The novel dealt with the clash of civilizations: African and European, and suggested that the European prevailed over the African and that the African world has fallen apart and is no longer able to provide Africans with the cultural compass with which to navigate the exigencies of living on planet earth. As it were, contemporary Africans are operating with poorly understood European cultural parameters, not their culture, hence are a confused people?

Let us, briefly, summarize the Okonkwo character. Okonkwo was the son of a social never do well father. Apparently, he did not like the fact that he was a social nobody and resolved to “wash his hands well” so that he could eat with the do wells of his Igbo society. He was driven to succeed by all means necessary. As a young man, he excelled at wrestling (sports) and that brought him fame. He then threw himself into the work of his people, farming, and excelled at that, too.

The Igbos say: when a man says yes, his Chi says yes. At a relatively young age, Okonkwo had made it by his society’s standard of success. He had several wives and several children and by Igbo universal acclaim had made it into the decision makers' circle of his society. The born nobody is now a social somebody, a very important person, a VIP (the craving of human egos).

As a result of a dispute between Okonkwo’s village and another village, a lad, Ikemefuna, was given to Okonkwo’s village in restitution. The Village gave the lad to Okonkwo for safekeeping. For all practical purposes, the lad became a member of Okonkwo’s family and grew up with his children. The lad, in fact, called Okonkwo father.

Ikemefuna got to be one of the loveliest characters in Achebe’s novels. He was pleasant and music loving (like Okonkwo’s father). He was every person’s idea of a wholesome, loveable kid.

Apparently, the lad was destined to be killed and one day the village elders requested that he be brought to be killed, to avenge the killing of their fellow villager for whom he was given. Okonkwo not only brought the boy forward but volunteered to be the one who killed him. Okonkwo killed the boy, Ikemefuna.

Okonkwo’s killing of his step son, Ikemefuna, was what troubled me. I could not quite understand why he killed the boy.

There were other aspects of Okonkwo’s character that troubled me, such as his volcanic temper and impatience. His younger wife once made the mistake of disrespecting Okonkwo, and Okonkwo gave her the beating of her life. Okonkwo was a proud man and any one who dared make him lose social face was vigorously punished. Indeed, Okonkwo would kill to safe his social face. Okonkwo had no soft side to him; the man had no feeling of compassion and sympathy for any one; what mattered to him was to succeed, as defined by his society.

The Okonkwo character played itself out when white men came to his world. Like most true Africans, Okonkwo sensed the end of the world he knew and resented it. He wanted to maintain his world and to keep out the new world knocking at its doors.

First, the missionaries came knocking. The missionaries preached a strange religion, Christianity. This new religion talked about all people being the same and equal. This view, apparently, was unacceptable to Okonkwo. Okonkwo, apparently, preferred his Igbo society where some were deemed more important than others. After all, he, Okonkwo, had worked very had to make it into the ruling circle of his society and he was not about to accept that all men were created equal. He had grown up having no respect for his feminine, music loving and indolent father and now the new Christian dispensation tells him that all he had worked for was for nothing.

Okonkwo particularly resented the fact that the Osus (slaves) of his village were given the audacity by the Christians to believe that they were like everyone else. How dared Christians teach that all people are the same?

Things came to a head when the British authorities tried to establish their administrative and legal control over Okonkwo’s village and sent in their police (court messengers, Kotima) to enforce their law. Never mind the content of the law, the salient point is that an alien force, white men, had descended on Okonkwo’s village and are now the bosses of his world.

If Okonkwo acquiesced to the white man’s rule it meant that he had become a defeated man and is now like the slaves that he despised. Okonkwo could not accept this reality and chose to die. He died rather than accept the ruler ship of the white man.

Okonkwo’s death symbolized the defiant African who refused to embrace the white man’s culture; he remained a true African. Those that survived him became mixed breed, phony Africans like us.

(As an aside, my history is somewhat akin to Okonkwo’s. The White man came to my town, Umuohiagu, near Owerri, in 1902. My great grandfather, Njoku, led his people in fighting the white man’s army that was passing through his town, after subjugating the long juju of Arochukwu, “pacifying the lower Niger for British rule”. He was killed in that war. His son, Osuji, who was then ten years old, survived him. Osuji’s character is exactly like Okonkwo’s character; he was one continuous headache for the local NwaDC of his area. He was in and out of NwaDC’s court for defying their rule. Osuji never accepted the white man as his boss. But he was a smart defiant man; he recognized that hating the white man was one thing, not coping with extant political reality, is another. Thus, he sent his children to the white man’s school. Indeed, he donated the land on which the Holy Ghost Missionaries built their school and Church in his village. Osuji’s children, my father included, unabashedly embraced the new world order. Unlike Okonkwo, grandfather did not fight the leveling of society brought by Christians. The Osus of our town were accepted by us, Dialas.)

When I read about Okonkwo killing Ikemefuna I was so offended that the only thing that I could do was agree with the Christians that Okonkwo and the world he represented were primitive and deserved to be defeated and civilized. To me, it seemed that only a savage could have killed his own step son.

I do not believe that I ever forgave Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna. In fact, that singular act, though fictional, made me ashamed to be Igbo. For a long time, I associated Igbos with primitivity.

I must add that my childhood home, Lagos, was not particularly kind to Igbos. I hate to say this but truth must be said: we, children, in the 1960s Lagos, actually called Igbos primitive folks (kobokobo). When a child came from the East we would go look at him to appreciate his alleged primitive qualities; he was not one of us and, generally, it took some time before we accepted him as one of us.

I used to wonder why Chinua Achebe wrote a book whose chief character exhibited primitive and, in street language, crazy qualities? I wished that he had made his chief character a civilized and sane person!

It took me the longest time to recognize that Achebe is a great artist and, as such, is beholden to the truth, only the truth and may God help him. He did not write his book to please his readers, to present a character that would universally be appreciated as a decent human being but was, apparently, motivated to portray a real Igbo character.

Achebe had to portray a man who struggled very hard to meet the criteria for his society’s expectations for acceptance. For him to have struggled to be accepted by his society, he had to admire his society. Because he valued his society, he struggled to maintain it and resented its demise, as was initiated by the dawn of the white man.

Okonkwo had to be who he was to make Achebe’s book poignant and realistic. If he was different he would not have made the case of a man representing his dying culture and struggling to preserve it in the face of unrelenting attack by a conquering foreign culture.

Okonkwo was an Igbo man per excellence. His problematic behavior was representative of problematic Igbo behavior patterns. (As noted, his personality and behavior reminds me of my grandfather’s indomitable character and behavior. I say this because I asked myself whether I am projecting, that is, seeing something in me that I do not like, dissociate from it, deny it and attribute it to other persons. I do not believe that I am externalizing anything in me. I understand the nature of the various ego defense mechanisms and how they work in people, and am mindful of employing any of them.)

I think that Achebe meant for Okonkwo to represent the Igbo character. (Since Achebe is still alive, I stand to be corrected by him.)

In as much as Okonkwo represents the Igbo character, what does he tell us about Igbos?

First, let us try to approach Okonkwo’s character from a psychological perspective. On the face of it, any mental health professional would diagnose Okonkwo as a rigid paranoid personality. (See David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character, also his Neurotic Styles; David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, Paranoid Process and other books on paranoia, including the purely descriptive American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, sections on paranoia.)

Okonkwo exhibited all the classic symptoms of paranoid personality disorder. He felt inadequate and compensated with a desire to seem adequate, exaggerated adequacy. He felt inordinately inferior and restituted with pursuit of what Alfred Adler called fictional sense of superiority. He wanted to be a very important person. Of course, he was not a very important person; nevertheless, he acted as if he was a very important person.

Since Okonkwo’s sense of specialness was false, it had to be defended at all times. Defense of false superiority makes it seem real to the defender. A neurotic wants to seem important, acts important, defends importance and comes to think that he is, in fact, important. In clinical language, he has delusion of importance.

The person who wants to be important, generally, wants every person in his world to treat him as if he is important. If you treat him as if he is important he gets along with you, but if he suspects that you treat him as a social nobody, he feels angry at you. In this light, when Okonkwo’s wife treated him as if he was a nobody, by disobeying his orders, he beat her senselessly; in fact, he nearly killed the poor woman. He had to show her who was the boss, who had power, who was important, who was superior to whom, who must be obeyed.

The paranoid character fears being demeaned and will physically and or verbally (depending on whether he is the active or passive type) attacks you if you dare make him seem unimportant. He will quarrel with you if he felt that you publicly disgraced him, degraded him, belittled him, criticized him, humiliated him etc. His whole life is motivated by effort to seem important and you are asked to collude with him and validate that neurosis, and if not, you are seen as his enemy and attacked.

Okonkwo liked those who affirmed his social importance and resented those who made him remember what he fears in him, his sense of littleness. He sought grandeur, for he felt little.

In existential light, all human beings separated from their creator and, as a result, feel incomplete, imperfect and little; they then strive to seem complete, perfect and big; but they do so without reference to their creator hence must fail. Human beings seek importance and specialness on their own terms, ego terms, and must not obtain it until they return to their source. It is only in God, or whatever you choose to call your maker, that human beings have worth, value, meaning and purpose. Human beings did not create themselves and cannot give themselves value; they can only obtain real sense of value when they are rooted in God, not in seeking social praise. Nigerians, a godless people, feel like they are nothing and seek each others praise as a means of seeming existential importance, hence their ridiculous vanity and pursuit of prestige, but they can only obtain worth when they turn to God.

(If you are interested in clinical issues, paranoid personality is different from paranoia proper, aka delusional disorder and or schizophrenia, paranoid type. Paranoid personality is within the normal personality continuum, or, if you like, is neurosis…every human being, even the most normal person, has some neurosis, whereas delusional disorder and schizophrenia are psychoses. In delusional disorder the person believes what is not true as true. Some delusions are: grandiosity, belief in ones superiority to other people; persecutory, belief that other people are out to kill or harm one, feeling that other people are talking behind ones back, laughing at one etc; jealousy, belief that ones spouse is cheating on one and a tendency to beat her on account of that false suspicion; erotomanic, belief that very important persons are in love with one; somatic, belief that one has sickness that one does not have; in schizophrenia, in addition to delusions are hallucinations: hearing voices, seeing what is not there, feeling that things are crawling underneath ones skin, smelling what other people do not smell and other sensory disorder and, of course, thought disorder.)

Okonkwo did not exhibit delusions and hallucinations and, therefore, did not have psychoses; he was a neurotic, paranoid cum narcissistic type. The man was inordinately afraid…paranoia is intense fearfulness…but denied his fear and masked it with false courage, his bravadoes. His killing Ikemefuna exhibited his false courage for, obviously, he loved the boy, unless he was a total inhumane monster, but feared that if he shrunk from killing him that he would be perceived by members of his society as a wimp, a weakling; he wanted to be seen as a strong man and acted tough by killing the lovely boy.

I am sorry to say this but truth must be said. Many Igbos exhibit Okonkwo’s paranoid character traits. I have pointed these out in several writings and have probably encored the eternal hatred of Igbos. But harbingers of the truth cannot afford to shrink from articulating the truth, as they see it, even if it means encoring the hatred of other human beings.

Only the truth shall save us. The Igbos I see around me act boisterously in an apparent effort to seem courageous (false courage); they act as if they are tough and powerful, in an apparent effort to mask their weakness. Generally, they lack what are called the finer qualities of humanity: compassion, kindness, sympathy, caring, loving, forgiving etc. They are Okonkwo, pure and simple, character disordered persons.

Chinua Achebe, as a great artist, helped us understand our character structures. But he is not a mental health professional (psychiatrist, psychologist, clinical social worker) and, as such, cannot help us heal our problematic characters.

This writing is not interested in psychotherapy, in changing people, but merely observes how people are. I think that Achebe did all of us a great service in describing the Igbo character and Igbos ought to be grateful to him and seek ways to change it. Instead of denying the obvious, they ought to take the time to understand why they have their character traits and accentuate their positive aspects, while working to improve their negative aspects.

I am not in denial. As already noted, my grandfather was exactly like Okonkwo. All you had to do was disrespect the man, even slightly, and he punished you. I recall a poor man in the village who insulted grandmother and grandfather made sure that he was sent to jail, to teach him a lesson. What lesson was he taught? He was made to know the difference between important and unimportant persons.

I spent a couple of years with my grandparents in the village, in the 1960s, my parents sent me home to go learn Igbo language. Once my teacher flogged me and I went home and told grandfather about it and he insisted that he be removed from the school and he was. You did not mess with the man. His pride was humongous and his temper was volcanic. Anything that made him lose social face was intolerable. (I am the exact opposite of grandfather; I was a shy, introspect, philosophic, avoidant boy, that is, I desired acceptance from all persons, feared social rejection and pleased folks to get their acceptance and withdrew from those I felt would reject me; of course, I have worked on these traits and, today, could care less whether other folks accepted me or not; hence could say these unpalatable things about Igbos, aware that many of them would like to strangle me for revealing the skeletons in their closets.)

I think that it is about time we, Igbos, stopped being resentful of those who tell us the truth of who we are. Achebe is one of our greatest truth tellers. Unfortunately, he cast his truth telling in a fictional mode, made his prototypal Igbo a fictional character. But he was trying to tell us something about ourselves. We ought to stop and learn from the man.

I see Igbos everywhere motivated by fear of social rejection, of trying to attain the social indices of importance (if they have some brains they strive after PhD, they think that the doctorate makes them seem important…when I first got out of graduate school, if you did not address me as Dr Osuji, I felt slighted by you, but now, I actually feel insulted if you did for I do not take pride in having gone to white man’s schools; at any rate, what matters to me is the truth, not social honor). Some Igbos satisfy their vanity and pride through wealth and political power.

Look, these behaviors are not healthy. A healthy person is actuated by love and social service. Whatever you do in the spirit of love, to serve other people is healthy; but whatever you do to make you seem important, to enhance your prestige is unhealthy. I am telling you the truth; we ought to stop and think about it and stop making fools of ourselves via pursuit of infantile narcissism.

CONCLUSION

It has taken me many years to understand the difference between a great artist like Chinua Achebe and ordinary folks like me. Artists capture the human condition in a few words, perhaps, without even consciously knowing how they did it.

Achebe wrote Things fall apart when he was still in his twenties. It took me many more years than twenty eight to understand what the man was trying to tell us. And, I suspect that many folks out there have not understood what the man is telling us.

In portraying Okonkwo as a sick character, Achebe is probably telling us that we are sick characters.

My own humble contribution to this discourse is reminding us that sickness can be understood and healed.

To heal is to change; we can change our characters, from self centered to sociocentric, to loving and caring for all people.

Instead of Okonkwo killing Ikemefuna, the sensitive boy, a real human being, (killing his real self, in pursuit of his false ideal self) he could have defied his society’s insistence that he be killed and taught them to love and care for him, even if he came from another village and is given in restitution for an injury done to them. He could have practiced what Jesus Christ is trying to teach us: to love and forgive one another our sins (to be our real self, as symbolized by Ikemufuna, rather than reject and kill him).

We are all sinners and must forgive each other to have our own sins forgiven us. Love and care for all human beings. Do everything you do from the perspective of love and you cannot be (too) wrong. However, to love and care for all people you must have a healthy personality. A healthy personality works for the good of all society, what Alfred Adler called social interest, whereas a neurotic personality works for his self interests only, for what enhances his ego, his pride and vanity (and pays a heavy price, live in fear and unhappiness).

Peace and happiness lies in working for the public good. Try it; you would be pleasantly surprised to learn that real joy lies in serving our fellow human beings, not in seeking their praise and social acceptance, as Okonkwo did.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji