No Longer at Ease

Obi Okonkwo returns to Nigeria in the 1950s after an English education financed by the Umuofia Progressive Union. His new post in the colonial civil service appears to place him among the educated elite who will shape the country’s future, but it also brings obligations he cannot easily meet. Relatives and townspeople expect financial help, officials and applicants test his resistance to bribery, and the cost of maintaining a modern Lagos life steadily exceeds his income.

Obi’s relationship with Clara, whom his family regards as an unsuitable wife because of inherited social status, deepens the conflict between personal choice and communal expectation. Bereavement, debt and professional compromise gradually erode the certainty with which he returned from Britain. Through Obi’s decline, Achebe depicts late colonial Nigeria as a society approaching independence while its institutions, class divisions and moral pressures already contain the seeds of postcolonial disillusionment.