Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease: The Conflict of Values in Post-colonial History of Nigeria

Abstract

As a reaction to the European dominance on the African continent, African novelists showed a nationalistic feeling in their novels, and this national awareness gave them the opportunity to present the contemporary African experience. In the region that was occupied by the British, Nigeria in particular, the novelists’ interest was to show the impacts of the settlement period on the peoples of that region. Chinua Achebe was one of the most prominent Nigerian novelists who dedicated their novels to represent the psychological, social and cultural conflicts that Africans experienced as a result of the European intrusion into African life. The events and scenes of his novels were taken more from the reality of African life than from the world of imagination. His No Longer at Ease provides a critique of post-independence Nigerian life and an assessment of what it inherited from the European settler. The events of the novel deal with an African young man and the crisis he experienced as a result of the conflict between the European intellectual culture that he acquired during his studies in England and what he inherited of tribal and family traditions and values. The novel reveals the protagonist's lack of the moral courage to face the pressures of the conflict between the European materialistic ideals and the African traditions, which leads to his failure and moral downfall. The novel thus becomes an invitation, on the level of values ​​, for an assessment of the behavior of the cultural elite that will take over the leadership of modern Nigeria and their ways to deal with the legacy of settlement.