Okonkwo
It is impossible to imagine someone reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and not falling in love with the classic novel. It is not by chance that Okonkwo is one of the most recognisable characters in literature. Few literary characters have a more powerful and enduring effect as Okonkwo. He is one of those characters with an uncanny capacity to charm and repulse at the same time, a rare breed of person, who despite all his obvious shortcomings – the violence, the misogyny and the arrogance – there is a residual element that is still endearing, leaving many conflicted.
Perhaps it is the realisation that deep down, beyond the façade of exaggerated masculinity, there is actually a tender and vulnerable human being in need of care and comfort. Instead of despising him, you end up feeling sorry for him. You will him to do well and become a better person.
The first lines of Things Fall Apart are classic and memorable. I know a good number who read the book at school many years ago, but can still recite them by heart. They remain secure in the shelves of memory. Their purpose is to announce Okonkwo and the story in glorious fashion:
“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino …”
After this, the temptation to discover more about this character is irresistible. The rest of the story itself revolves around Okonkwo.
As the story unfolds, you come face to face with the man, Okonkwo. He is the classic tragic hero. He rises from poor circumstances to achieve incredible success on the back of sheer hard work and determination. He is the archetypal self-made man, working his way up from the bottom.
Interestingly, his determination to succeed is, in part, motivated a strong revulsion of his father. Unoka is a soft, poor, weak, reckless and lazy man who stands for everything that Okonkwo despises and is eager to avoid in his own life. His behavior is driven by an extreme fear that he might become like his father. He pushes himself hard, vowing never to be soft and lazy like his father. As he sees his father as having feminine qualities, Okonkwo goes to extremes to demonstrate his manliness. It manifests in aggressive and violent behaviour. For Okonkwo femininity equals weakness, which accounts for a disgusting attitude towards women, reinforced by a thoroughly patriarchal society in which he lived. He works hard, achieving great success and earning titles and the respect of his male peers.
However, his sheer determination to succeed and avoid his father’s path is at the core of his fundamental weakness. He is brash, intolerant, rude and violent. He rules his family with an iron fist. He exhibits the qualities of a dictator and wields absolute power. He tries his best not to show any emotional attachment to his family or to anyone. His intolerance leads him to humiliate others who do not meet his exacting standards. On one occasion he refers to Osugo, a fellow man, as a woman, simply because he is not successful and has no title. When he assaults one of his wives during the sacred Week of Peace, the community finds him guilty of committing an abomination and Okonkwo is banished from the village for a number of years. As punishment, he is sent away to his mother’s village where he lives in exile with his uncle – a situation he finds distasteful and humiliating.
After his return, Okonkwo still struggles to cope with the changes taking place in his society, represented by the arrival of the white missionaries and imperialists. Okonkwo cannot countenance the idea of the new arrivals taking over his land and culture. But he is more disappointed by his fellow citizens who appear to be acquiescing to the new force. He cannot understand why his fellow citizens are choosing accommodation when they could fight the occupation. “How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has a put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart,” Okonkwo laments to his friend Obierika.
But he is still adamant that he will fight, even if it means he will do it alone – reflecting the unilateralist streak in his mentality. “Afraid? I do not care what he does to you. I despise him and those who listen to him. I shall fight alone if I choose,” he declares.
In the end, unable to accept his society’s weakness and feeling hopeless, Okonkwo commits murder, killing one of the white man’s messengers and thereafter, hangs himself, ending a remarkable life. The suicide could be seen as a weakness but it might also be seen as the sign of a proud man who preferred to control his own destiny, rather than to submit himself to the authority of the white man who would probably have tried and executed him for the offence under his new system of justice. Okonkwo does not want that. Ever the proud man, he wants to end it his own way. He is a character who is prepared to self-harm in order to prove a point, regardless of what that does to those around him – again reflecting a selfish streak.
Reading the story of Okonkwo reminds me of the central character of Zimbabwe’s political drama – Robert Mugabe. It’s only in recent years that we have come to know fragments of his father’s life. We know from his sporadic revelations that his father literally abandoned his home and family when Mugabe was still very young. The young Robert had just lost his elder brother, Michael when his father packed his bags and left. Young Robertb had to step up and assume an important role in the family at an early stage of his life. His father went away to Bulawayo, where he remarried and started a new family. The young and intelligent Robert grew up under the care of his mother, and the Jesuit priests at Kutama Mission who had already identified and admired his talents. There and later in life he excelled in many endeavours.
The rest of the story is one of a young man who invested a great deal of work in order to succeed. In 1964 Mugabe was detained for ten years on account of his political activities. He spent the decade in prison or banished at Gonakudzingwa. But as fellow inmates played games to while up time in jail, Mugabe read books voraciously, earning a number of academic degrees through correspondence, among them law and economics. There can be no doubt that Mugabe was a hard worker. He had solid personal achievements, all earned against serious odds. Like Achebe’s Okonkwo, it is unlikely that Mugabe was impressed by his father’s conduct. He was probably determined to avoid his path. This will to succeed and never to lose is evident in his life and political career.
But like Okonkwo, this relentless drive to succeed by all means necessary has also been the source of his great weaknesses. He’s a proud and self-assured man who speaks his mind. When he appointed his Cabinet in the early 2000s, Mugabe said he wanted madoda sibili (real men). But he also goes to extremes, manifesting in aggressive and violent behaviour. At one point, when he boasted of possessing degrees, he was not referring to his numerous academic titles, no. He called them “degrees of violence”. And when his chief rival, Morgan Tsvangirai was beaten and tortured in March 2007, Mugabe seemed to take pleasure in his suffering. Back in the 1980s when he fell out with his then political nemesis, Joshua Nkomo, he declared the best way to deal with a cobra that enters the house was to crush its head. During that period, thousands of civilians were killed during the Gukurahundi campaign – human rights activists estimate that 20,000 were killed. After losing to Tsvangirai in March 2008, the response was an extremely violent campaign in the rural areas.
Like Okonkwo Mugabe has a unilateralist streak. He will fight alone if he has to. He is very contemptuous of fellow African leaders, especially in the Francophone Africa, whom he sees as puppets of the former colonial states. We learn fro his uncle James Chikerema, that he was always like that from the early days. If he was not happy, he selected his grandfather’s cattle from the rest and drove them away to herd them alone. Likewise, he has driven Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth. He has threatened to leave SADC. And he has recently declared that African countries might leave the United Nations if demands for the UN Security Council reform are not met.
It is arguable that like Okonkwo, the will to succeed and to be different from his wayward father has driven him to extremes. He certainly made great achievements. If Okonkwo threw Amalinze the cat, Mugabe led the struggle that toppled the Smith regime. Yet as Okonkwo ruled his family with an iron fist, Mugabe has also ruled Zimbabwe with a heavy hand. In both cases, there is a clear lack of emotional attachment. Okonkwo was fighting change and chose the aggressive methods. Mugabe has struggled to accept the idea of change and his methods have been aggressive. But in the end, Okonkwo realised he was on his own. Mugabe is not there yet, but it is increasingly getting lonely. In the end, staying in office while watching the country go deeper into the mire and facing the daily revulsion of a once-admiring nation is probably worse than Okonkwo’s final path.
Julius
One of Zimbabwe’s greatest writers, Charles Mungoshi, gave us another powerful and enduring character. His name is Julius, the tragic hero in a story of the same title, The Hero, in a collection of short stories called Coming of the Dry Season. I wonder if Julius is an echo to another tragic hero, Shakerpeare’s Caesar.
The story is set at a boarding school, which made it familiar when I first read it because I was still at school, a similar establishment to the one Julius attended. It was easy to relate to Julius story and its not surprising that he became our hero, too.
In the story, Julius does something remarkable, either brave or reckless depending on one’s perspetive. But what he did was something that most students would have wanted to do, but were not courageous enough to do. Years afterwards, we remember boarding school life with some nostalgia, but it was by no means an easy life. Water from the showers was cold, the food was basic and often a great challenge to the palate. Julius was the rebel who challenged the authorities in a fiery speech delivered in front of all students. “I would not eat what you yourself would not give to your dogs!” Julius thundered. The rest of the students cheered. He was representing them.
It was easy for us to identify with Julius because we would all have wanted to be like him – the personification of courage, speaking truth to power. But we were all so timid and unable to live with the consequences of such bravery. So we suffered silently and marvelled at Julius’ courage. Julius’ peers cheered him on. He also believed he had performed an heroic act.
But as expected, the end is brutal. The authorities expel Julius from school. The story proceeds with our hero taking the lonely and humiliating walk home.
As he walks away, it dawns on him that he has to face the consequences of his bravery on his own. He remembers the tough environment at home where a wicked step-mother awaited. “Already he could hear his stepmother’s bick-bickering voice”, Mungoshi writes, revealing the challenge that awaited the hero. He remembers that after his supposedly courageous outburst, he is now on his own. Those who cheered him on are not with him. They have stayed at school and they are getting on with their education. None of them stood up for him in his hour of need.
Sometimes when I hear President Mugabe speaking on international platforms, I am reminded of our Julius, the tragic hero who stands up to authority. Fellow African leaders cheer him on as he launches his diatribes against the West. But they are more pragmatic. They never do it themselves. In our leader they have found a convenient spokesman. He takes the punches of their behalf.
Like Julius, Mugabe has raised important and legitimate causes that concern the weaker nations of this world. He has raised important issues at the United Nations and other forums. But in the end, it is his people who have paid the price of exclusion. Like Julius he sees himself as a hero doing the right thing. He has often railed against fellow African leaders for being timid.
Unlike Julius however, Mugabe doesn’t have to live with the consequence of his ‘heroism’ alone. Ordinary Zimbabweans do. When he is unwell, he can always hop onto a place and go to Singapore. For the ordinary Zimbabwe, they have to make do with the impoverished local hospital which are struggling to provide basic healthcare. Mungoshi’s Julius carried his cross, but Zimbabwe’s Julius doesn’t have to. Instead, it’s carried by the poor citizens.
Ezeulu
Ezeulu is the tragic hero in another Achebe classic, Arrow of God. He is the Chief Priest of the traditional god Ulu, ruler of Umuaro, which consists of six villages.
Ezeulu is a proud man. He believes he has a prominent role in his community, which his people must respect. However, he also feels that they don’t respect him enough and Ulu, the god that he represents. His nemesis is Nwaka, a man who challenges his authority. Feeling challenged and disrespected, Ezeulu takes a defensive approach which borders on paranoia. As a result he feels compelled to always assert his authority. He wants the people to feel his authority.
The situation is complicated by the arrival of the white missionaries and imperialists in the region. They are bring in a new power structure and religion which is challenging his own authority in the eyes of the people. Yet Ezeulu is pragmatic enough to know that the white man’s arsenal of power is superior. He tries to strike a balance between the two poles, his traditional religion from which he derived authority and the new ways of the white man. However, his fellow citizens question him when he sends his son, Oduche to a school established by the white missionaries. But Ezeulu thinks it makes sense to send at least one of his sons to learn the ways of the white man. This is not understood by the citizens, particularly as he is the Chief Priest of Ulu. It gets worse when his son Oduche kills the royal python, an act that is regarded as an abomination. They blame Ezeulu for bringing the British into the community.
Later on, Ezeulu is detained for months by the colonial administrator. The colonial administrator wanted Ezeulu to assume the role of chief in the region, but Ezeulu refused, an act that reaffirmed his strength of character and commitment to tradition. A proud man, Ezeulu refused to be the “white man’s chief”. There were no chiefs in their culture and he wasn’t about to become a chief appointed by the colonial authorities.
Nevertheless, Ezeulu is disappointed that his fellow citizens did not fought for him during his detention. He had initially refused to go to the colonial office when he was summoned but the village elders had persuaded him to heed the call. Now, no-one had come to defend him while he was detained. That made him very unhappy. Instead of it being a war with the colonial authority, he began to see it as a war between himself and his own people. They were failing to respect him and Ulu. Bitterness ate at his soul during his time in detention and while inside, he plotted revenge. The people had to be punished.
As Chief Priest Ezeulu had an important role in the community. He was responsible for keeping time, so he counted the months according to the cycles of the moon. In that role he literally controlled time for the rest of the citizens. There was an important ceremony, called the Feast of New Yams, an event which opened the season of harvesting crops. Ezeulu was responsible for announcing the arrival of this festival. He counted the months by eating one yam at a time according to the cycles of the moon. But since he was in detention, Ezeulu had not eaten the yams for those months that he was away from home. When he returned, he did not dispose of them and acted as if time had literally stopped during his time away in detention. He just continued from where he had left before his detention.
The result was that while in real terms the time of the festival and therefore the harvest period had arrived, according to Ezeulu, it had not. There would be no festival until he had eaten all the yams in their order. But this meant the crops would stay in the ground for too long and they would die and rot. The result would be famine in the land. People pleaded with Ezeulu. They begged him to reconsider otherwise the people would starve to death. But Ezeulu would not budge. He was not moved by the suffering of his people.
Ezeulu did not see his stance as stubbornness. As far as he was concerned, he was merely doing Ulu’s will. It was not him, but Ulu, punishing the people and they deserved to be punished because they had disrespected Ulu and himself, the Chief Priest. Ezeulu saw himself as the arrow of Ulu – the arrow of God.
Sensing an opportunity to penetrate the traditional community that had largely resisted intrusion, the leaders of the new Christian religion pounced. They promised the people that there was a way out of the problem they were facing with their Chief Priest. They could join the new religion, where the new God was not as vengeful. He would allow them to carry out their harvest and avert a famine. This promise opened a new gateway for conversion of the people of Umuaro to the Christian religion. Facing famine because of Ezeulu’s obstinacy, more people crossed to the new religion, which promised salvation.
In the end, Ezeulu’s final days are lonely and miserable. His son, Obika, dies a mysterious death, which the people see as punishment for Ezeulu’s irrational conduct. Ezeulu himself is shocked by his son’s death. Why would Ulu punish him like that? Why would he let his son die? What had he done to deserve such punishment? With so many questions and confused, Ezeulu loses his mind.
So it’s a miserable end for old Ezeulu. He is principled but stubborn. He’s motivated by vengeance and misses an opportunity to be pragmatic and to adapt. Pride is his greatest weakness. He thinks highly of himself and his opinions and has very little regard for others. When he is questioned, he takes offence. When he has problems, he blames everyone else and wants them to pay. Everyone else is wrong, but he alone is right. His refusal to declare the festival so that the harvest could begin was a sign of a man who was prepared to cut the nose to spite the face. Ultimately, his stubbornness undermines his own religion and his authority. He burnt down the house in pursuit of a rat.
Like Ezeulu, Mugabe is proud and head-strong. He has to get his way, at all costs. The suffering of the people in pursuit of that goal is an externality which can be accommodated. Like Ezeulu, Mugabe thinks the people are not grateful and respectful enough, after all that he has given. The people do not defend him enough but instead, they blame him. Like Ezeulu, when questioned, he takes offence. Some of the policies that have been carried out have had disastrous consequences on the economy and society. But it’s always someone else’s fault. Never his government.
Flawed characters
The powerful characters are memorable. They leave a lasting impression in the mind of the reader. They are strong men, proud and self-assured. Each of them deal with power – whether it’s acquiring it, defending it, asserting it or challenging it. For each as far as power is concerned, the line between bravery and recklessness is very thin, as is the line between confidence and arrogance.
Despite the outward show of power and strength, they are also vulnerable. They each have a soft centre. Inside they have to deal with a serious tug of war of emotions, which they must keep locked in. They cannot let the world know they are weak. For Okonkwo, it ends in suicide. For Ezeulu, it ends with him losing his mind. For Julius it’s the turmoil and fear of returning to a broken home. President Mugabe might put on an outward show of strength and defiance, but inside there must be a mixture of emotions, including fear of life outside office.
Pride and an exaggerated sense of their own importance is their greatest undoing. This misplaced sense of heroism leads them to their own downfall.
Mugabe retains a large number of admirers, both within his party and outside the country. They regard him as a hero. There is an Okonkwo quality in his aggressive anti-West stance, which makes him the poster-boy of the anti-imperialist movement across the world. Okonkwo was violent and beat up his wives at will. But that did not stop him earning respect and getting titles. Whatever Zimbabweans feel about him, Mugabe’s peers still accord him titles and respect.
There is also a Julius quality in his anti-Western rhetoric on the international stage, which endears him to vast numbers of Africans and others who regard him as a hero. The difference is unlike Julius, he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of his actions, but his people do.
There is also an Ezeulu quality in his pride and vengeful approach, even against his own people. Both refuse to follow the path of common sense and pragmatism, favouring instead a dogmatic approach to principle.
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, the story of Zimbabwe for the past 36 years reads like a tragic tale in which Robert Mugabe is the central and dominant character – a hero to some, but a villain to others. Achebe gave us Okonkwo and Ezeulu among other great characters in his works of literature. Mungoshi gave us Julius in Coming of the Dry Season. Zimbabwe has given us Robert Mugabe – and there is something of him in each of those three great characters. We know how it ended for Okonkwo, Ezeulu and Julius. It was not pretty. But the story of Mugabe continues, although it is now surely in the twilight zone …
waMagaisa
Recommended books
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
Charles Mungoshi, Coming of the Dry Season
