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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in No Longer at Ease, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corruption
Western Influence and Alienation
Language, Literature, and Communication
Prejudice and Discrimination
Summary
Analysis
With the passage of time, Obi comes to gain perspective on his life and his parents, feeling that he has been somehow reborn. He fondly recalls a number of stories of his mother’s toughness and self-assertion. He feels that “he, too, had died,” in that he’s achieved a perspective free from illusion.
As scholarship season kicks into gear again, one day a rich man arrives at Obi’s home and leaves him a £50 bribe to ensure his son preferential treatment in the upcoming scholarship contest. Deeply conflicted, Obi ends up taking the bribe. Soon, he becomes a regular taker of bribes, both monetary and sexual. The bribes enable him to pay off all his outstanding debts.
Just as Obi had seemed to arrive at a mature state of tranquility and self-awareness, this chance temptation catches him off guard and quickly plunges him into a moral freefall
Themes
One day, after a man has dropped off a £20 bribe, Obi grows disgusted with himself and what he has become. A second knock on the door turns out to be two law officers, who have caught him in a sting operation. They take him in to the police station and initiate Obi’s legal proceedings. Everyone, including Mr. Green, is disappointed by Obi’s actions.
Obi’s story ends as it began: with Obi’s arrest on charges of corruption. In ending Obi’s story with the scene with which it began, the novel frames Obi’s fall as inevitable. And indeed it was, though not for the racist reasons Mr. Green proposed at the beginning of the novel. Instead, Obi’s fall from grace represents the failure of marginalized colonial subjects like Obi to thrive in a Colonial Nigeria rampant with corruption and systemic inequalities.
Themes
