ABSTRACT
Chinua Achebe’s character Obi Okonkwo is a son of print. The anti-hero of Achebe’s second novel No Longer at Ease (1960), sequel to the more celebrated Things Fall Apart (1958), he is a university-educated higher civil servant arraigned for corruption while attempting to make ends meet in fast-moving Lagos, capital of post-independence Nigeria. Obi is found guilty but, before his fall, he makes a return trip eastwards in his new Morris Oxford to his home village of Umuofia in Igboland. There he wanders into the study of his father, Nwoye, a missionary product and a preacher, himself the son of the non-literate but proverbially wise Okonkwo, tragic protagonist of Achebe’s famous first novel.
