Education, Corruption, and Alienation: Postcolonial Dilemmas in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease

Abstract

Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) dramatises the interweaving of corruption, alienation, and identity crisis within postcolonial Nigeria. Penned at the cusp of complete independence, the text interrogates the persistence of colonial legacies, foregrounding the dual vexation of Western education and the emergent elite’s social burdens, which conspire to produce moral compromise and cultural dispossession. Achebe, through the tragic trajectory of Obi Okonkwo, offers a blistering critique of the moral rot and systemic malaise that still besiege a society marked by colonial subjugation. Obi’s Metropolitan schooling instils a creased ideal of probity and civic duty. However, that ideal unravels beneath the compounding stresses of accrued indebtedness, familial demands, and the pervading venality inscribed within the national civil apparatus. Scholarly valuations—Kanak Raj Chandna, Surekha Ahlawat— foreground corruption as a pervasive social malignancy; Anindita Das inscribes it within the broader frame of postcolonial hegemony; Seyed Mohammad Marandi and Reyhane Shadpour reinscribe education as a residual ideological technology of empire; Abdul Hameed Abubakar frames alienation and rootlessness as objectively conjoined to the incomplete project of hybridity. This article, synthesising the pluralities, contends that the text apprehends corruption less as an isolated vice of the singular conscience than as a national contretemps whose ambience afflicts Nigeria’s tentative and still unfulfilled transit into independent sovereignty.