7 - Marginal lives: Girls at War and Other Stories

Summary

Between the publication ofThings Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease, Achebe published two shorter pieces of fiction, ‘The Sacrificial Egg’ in 1959 and ‘Chike's School Days’ in 1960. The latter at first sight may seem to be in part an elaboration of some of the autobiographical reminiscences in the essay, ‘Named for Victoria, Queen of England’, but most of the details given about Chike's family differ from Achebe's. The sketch also includes some of the details which will later be either elaborated or alluded to in the novel which was to be written twenty-five years later, Anthills of the Savannah. One such detail is the amused memory of the half-understood counting rhyme, ‘Ten Green Bottles’, which Chike and his fellow primary school puils sing with great vigour; another is the English proverb so much loved by Chike's teacher and by Beatrice's schoolmaster father, ‘Procrastination is a lazy man's apology’. Like many of the stories, it provides the opportunity for a variation or another perspective on a theme or story which Achebe will deal with elsewhere. Thus, the conflict and consequences created by marriage to an osu, given a contemporary setting in No Longer At Ease, is here, in a two-page flashback within the six-page sketch, placed in the first decades of the century, and focused on Chike's parents, two early Christian converts supported by the missionary, Mr. Brown. In this case the marriage is also bitterly opposed by the mother of the young man, but Chike's father neither wavers (as Obi does in the face of this opposition) nor effects a reconciliation through the next generation (as Nnaemeka does in ‘Marriage Is A Private Affair’).