history of his people had a man married a woman who spoke a different tongue, he might have been less optimistic. ‘It has never been heard,’ was the verdict of an old man speaking a few weeks later. In that short sentence he spoke for all of his people. This man had come with others to commiserate with Okeke when news went round about his son’s behaviour. By that time the son had gone back to Lagos.

‘It has never been heard,’ said the old man again with a sad shake of his head.

‘What did Our Lord say?’ asked another gentleman.

‘Sons shall rise against their Fathers; it is there in the Holy Book.’

‘It is the beginning of the end,’ said another.

The discussion thus tending to become theological, Madubogwu, a highly practical man, brought it down once more to the ordinary level.

‘Have you thought of consulting a native doctor about your son?’ he asked Nnaemeka’s father.

‘He isn’t sick,’ was the reply.

‘What is he then? The boy’s mind is diseased and only a good herbalist can bring him back to his right senses. The medicine he requires is Amalile, the same that women apply with success to recapture their husbands’ straying affection.’

‘Madubogwu is right,’ said another gentleman. ‘This thing calls for medicine.’

‘I shall not call in a native doctor.’ Nnaemeka’s father was known to be obstinately ahead of his more superstitious neighbours in these matters. ‘I will not be another Mrs. Ochuba. If my son wants to kill himself let him do it with his own hands. It is not for me to help him.’

‘But it was her fault,’ said Madubogwu. ‘She ought to have gone to an honest herbalist. She was a clever woman, nevertheless.’

‘She was a wicked murderess,’ said Jonathan who rarely argued with his neighbours because, he often said, they were incapable of reasoning. ‘The medicine was prepared for her husband, it was his name they called in its preparation and I am sure it would have been perfectly beneficial to him. It was wicked to put it into the herbalist’s food, and say you were only trying it out.’

Six months later, Nnaemeka was showing his young wife a short letter from his father:

It amazes me that you could be so unfeeling as to send me your wedding picture. I would have sent it back. But on further thought I decided just to cut off your wife and send it back to you because I have nothing to do with her. How I wish that I had nothing to do with you either.

When Nene read through this letter and looked at the mutilated picture her eyes filled with tears, and she began to sob.

‘Don’t cry, my darling,’ said her husband. ‘He is essentially good-natured and will one day look more kindly on our marriage.’ But years passed and that one day did not come.

For eight years, Okeke would have nothing to do with his son, Nnaemeka. Only three times (when Nnaemeka asked to come home and spend his leave) did he write to him.

‘I can’t have you in my house,’ he replied on one occasion. ‘It can be of no interest to me where or how you spend your leave—or your life, for that matter.’

The prejudice against Nnaemeka’s marriage was not confined to his little village. In Lagos, especially among his people who worked there, it showed itself in a different way. Their women, when they met at their village meeting, were not hostile to Nene. Rather, they paid her such excessive deference as to make her feel she was not one of them. But as time went on, Nene gradually broke through some of this prejudice and even began to make friends among them. Slowly and grudgingly they began to admit that she kept her home much better than most of them.

The story eventually got to the little village in the heart of the Ibo country that Nnaemeka and his young wife were a most happy couple. But his father was one of the few people in the village who knew nothing about this. He always displayed so much temper whenever his son’s name was mentioned that everyone avoided it in his presence. By a tremendous effort of will he had succeeded in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had persevered, and won.

Then one day he received a letter from Nene, and in spite of himself he began to glance through it perfunctorily until all of a sudden the expression on his face changed and he began to read more carefully:

. . . . Our two sons, from the day they learnt that they have a grandfather, have insisted on being taken to him. I find it impossible to tell them that you will not see them. I implore you to allow Nnaemeka to bring them home for a short time during his leave next month. I shall remain here in Lagos. . . .’

The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was telling himself that he must not give in. He tried to steel his heart against all emotional appeals. It was a re-enactment of that other struggle. He leaned against a window and looked out. The sky was overcast with heavy black clouds and a high wind began to blow filling the air with dust and dry leaves. It was one of those rare occasions when even Nature takes a hand in a human fight. Very soon it began to rain, the first rain in the year. It came down in large sharp drops and was accompanied by the lightning and thunder which mark a change of season. Okeke was trying hard not to think of his two grandsons. But he knew he was now fighting a losing battle. He tried to hum a favourite hymn but the pattering of large raindrops on the roof broke up the tune. His mind immediately returned to the children. How could he shut his door against them? By a curious mental process he imagined them standing, sad and forsaken, under the harsh angry weather—shut out from his house.

That night he hardly slept, from remorse—and a vague fear that he might die without making it up to them.