THE COLLISION OF AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN CULTURES, A SITE OF METAMORPHOSES IN CHINUA ACHEBE'S AFRICAN TRILOGY

Abstract

Everybody knows that there are many other areas of Africa where colonialism facilitated contact between people especially because "it gave them a language with which to talk to one another.[...] [...]those African writers who have chosen to write in English or French are not unpatriotic smart alecks with an eye on the main chance - outside their own countries. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1995:284), his writing is thought to have accomplished its goals as it "displays a process by which the language is made to bear the weight and texture of a different experience. The osu group of outcasts of the tribe are among the most motivated to make attempts to get close to the new religion. Because of being dedicated to a different god, their kinsmen had chased them to a special area of the village, cutting their possibilities to take any of the four titles of the clan, not accepting them to their assemblies or sheltering them under a regular Umuofia roof. [...]there were two different cityscapes in Lagos: on the one hand, there was the bustling big city with bars, dancing places, restaurants and the European quarters where some Nigerian people like Obi, educated and working in important administrative places could live, on the other hand, there were the segregated neighbourhoods where poverty, squalor and sadness went hand in hand.

Headnote

Abstract: Achebe, the realist Nigerian novelist, made use of his "knowledges " and fulfilled what he felt as a deep duty: he made "his people " speak in some acclaimed and highly rewarded novels in order to tell Their Truth. Achebe was fully aware that "literary texts are one of the rare places where they might be heard", as Foucault (qtd. in Loomba 1998:38) largely stated. Thus, readers of all times are able to perceive the metamorphoses undergone by both sides of the cultural clash in the process of colonisation. This paper traces how the profound mechanisms of change gradually affected large groups of indigenous people: the social fabric of the African villages started its perpetual disintegration, their languages were replaced by the British language, their institutions became ignored, minimized, and finally reduced to inefficiency. New people and new places were born.

Key words: Africa, change, cultural clash, language

1. Introduction

Chinua Achebe was not the first African writer, not even the first Nigerian novelist publishing in English. Cyprian Eqwensi and Amos Tutola had published their novels some years before 1958, but Achebe was the one "who blazed the trail for a generation of African writers", as Appiah (2013, online) wrote for the millions of people who read his books and even studied them in school, in a short praising article issued shortly after "the father of African literature" passed away on March 21, 2013. In spite of Achebe's modest refusal of such a title, Appiah and many other voices around the world bring as a solid argument the fact that he was the first to offer a model of how to write fiction in English about African life, for he knew how to mould the English language so as to convey the traditional life and even language of the Nigerian village people. He was very convincing in the interviews he gave, or in conferences he attended and lectures he gave to his students, while speaking about the high importance of writing, mentioning that any piece of writing should send an important message to the readers.

He also said that "literature opens magic casements" (1992:xvii) and we really have this very feeling while reading his books - of looking through a transparent window and watching a movie about tribal life naturally carrying on at different moments in time. Appiah brings some more reasons why Achebe succeeded in raising the interest of people beyond Africa's borders: he did not bias the cultural information he offered about life in certain places of Nigeria, revealing some of its unknown shades, as well as favourable aspects of an old pre-colonial micro-cosmos. At the same time, he did his best to write according to European literary canons:

Achebe teaches us that the novel, a form invented in Western Europe, can be shaped by the creative intelligence and the local vision of a great writer outside of Europe into a medium of continuing universal significance. Perhaps this is the reason that for so many readers around the world, it is Chinua Achebe who opened up the magic casements of African fiction. (Appiah 1992:xvii)

It is of paramount importance that Achebe wrote his fiction presenting tribal life from the inside because he was bom and raised in the Igbo village of Ogidi by his converted Christian parents, who had personally lived the moments of the first encounter with "the white man". He used the reality remembered from stories told by his own parents and many other witnesses of those times of colliding cultures, thus creating a diversity of characters: numerous native Igbos and some Europeans who are but samples of how the clash between the local tribal culture and the intmsive European one affected so many and so much of what was to become a new world and new people living in a new era. Related to this aspect, Neil Kortenaar (1995:33) makes a clear point that Achebe acquired the necessary knowledge so as to approach the intersection of African tradition and modernity in a realistic manner:

The problem with seeing two cultures as occupying the same world is that they can be measured against each other and one preferred to another as a reflection of that world. To measure them is to assume a scientific objectivity that allows the observer to stand outside both. In [Achebe's] case, scientific objectivity is a mode of knowledge associated with one of the cultures to be measured.

Achebe does not try to embellish, to trim or to avoid real facts and true-tolife episodes of the tribal natural rhythm he came to know via dependable witnesses, some of them direct participants in those events.

2. The African Trilogy

Things Fall Apart published in 1958 was followed by No Longer at Ease in 1960 and Arrow of God in 1964. The order of publication does not represent a perfect sequence of events: Things Fall Apart is set at the end of the eighteenth century, when the first missionaries were making use of their faith, their knowledge, their human qualities and abilities to persuade the natives that the Christian God was the only one to trust and worship. In No Longer at Ease, Obi Okonkwo, the main character, is the grandson of Ogbuefi Okonkwo, the main character in the first novel, both novels covering a three-generation span. The third novel, Arrow of God, comes with a large display of characters, but none of them is connected with the ones in the first two novels, and the author gives some information to make his readers understand that he had something more to say about the period of time that he had left suspended between the first and the second novel.

These three novels were later put together in a single volume known as The African Trilogy (2010c), which is seen especially by the African young generation as a genuine picture of a changing process. They read it and get deeply impressed because, as young writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2010c: ix) confesses, they discover something "aching familiar, but also exotic because it detailed the life of [their] people a hundred years before. [...] [They] could not imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in [their] part of the world in 1890", not even in the first half of the twentieth century. After having read Achebe's Trilogy, Adichie (2010c: ix) felt "it was a glorious shock of discovery" because there she found the world of her ancestors, of her grandfather, of her parents' youth:

Things Fall Apart was no longer a novel about a man whose exaggerated masculinity and encompassing fear of weakness make it impossible for him to adapt to the changes in his society, it became the life my great-grandfather might have lived. Arrow of God was no longer just about the British administration's creation of warrant chiefs, and the linked destinies of two men - one an Igbo priest, the other a British administrator - it became the story of my ancestral hometown during my grandfather's time. And No Longer at Ease transcended the story of an educated young Nigerian struggling with the pressure of new urban expectations in Lagos, and became the story of my father's generation.

This paper focuses on the metamorphoses or the gradual changes caused by the mechanisms activated when two different cultures came into close contact, especially because one of them made use of all its tools to minimize the other, to intrude into its space at all levels, not by fierce fight, but by the help of shrewd strategies as Moses Unachukwu, elder of an Igbo village suggests in his wise way of talking, in Arrow of God (2010b:86):

I have traveled to Olu, and I have traveled to Igbo, and I can tell you that there is no escape from the white man. He has come. When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. The white man is like that. [...] As daylight chases away darkness so will the white man stamp out all our customs.

The African Trilogy displays a rich range of characters - most of them Igbo people, but Europeans as well - offering detailed descriptions of the traditional precolonial tribal life, of the colonial encounter and of what life, people and places have undergone during three generations. Each Nigerian character may be representative for any African with a similar life story, while the Europeans whose minds and acts are skillfully read through by Achebe may serve as genuine examples of missionaries, administrators and other British government agents.

2.1 Achebe's metamorphosed language

When two different cultures meet, the only way towards harmonious communication is a common language. Language is a component of great importance of a people's culture because it helps them tell their true stories, which then become their history, it is their main way of communication in all types of relationships within the borders of their land. Along centuries, Europeans did their best to leam different native languages and dialects in order to get closer to the indigenous tribes they discovered while travelling around the world. Totally aware of the possibility of controlling people by imposing one's language upon them, the colonising powers used it as a powerful instrument upon the natives who felt as if "history has forced it down their throat" (Achebe 1975:3). The possible responses to such an attempt are either rejection or subversion (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1995:284). However, Achebe (1975:3) stated he was in a "position to appreciate the value of the inheritance [and not to resent] it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice, which may yet set the world on fire." He also advised: "But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it" (1975:3).

There are many tribes and ethnic groups in Nigeria, each using a different language or dialect. Three main languages are spoken: Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, with more than one hundred dialects and about five hundred other languages being used across the country. This situation could be taken as the main reason for the Nigerian people to have accepted English as the official language of the country used especially by the administration and by the writers who attempt to enrich their national literature. It is the only way they could be read and understood by a larger number of people in their own country, while chances to have their voices heard abroad increase as well. Nigerians admit that, in spite of the fact that their country "was arbitrarily created by the British for their own ends [and] colonialism in Africa disrupted many things, it did create big political units where there were small, scattered ones before" (Achebe 1975:3). Achebe (1975:4) also explains that:

Nigeria had hundreds of autonomous communities ranging in size from the vast Fulani Empire founded by Usman dan Fodio in the north to tiny village entities in the east. Today it is one country.

Everybody knows that there are many other areas of Africa where colonialism facilitated contact between people especially because "it gave them a language with which to talk to one another.[...] Therefore those African writers who have chosen to write in English or French are not unpatriotic smart alecks with an eye on the main chance - outside their own countries. They are by-products of the same process that made the new nation-states of Africa." (Achebe 1975:3)

Achebe argues that an African can leam and handle a European language well enough to use it in creative writing without attempting to write at native standards because "[the African writer] should aim at fashioning an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience" (Achebe 1975:7). Besides, he made a commitment: "I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new African surroundings" (1975:7). According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1995:284), his writing is thought to have accomplished its goals as it "displays a process by which the language is made to bear the weight and texture of a different experience. In doing so, it becomes another language," or, as I suggested, a metamorphosed language.

All through The African Trilogy, the reader becomes aware of Achebe's special way of handling words: a plastic rendering of Igbo proverbs, a plain, clear style to make Igbo people speak so as to transfer the exact message of traditional wisdom and universal truths devoid of futile linguistic ornaments, some proper African English, but also untranslated Igbo words like ogbanje - a malicious spirit, egwugwu - an ancestral spirit, or osu - the name given to a marginalized group of people whose only sin was to worship different gods. Kortenaar (1995:34) argues that such "foreign traces in an English text refer metonymically to a whole world that cannot be adequately translated, a world that Achebe implicitly shares with the characters he writes about". It also testifies to his respect for the African oral tradition. Timothy Reiss claims that, for Achebe, language is a tool which "placed between the observer and the world observed allows the observer to know the world as it truly is" (Reiss qtd. in Kortenaar 1995: 33).

2.2 Achebe's metamorphosed people

As I have already mentioned, the lack of a common language in an instance of contact of two different cultures may be the starting point for various mechanisms of change gradually affecting both sides of the cultural clash in the process of colonisation. Sooner or later the sides are supposed to leam the Other's language in order to approach any type of interaction. The indigenous people experienced enough unhappy situations to understand that learning European languages - English in our case - could bring them different advantages. This was quite a long process perfectly exemplified in Achebe's Trilogy, which shows precisely the road language pursued to become the "tool" Achebe used in order to fulfill the promised task. Moreover, it was the main element inducing profound changes at all levels of the indigenous society.

In Things Fall Apart, which is set in the pre-colonial Nigeria of the 1890s, we witness how the linguistic barrier made the first victim, a white "visitor" of the Igbo land, more precisely of Umuofia, the fictionalised name of a group of villages in southern Nigeria:

"What did the white man say before they killed him?" asked Uchendu.

"He said nothing," answered one of Obierika's companions.

"He said something, only they did not understand him," said Obierika. "He seemed to speak through his nose." (45)

At this first level of communication, we see how not understanding the Other's language becomes equal to "saying nothing", especially because the side which felt more powerful for obvious reasons - they were more numerous and they were on their ancestral land - did not really care to understand the Other. Instead, they solved the problem by simply eliminating the intruder, thus condemning the whole village to cruel revenge on the white men's side.

The white man does not bother to leam the tribe's language, because they have totally different plans:

[Okonkwo]: "Does the white man understand our custom about land?"

[Obierika]: "How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad." (57)

We can understand that some people from Umuofia, where the white man came, settled and also built his church, started to leam the new language and converted to the new religion. One of these people was Nwoye, Okonkwo's son, whose reason for the choice was first and foremost the incapacity he had always felt to accept certain cultural customs of his clan. He speaks about the absurdity of throwing innocent babies to die in the bush, or of estranging children from their tribe, eventually deciding to sacrifice them as a normal consequence of a kinsman's fault only because the ancestral gods invoked by the native priests pretend that this is the right way to deal with such issues:

There was a young man who had been captivated... It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in the darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that hunted his young soul - the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye's callow mind was greatly puzzled. (48)

Okonkwo cannot accept such a blow from his own son and prefers to chase him from home. The character he embodies is the most eloquent example of native resistance to change. He deeply despises his kinsmen, who are not capable of reacting properly by fighting the intruders, and, according to him, are "soft like women" (59). Consequently, a treachery like leaving one's own religion and customs behind coming from one's own son was too painful to bear.

Nneka is another peculiar example of an Igbo character who chooses to take the white man's way. She is the first woman of Umuofia who decides to join the Christian church in spite of being a prosperous farmer's wife. She had four previous twin child-births and was forced by the tribal unwritten laws to throw all her babies away. At the moment of her encounter with Mr. Kiaga, the interpreter in charge with the infant congregation, "she was very heavy with child" and was feeling threatened again by the ancestral customs. When her family found out "she has fled to join the Christians" they thought "it was a good riddance" (49).

The osu group of outcasts of the tribe are among the most motivated to make attempts to get close to the new religion. Because of being dedicated to a different god, their kinsmen had chased them to a special area of the village, cutting their possibilities to take any of the four titles of the clan, not accepting them to their assemblies or sheltering them under a regular Umuofia roof. They were supposed to bear this discriminating treatment forever together with their coming children and next generations. When they first get their feet into the new church, the previously converted folks "raise a protest and [try] to drive them out", but Mr. Kiaga stops them and says: "[they] need Christ more than you and I", adding a very convincing discourse which makes everybody change their behaviour. "The converts drew inspiration and confidence from his unshakable faith... [and] the outcasts shaved off their long, tangled hair, and soon they were the strongest adherents of the new faith" (51-52).

Arrow of God takes us to 1920s Nigeria in the early days of colonization, when the white man had already become a well-known presence, but the language was still a barrier between the newcomers and the people of Umuaro, another Igbo village, especially when serious matters were to be solved. Moses Unachukwu, an old carpenter, was the only villager who could speak the colonizers' language.

His reputation in Umuaro rose to unprecedented heights [because] it was one thing to claim to speak the white man's tongue and quite another to be seen actually doing it. The story spread throughout the six villages. Ezeulu's one regret was that a man of Umunneora should have this prestige. But soon, he thought, his son would earn the same or greater honour. (2010b:79)

At this level of metamorphosis, most of the Igbo people having understood the importance of acquiring the white man's language, admire their kinsmen when they are capable "to take words out of the white man's mouth for them" (79) and look for ways to get closer to his demands:

[w]hat a man does not know is greater than he. Those of us who want Unachukwu to go away forget that none of us can say 'come' in the white man's language. We should listen to his advice. (86)

Ezeulu {eze=king; w/w=priest in Igbo language), the main character called the "Chief Priest" all through the novel, genuinely trusts his spiritual power and feels like being an arrow in God's bow. This would be a plausible explanation for his rejecting attitude when the white man shows great appreciation and wants him to become a warrant chief. Ezeulu wants to stay faithful to his kinsmen and he applies what he reckons to be a wise move: he sends one of his sons to leam the white man's way and language and, at the same time, to "see and hear" for him. He still hopes to be able to save his people from the imminent intrusion of the European religion and culture by fighting the white man back with his own weapons. Unfortunately, he proves to have underestimated the enemy's strength for he chose the most inappropriate way of revenge against his people, by delaying the New Yam Feast invoking the Ulu's will. The wise white man takes advantage of the situation and invokes the true Christian God to save people from famine in exchange for loyalty:

Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and thus uphold that truth, for in destroying his priest he had also brought disaster on himself. [...] For a deity who chose a moment such as this to chastise his priest or abandon him before his enemies was inciting people to take liberties; and Umuaro was just ripe to do so. The Christian harvest which took place a few days after Obika's death saw more people than even Goodcountry could have dreamt. In his extremity, many a man sent his son with a yam or two to offer to the new religion and bring back the promised immunity. (232)

Among the numerous indigenous characters playing on the Umuofia stage, there are some cases of negative behaviour manifested in the same context of cultural collision. Achebe obviously did his best to convey the whole range of human manifestations in an attempt to prove that his Igbo people, like Nigerians or like Africans, are like everybody else and not completely different. He implies that people act almost in the same way in similar situations and especially when it is about money, irrespective of their culture, race or nationality. We can see how quickly people change for the worst. In the native warrant chief system that the colonial administration was trying hard to implement, there were several cases of corruption, high-handedness, cruelty and authoritarianism:

Three years ago, they had put pressure on Captain Winterbottom to appoint a Warrant Chief for Okperi against his better judgement. After a long palaver, he had chosen one James Ikedi, an intelligent fellow who had been among the very first people to receive missionary education in these parts. But what had happened? Within three months of this man receiving his warrant, Captain Winterbottom began to hear rumours of his high-handedness. He had set up an illegal court and a private prison. He took any woman who caught his fancy without paying the customary bride-price. Captain Winterbottom went into the whole business thoroughly and uncovered many more serious scandals. (58)

In No Longer at Ease, which is set in the colonized Nigeria of the 1950s, some years before its independence, most of the Nigerians manifest high admiration for their co-nationals with good command of English. We can identify the interest for education at European standards as the third level of metamorphosis. At this moment of the colonial encounter, one of the main preoccupations of each community is to have as many children and young people educated in mission schools and even in Britain:

Mr. Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And the symbol of the white man's power was the written word, or better still, the printed word. (2010a: 100)

Mr. Okonkwo is the symbol of change; he was Nwoye, son of Obuefi Okonkwo, the main character in the first novel of the trilogy, one of the first young men of Umuofia who had chosen the white man's way. He became a convert and he was given the Christian name Isaac. Meanwhile, more of his kinsmen understood that the written word meant power and set The Umuofia Progressive Union whose main goal was to save money for their sons and daughters' further studies in England. Obi, Mr. Okonkwo's son, is the only one who succeeds in acquiring a British college diploma and a job in the civil service once returned to Nigeria. In his new position, he discovers that many people working for the government were backhanders and corrupted, a reality he already knew and he had fought against by writing virulent articles while studying in Europe. He is highly idealistic about implementing successful western standards in his corrupted Nigeria. We can take this as the final stage of metamorphosis - a Nigerian indigenous person is completely imbued with European knowledge and values and he comes back home full of high expectations for his kinsmen and himself, hoping to be able to change a century-long corrupted system. He manages to resist the temptations to receive bribes himself, but the situation becomes more and more complicated and he changes for the worst. The novel starts with this new Obi, the one who, in spite of his change for the best, was pushed backwards only because he succumbed to temptation in a moment of great pain. When he first came back home, he was so very touched when he discovered "[his mother] had grown so old and frail in four years"., .that "henceforth he wore her sadness round his neck like a necklace of stone" (44), whereas now he has become insensitive even towards his dying mother. His mother died and Clara had gone out of his life. "The two events following closely on each other dulled his sensibility and left him a different man" (2). Everybody was taken by surprise that he accepted to take a bribe, the judge himself is intrigued: "I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this" (2), whereas Mr. Green, Obi's British boss, "[who] was famous for speaking his mind" (2) attempts an informal explanation for some people insisting on the same question the judge had rhetorically asked during the trial. He argues that:

the African is corrupt through and through" and the real facts are "that over countless centuries, the African has been the victim of the worst climate in the world and of every imaginable disease. Hardly his fault. But he has been sapped mentally and physically. We have brought him Western education. But what use is it to him?" (2-3)

Mr. Green's argument symbolizes the colonizers' opinion that they have brought only good things to Africa, but the Africans did not know how to use them to their own advantage. We can easily seize Achebe's irony and also his counterargument represented by Obi himself, who counted so much on education and its power to really change the situation in Nigeria. The novel comes with enough details to let us understand that the fault for the system of power relying on corruption and bribery was in the perpetual underestimation of the local people and their difficult access to high standards education caused by the continuation of colonial intrusion. Besides, this African trilogy shows that metamorphosis was a long, painful and complicated process at any level it worked. There is hope for the entire system, rotten as it is, to stick to the same track of change for the best, paradoxically helped by European education which was forcefully imposed on the natives at the beginning.

2.3 Metamorphosed places

Achebe gives such a detailed description of places that we can literally see them and visualize the huge difference between the native pre-colonial villages and the colonial locations. The action of Things Fall Apart unfolds in Umuofia, a very large and heavily populated place made up of nine villages in the Igbo land of eastern Nigeria. When important events took place, about ten thousand men gathered in the market place:

Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine men were feared in all surrounding country. Its most potent war-medicine was as old as the clan itself. Nobody knew how old...so the neighbouring clans who naturally knew these things feared Umuofia, and would not go to war against it without first trying a peaceful settlement. And in fairness to Umuofia it should be recorded that it never went to war unless its case was clear and just and was accepted as such by its Oracle. (1995:3)

Each village has a clear setting of dusty roads heading towards the main directions: the river, the farming land, the Evil Forest. The inhabitants live in huts made of red earth and covered by thatched roofs built by themselves as large as their wealth allows:

[Okonkwo, the main character of this novel] was a wealthy farmer and had two bams full of yams, and had just marries his third wife. [His] prosperity was visible in his household. He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of red earth. His own hut, or obi, stood immediately behind the only gate in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut, which together formed a half moon behind the obi. The bam was built against one end of the red walls, and long stacks of yam stood out prosperously in it. At the opposite end of the compound was a shed for the goats, and each wife built a small attachment to her hut for the hens. Near the bam was a small house, the "medicine house" or shrine where Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children. (4)

Okonkwo has also gained all the clan's titles and the full respect of his kinsmen, but his accidental shooting of a child is severely punished by the Igbo tribe who ban him from the village for seven years. When he finally came back home he found a totally changed place where "the church had come and led many astray. Not only the low-bom and the outcast but sometimes a worthy man had joined it...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 into Umuofia." (58) For Okonkwo it was difficult to accept:

Umuofia did not appear to have taken any special notice of the warrior's return. The clan had undergone such profound change during his exile that it was barely recognizable. The new religion and government and the trading stores were very much in the people's eyes and minds. There were still many who saw the new institutions as evil, but even so they talked and thought about little else, and certainly not about Okonkwo's return... [He] was deeply grieved. And it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women. (59)

The changing process keeps its track and we discover new instances in Arrow of God, where Achebe speaks about the five Europeans living on Government Hill: Captain Winterbottom, the District Officer, Mr. Clarke, his Assistant, Roberts, an Assistant Superintendent of Police in charge of the local detachment, Wade, in charge of the prison, and Mr. Wright who was a Public Works Department man supervising the new road to Umuaro. Speaking about the new road, the author gives a very important detail, that "the road Mr. Wright was building [connected] Okperi with its enemy, Umuaro" (2010b:77), subtly hinting at the cruel and irrational way of cutting Africa into pieces using only a large map, at the Scramble for Africa moment, when the European powers did not take into account the natural borders of different tribes speaking different languages or dialects, while establishing the new provinces of the African continent meant to be "civilised" by them.

This list of British representatives and their duties show that the white men are in the most important institutional positions, but the course of events let us know that they are living hard times with the people of Umuaro who "had put up more resistance to change than any other clan in the whole province. Their first school was only a year or so old and a tottering Christian mission had been set up after a series of failures" (179).

No Longer at Ease is set in a modem large town, Lagos, the capital city of Nigeria, at the moment the novel was written, which compared to Umuofia or Umuaro described in the previous novels, represents the highest level of metamorphosis that a place of pre-colonial Africa could reach in about half a century. While Obi was still living in his native village of Umuofia, he was dreaming of the day when he would see Lagos with his own eyes. He had heard so many wonderful things about it from the soldiers passing through his village that "for many years afterwards, Lagos was always associated with electric lights and motor-cars in [his] mind" (2010a: 11). Some years later, after having returned from England, he was waiting for his girlfriend, Clara, "in one of the less formidable of Lagos slum areas" and, for the first time, he saw the difference. "He had not thought places like this stood side by side with cars, electric lights and brightly dressed girls" (12). He realized that that was the real Lagos he couldn't even imagine, with more poverty than he had ever seen in his village, with people living in the streets in a total lack of safety those belonging to a family used to have in their traditional compounds. Children and old men were wrapped in cloths and used to sell anything for a living. As a matter of fact, there were two different cityscapes in Lagos: on the one hand, there was the bustling big city with bars, dancing places, restaurants and the European quarters where some Nigerian people like Obi, educated and working in important administrative places could live, on the other hand, there were the segregated neighbourhoods where poverty, squalor and sadness went hand in hand.

We can see how modernity and urban lifestyles have influenced people's behaviour - culture and traditions have almost been forgotten in town. Still, there are some aspects especially related to some ancient taboos which people cannot get rid of, irrespective of their education and social position. The most striking one is the interdiction to marry a girl with an osu identity, even for a young man having acquired British education.

3. Conclusion

Achebe's African Trilogy is a palpable evidence of a long and painful process of change taking place in one of the numerous places of Africa, but also of this world heading more and more clearly towards globalization, which some people consider only a different name given to colonization. The new wave of change, as it was perceived by the Igbo people in the books this paper deals with, was quite successful in sweeping away the old religions, customs and traditions as well as a good number of African languages and dialects, some of them disappearing forever, especially because of their oral status. European languages became the ones which facilitated larger contacts among different tribes of Africa and also communication with the world at large.

This trilogy, as well as many other African discourses written in European languages, proves that, paradoxically, these very languages became the tool which helped "the colonies write back" and bring important information to the world about the real Africa and Africans. Achebe was one of the writers who did his best "to reestablish the humanity of his Africans, insisting] that Africans live in the same world and are not absolutely other" (Kortenaar 1995:32). Achebe accomplished even more than that, as Obi Nwakanma (2013, online) was spotlighting in a newspaper article shortly after Achebe's death by mentioning some reasons why this writer "seems immortal and timeless":

After Achebe, Africa was no longer that "area of darkness" denuded of human consciousness. Achebe restored its coherent institutional fabric and its "universe of meaning and values". To put it quite simply, Chinua Achebe's importance is that he restored the dignity and humanity of the African, pillaged for over five hundred years in antinomic imagery and stories circulated across the world without the challenge of a counter narrative. It was a historic task and only a man of Achebe's genius and powerful introspection could achieve it. He wrote with crystalline power and authority.

References

References

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Achebe, C. 2010a (1963). No Longer at Ease. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Achebe, C. 2010b (1965). Arrow of God. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Achebe, C. 2010c . The African Trilogy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Achebe, C. 1975. 'The African Writer and the English Language' [Online]. Available: http://www.scribd.com/doc/139529573/Chinua-Achebe-the-African-Writer-and-theEnglish-Language [accessed 2013, April 20].

Adichie, N. C. 2010. 'Introduction' to The African Trilogy. New York, London: Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, pp. vii-xiii.

Appiah, K. A. 1992. 'Introduction' to Things Fall Apart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. ix-xvii.

Appiah, K. A. April 18, 2013. 'Achebe: Exit of a Literary Giant' [Online]. Available: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/04 [accessed 2013, April 20].

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Loomba, A. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York, London: Routledge.

Kortenaar, T. N. 1995. 'How the Centre is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart' in Postcolonial Literatures. M. Parker and R. Starkey (eds.). Hampshire, Macmillan Press Ltd, pp 31-53.

Nwakanma, O. 2013. 'Chinua Achebe, a Celebration' in Vanguard [Online]. Available: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/03/chinua-achebe-a-celebration [accessed 2013, April 22].