“The ‘beautiful soul,’ lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone is the middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to its pure abstraction, and is pure being or empty nothingness—this ‘beautiful soul,’ then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption.”—Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Footnote 1
Born of a compensatory desire for purity, the beautiful soul is a self-ironizing figure that trumpets its authenticity—its inward delicacy of moral feeling and insight—against the outside world’s infectious corruption, degradation, and depravity. For Hegel, the concept names the immature manifestation of Spirit expressed in Romantic irony’s smug solipsism, embodied by that literary movement’s morally sensitive yet ethically paralyzed protagonists. As Timothy Morton describes it, beautiful soul syndrome (“BS for short”) describes a posh cynicism that thinks itself unpolluted and post-ideological, but which in its rationalized passivity essentially is the evil in the world it claims to see.Footnote 2
Hence Drew Milne’s characterization of beautiful soul syndrome as a tortured literary and authorial archetype, even a condition of modern writing itself:
The desire to have an inwardly determined quality of secular saintliness runs through the dissident delicacy often demanded of the modern writer. This demand is perhaps clearest in the way poets are called on to embody the conscience of secular society, serving up beautiful particularities of moral perception free of the weight of worldly complicity. Family resemblances to the unstable literary-philosophical compound represented by the beautiful soul can be recognized in the antiheroes of modernist literary representation.Footnote 3
Perhaps, though, Milne’s tracing of Romantic irony’s beautiful soul syndrome to modern authorship’s “self-legislating” disposition and modernist antiheroes does not apply to the case of Africa and its artists. Maybe to suggest as much only engages in the most banal of imperialisms: to render the continent’s cultural forms derivative, impure, lagging forever behind Europe’s modish avant-garde.
But as Ato Quayson reminds us, African and European modernisms constitutively overlap in more ways than one—a case in point being Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, which as many African texts of disillusionment do, thematizes the intellectual’s self-consciousness, anomie, and accountability as these relate to the wider community.Footnote 4 Beautiful soul syndrome, then, might describe in helpful ways those African literary protagonists who—whether or not they echo their authorial doppelgängers—struggle with brands of self-loathing and self-absolution in the face of modernity’s gaps of inadequately realized change.
This essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s exemplary satire of African disillusionment, No Longer at Ease (1960).Footnote 5 Published the year of Nigeria’s official independence from Britain, the novel describes how Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant and colonial subject, tries but fails at the threshold of independence to navigate a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism. Torn between the moral and financial demands of his rural, traditionalist kin and those of the colony’s urban elite, Obi succumbs to corruption, voicing his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal. As Neil Lazarus argues, many African intellectuals and writers during the anticolonial era were “predisposed to a messianic and middle-class specific conception of decolonization as a revolutionary process,” a conception that led them to “overvalue the emancipatory significance of independence,” catalyzing their quick descent into self-loathing and self-acquitting pessimisms.Footnote 6 A frustrated idealist betrayed by the high promises of anticolonialism, Obi mirrors such a lost generation of African writers and intellectuals, figures the novel satirizes for their self-absolving cynicism.
I
No Longer at Ease takes place in late 1950s Nigeria and tells the story of Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the tragic hero of Things Fall Apart. A “been to,” Obi travels to England where he receives a degree in English—he specializes in Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene—and returns home a firebrand cultural nationalist alienated from traditionalist friends, family, and the Umuofia Progressive Union (UPU), the hometown association whose members “taxed themselves mercilessly” in order to fund Obi’s education and who expect him to take a senior civil service position in the capital city of Lagos to benefit himself and further the interests of the UPU. The novel begins and ends with Obi’s fall from grace—he is on trial for bribery, which is normalized in colonial Nigeria but still prosecuted to set nominal examples—and asks how an idealistic “young man of . . . education and brilliant promise could have done this.”Footnote 7 It ends with the third-person omniscient narrator’s skeptical, blasé refrain that no one could “comprehend how an educated man and so on and so forth.”Footnote 8
Obi’s beautiful soul begins from his botched—and comic-tragically derivative—idealism toward decolonization, one he crafts as a colonial subject studying in England: “The Nigeria he returned to was in many ways different from the picture he had carried in his mind during those four years [studying English in Britain]. There were many things he could no longer recognize, and others—like the slums of Lagos—which he was seeing for the first time.”Footnote 9 Obi’s is no routine spell of defamiliarization caused by his trip to the infrastructurally developed empire, but rather an occasion for him to engage in hackneyed moralisms based on little else than quixotic musings about his homeland (“It was in England that Nigeria became more than just a name for him. That was the first great thing England did for him”). Hence Obi’s decision upon his return to urban Nigeria to moralize about “a wide-open storm drain from which came a very strong smell of rotting flesh”:
Here was Lagos, thought Obi, the real Lagos he hadn’t imagined existed until now. During his first winter in England he had written a callow, nostalgic poem about Nigeria. It wasn’t about Lagos in particular, but Lagos was part of the Nigeria he had in mind.
‘How sweet it is to lie beneath a tree
At eventime and share the ecstasy
Of jocund birds and flimsy butterfies;
How sweet to leave our earthbound body in the mud,
And rise towards the music of the spheres,
Descending softly with the wind,
And the tender glow of the fading sun’
He recalled the poem and then turned and looked at the rotting dog in the storm drain and smiled. “‘I have tasted putrid flesh in the spoon,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Far more apt.’”Footnote 10
Obi’s admission that he has been mugged by Nigerian reality (“here was . . . the real Lagos”) depends on a trite British pastoralism that denounces the corruption and complexity of city life. Pastoralism proves an apt genre for Obi’s misanthropy, for its impossible idealism expresses an elite, misanthropic disdain of the non-idyllic urban. Obi also parrots high modernism’s most beautiful soul, J. Alfred Prufrock, recasting the latter’s lament against the banality of modern bourgeois life (“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,”) into a scatological idiom that exonerates the sensitive and chicly disenchanted over and against the inured, naïve native.
But when seen outside of Obi’s narcissism, the scatological scene above tells an entirely different story. Before waxing pastoral, Obi notices how a child near the storm drain argues with a passing night-soil man, causing nearby workers to “burst into laughter” and even the night-soil worker to “smile” and “go his way, having said something very rude about the boy’s mother.”Footnote 11 Here Nigerians see their less-than-ideal surroundings not as the primal scene of their social decay, but as the banal backdrop to their survival and everyday life and moments of laughter. When Obi renders Lagos an occasion to lament the “fallen” African condition, he renders laughter-as-agency into laughter-as-resignation. As the real object of critique in the passage, Obi is the source of the cynicism he attributes to African locals. Through an irony that renders Obi the satirist satirized, the beautiful soul authors the fatalism he laments.
Obi’s excremental idiom positions Westerners as futuristic figures of retention, purity, sensitivity, and organization over and against retrograde natives framed as incontinent, polluted, insensitive, and disordered. For Warwick Anderson, such colonial-era binaries helped build “corporeal distinctions between colonizers and colonized,” painting the latter as promiscuous defecators who “lacked the self-control characteristic of white men, and therefore required guidance toward self-government of body and polity.”Footnote 12 In this way, Obi mimics colonialism’s beautiful obsession with the bodily waste of the colonized. He misappropriates shit as a sign of Nigeria’s civilizational and attitudinal failure, condemning natives for their acclimation to excreta, for him a sign of the colony’s incorrigible barbarity.
Notice, too, the classically colonialist tension between Obi—an individuated, sensitive, and alienated aesthete schooled in Western cynicism—and African locals figured here and elsewhere in the novel as undivided natives still tied organically to tradition and inured to poverty and harsh surroundings. When Neil ten Kortenaar explains this binary we see how beautiful soul syndrome functioned as a colonial missionary moralism: “Europeans believe that, while other peoples are as yet undivided and therefore, to an extent, innocent, they themselves, precisely because they are alienated from their essential selves, from the world, and from community with others, feel the truth of fallen humanity most deeply.”Footnote 13 For the fallen colonist, the native symbolizes not only a beautiful soul deserving of admiration and education, but also an occasion to render colonialism a beautifully redemptive, moral enterprise. In response to the charmingly undivided and ignorant native, the heroically anguished colonizer engages in the noble, self-sacrificial act of saving his unenlightened brethren.
Obi’s failed idealism thus takes its cue from colonialism’s. We see this when Obi meditates on what drives his boss, Mr. Green, to keep working diligently in his civil service post despite the “failure” of colonization to civilize the native. Here Obi re-creates Marlow’s ponderings on Kurtz as a failed missionary:
Here was a man [Mr. Green] who did not believe in a country, and yet worked so hard for it. Did he simply believe in duty as a logical necessity? . . . He must have come originally with an ideal—to bring light to the heart of darkness . . . But when he arrived Africa played him false. Where was his beloved bush full of human sacrifice? . . . With a flash of insight Obi remembered his Conrad which he had read for his degree. “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” That was Kurtz before the darkness got him. Afterwards he had written: “Exterminate all the brutes.”Footnote 14
Here Obi uses Green and Kurtz as objects of transference to express his unfulfilled idealism upon returning to Nigeria, his own Kurtz-like struggle, but in reverse. For Obi, Green’s frustrated optimism lies in his unsatisfied white colonial’s burden, a burden aggravated into a misanthropy he expresses throughout the novel in colonial-era truisms about Nigerians, truisms Obi likens to Kurtz’s call to “exterminate all the brutes.” Green’s—like Obi’s—is a colonial idealism frustrated by the gap between the redemptive Africa of the colonial imagination and an Africa that “played him false,” that failed to redeem the beautifully fallen colonizer, and that undercut the naive faith that replacing “old Africans” accustomed to corruption with “new,” European-educated Africans with “higher ideals” would change things for the better.
Still, Obi’s is not only the resigned cynicism of an enlightened false consciousness.Footnote 15 His is also the delicate—and colonial-style—cynicism of the self-exonerating elite. We see this when, on the way from urban Lagos to visit rural Umuofia, Obi witnesses his driver attempt to bribe two policemen during a routine stop. Refusing to look away from the transaction as other passengers do, Obi frightens the policemen away, only postponing the bribe until a quarter mile later—but this time with a much steeper price demanded by the off-put officers. Angered by Obi’s misplaced, melodramatic sense of morality concerning this most banal of inconveniences—the working-class passengers call him a “too know” young man and one of the “book people”—the driver and other lorry passengers snub Obi for the rest of the journey, prompting him to condemn in the mode of colonial exasperation what to his mind are Africa’s hopelessly callous and morally tarnished masses:
“What an Augean stable!” he muttered to himself. “Where does one begin? With the masses? Educate the masses?” He shook his head. “Not a chance there. It would take centuries. A handful of men at the top. Or even one man with a vision—an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? Perhaps a halfway house—a sort of compromise.” When Obi’s reasoning reached this point he reminded himself that England had been corrupt not so long ago.Footnote 16
Obi’s reference to Augean stables—places marked by corruption and filth, alluding to the Greek myth where King Augeus houses three thousand unclean oxen for thirty years until Hercules redirects the river Alpheus and cleans them in a single day—tell us more about his cynical sensibilities than anything about the masses he bitterly denounces. Here Obi voices how the beautiful soul exempts himself from and then individualizes and personalizes systemic issues—in this case, the normalization of Nigerian corruption in everyday life. He attributes that phenomenon to its greatest victims in order to justify an elitist vision of the Nigerian political order, one based on a colonialist time lag between peripheral colonies and imperial metropoles (“England had been corrupt not so long ago”).
Obi’s self-vindicating sense of isolation here and elsewhere in the novel suggests why, as Kofi Owuso notes, he “feels a certain emotional affinity with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”Footnote 17 But this affinity is less poetic than tragicomically horrifying. Having written a letter in sympathy to Hitler in his youth, but no longer able to remember exactly why he did so, Obi at one point asks himself, “What was Hitler to me or I to Hitler?” providing “a variation on Hamlet’s ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her?’”Footnote 18 Owuso offers the useful reading that both figures “feel no longer at ease in societies that are corrupt and corrupting.”Footnote 19 But Obi’s sympathy for the Nazi devil takes on a much more portentous meaning when paired alongside H. S. Harris’s reminder that “Hitler saw himself, and was seen by some of his admirers, as a ‘Beautiful Soul.’”Footnote 20 This link clarifies Morton’s claim that the beautiful soul is essentially the evil in the world it claims to see, for as he says elsewhere in another nod to Hegel, ideas and ideologies always come bundled with attitudes and dispositions, and vice versa.Footnote 21 Such bundling suggests that the beautiful soul’s cynicism—and the self-righteous, moralistic idiom in which the beautiful express that cynicism—emerges from a compensatory and ultimately colonial investment in a brutally solipsistic portrait of social reality.
In this way, Obi’s beautiful soul syndrome doubles as his blind spot: a constitutive porousness to the socius that threatens because outside the possessive-individualist logic of autonomy, control, and purity, a logic all-the-more attractive in a time that heralds a botched decolonization. As a beautiful cynic, then, Obi overlooks the role of the observer in constructing her object of analysis, and it is precisely in this sense that he expresses one of the beautiful soul’s most debilitating, dangerous qualities—its self-privileging fantasy of total knowledge, its treacherous certainty. He presumes himself post-ideological, that his jadedness renders him an omniscient subject accountable only to a private morality.
Such a private morality, after all, appears attractive and even reasonable insofar as the beauty of Obi’s disillusioned soul—its allure as an uncontaminated subject position in a compromised and compromising world—is at least two-fold. Indeed, Obi is for at least a short time successful not only in his early commitment to shun bribes and thus avoid a culture of graft, but also in his resolute desire to marry Clara, an osu (a member of an untouchable caste). Obi’s symbolic desire to marry an osu gestures toward a more fulfilling, egalitarian vision of New Nigerian unity, rendering understandable his alienation from the traditionalist UPU, who culturally and financially pressure Obi to avoid marrying Clara lest he contaminate Umuofians and undercut the UPU as a socially homogeneous, tribalist institution. To Obi—whose beautiful soul often takes to task and plays off of the UPU’s traditionalism and self-interest—that organization perpetuates a caste system tied vestigially to external and autochthonous traditions of slavery on the continent—traditions that for Obi are better off removed from the idealistic New Nigeria he envisions but is incapable of involving himself in.Footnote 22
II
Thus the novel has other targets besides Obi’s beautiful cynicism and its ties to colonial moralism—namely, its late colonial setting and the material and cultural institutions it birthed: a Nigeria engrossed in Western materialism, self-interest, and a tribalism born of the colonial carving up of the continent. During Obi’s return celebration an elder notes a drastic shift in Igbo values since the days of Things Fall Apart: “Today greatness has changed its tune. Titles are no longer great, neither are barns or large numbers of wives and children. Greatness is now in the things of the white man. And so we too have changed our tune. We are the first in all the nine villages to send our son to the white man’s land.”Footnote 23
Alongside such assimilation comes Western aesthetic and materialist predilections grafted onto forms of tribal favoritism and normalized nepotism, a case in point being the judgment against Obi’s populist decision to give his reception speech in “shirtsleeves” even though “[e]veryone was properly dressed in aghada or European suit except the guest of honor . . . [and] [e]verybody expected a young man from England to be impressively turned out.”Footnote 24
Despite Obi’s recourse to populism here, the narrator deems this Obi’s “mistake Number One.”Footnote 25 His second stems from his decision to “speak is and was” rather than the stilted, prolix English the hometown expects of a European-educated African.Footnote 26 Instead, Obi uses a “most unimpressive” cultural-nationalist idiom that falls on deaf ears: “Education is for service [to Nigeria’s progress and unity], not for white collar jobs and comfortable salaries”; but the latter is precisely what the UPU demands—especially the trappings of “the kind of English they admired if not understood: the kind that filled the mouth, like the proverbial dry meat.”Footnote 27 Meanwhile the leader of UPU, who mixes Nigerian cultural nationalism with the language of material self-interest, describes upon Obi’s return how although the “importance of having one of our sons in the vanguard of this march of progress is nothing short of axiomatic” because evidence of national progress, the real reason to celebrate Obi’s arrival is that “‘Ours is ours, but mine is mine.’ Every town and village struggles at this momentous epoch in our political evolution to possess that of which it can say: ‘This is mine.’ We are happy that today we have such an invaluable possession.”Footnote 28
The aforementioned passages satirize the UPU not only for its unabashed malfeasance, but also for impeding national development and aggravating the nation’s urban-rural divide. In the UPU’s decision to fund Obi’s education in law, Tejumola Olaniyan identifies a provincialism that undercuts the collective-nationalist cry for democratic unity: after all, the UPU needs lawyers primarily to “handle all their land cases against their neighbors”—that is, to engage less in the protection of native lands from colonial forces eager to dig roots before leaving and more in the “private appropriation and alienation” of adjacent, aboriginal land owned by native competitors scrambling for scant resources.Footnote 29 And although the UPU claims to represent all Umuofians equally, those closer to Lagos—the urban elite—reap the largest benefit from the UPU’s taxes, spending, and gains because they are closer to sources of upward mobility.
Here we see the novel’s satire of the UPU’s unscrupulous cynicism, which is distinct from Obi’s refined jadedness. Although Obi’s cynicism is that of the beautiful soul’s self-undercutting belief that his contemptuous separation from the world translates into the only effective ethics possible in a time of corruption and moral laxity, the UPU’s cynicism is that of a pure self-interest that has no higher moral calling yet proclaims itself communalist. Upon his initial return to rural Umuofia, for example, Obi notices how his esteemed “father . . . was all bones, although he did not look nearly as bad as his mother. It was clear to Obi that they did not have enough good food to eat. It was scandalous, he thought, that after thirty years’ service in the church his father should retire on a salary of two pounds a month, a good slice of which went back to the same church by way of class fees and other contributions.”Footnote 30 At first blush, Obi’s parents appear to be victims only of colonial Christianity’s deleterious, residual presence in Nigeria. But we should recall that this is not the only source of their poverty. For recall how the UPU members, who could hardly afford it, “taxed themselves mercilessly” in order to fund Obi’s education, expecting their investment to pay off in ways that will benefit the hometown as a whole, but inevitably aid the organization’s aspiring, urban-based elites. Hence the irony: Obi’s esteemed parents and, indeed, most of the rural village, suffer more than ever from acute forms of poverty, showing how the organization’s elitism belies its communalist taglines.Footnote 31
In this way, the novel satirizes the UPU as a cynically self-interested institution born of—and ironically still wedded to—the colonial state’s abandonment of the rural. For some, such institutions provide necessary bulwarks against the complete incursion of state power into rural areas. And they are not entirely wrong in this regard. Indeed, in one view hometown associations represent radical forms of mobilization against the colonial state regime—but they were and are, for that very reason, often captured by the state and its prevailing logics. So although there are less skeptical ways of viewing the hometown association and its beginnings as a self-help institution born in response to the scarcity produced under colonial administration in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa,Footnote 32 we should note Joel D. Barkan’s “Shadow State” interpretation of the phenomenon, which is where hometown associations function as “instruments of state manipulation and the effort to involve large numbers of citizens in community action and volunteer activities is seen as a cynical move by political elites to shift the burden of social welfare costs to private organizations and local institutions.”Footnote 33 This view is instructive insofar as Achebe’s novel takes place in a Nigerian modernity where cynicisms of all stripes operate—and understandably so. It is a time and place where “the government was they. It had nothing to do with you or me. It was an alien institution and the people’s business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble.”Footnote 34
Useful here is Olaniyan, who notes how Umuofians in the text declare their separation from Nigeria’s national struggle and cultural identity. The UPU’s Umuofians, after all, do not consider themselves traditional Nigerians, but rather natives of a higher moral standing and different ethnicity—as “sojourners” within Nigeria.Footnote 35 As a revered member of the UPU puts it, “‘We are strangers in this land. If good comes to it may we have our share.’ Amen. ‘But if bad comes let it go to the owners of the land who know what gods should be appeased. Amen.’”Footnote 36 Against Obi’s early investment in cultural nationalism, and later his brand of refined self-exemption, we find an association with its own distinct brand of cynicism at the threshold of decolonization—one the novel plays off of Obi’s to satirical effect.
Thus the novel’s ironic use of Igbo proverbs to show how the UPU instrumentalizes traditional idioms known for their communalist ethos and moral function. When trying to explain Obi’s predicament while on trial, the president of the UPU argues that “it was a thing of shame for a man in the senior service to go to prison for twenty pounds. He repeated twenty pounds, spitting it out. ‘I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.’”Footnote 37 Yet another member follows this sentiment by recounting how it was “‘all lack of experience . . . He should not have accepted the money himself . . . Obi tried to do what everyone does without finding out how it was done.’ He told the proverb of the house rat who went swimming with his friend the lizard and died from cold, for while the lizard’s scales kept him dry the rat’s hairy body remained wet.”Footnote 38 All of these are uttered, too, under the aegis of the UPU’s self-interested participation in a culture of bribery that they individualize to their own ends: For them, “Obi was without doubt, a very foolish and self-willed young man,” which is to say that his predicaments and ethical paralysis stem from a private failure to get with the program and move beyond misplaced scruples, not from the culture of graft of which the UPU is a part.Footnote 39
Hence Achebe’s systemic critique not only of Obi’s debilitating attempt to separate himself from what he sees as a debased and debasing New Nigeria, but also of a civil society institution often praised for its traditionalism and communalism. For such an institution would at first blush seem a properly populist-political response to an abnegating subject position such as Obi’s, rather than, as Achebe suggests and Jon Soske argues, potentially an example of how African “tribal institutions in their modern form are the product of colonial rule” and its not so egalitarian logics.Footnote 40
III
Achebe’s novel, then, satirizes not only the ineffectuality of the beautiful soul’s refined anomie alongside at least one falsely populist institution born under colonial rule, but also cynicism and moralism as widespread (though always differently articulated) responses to failed political visions. Perhaps, the novel suggests, cynicism functions as a systemic condition à la Achille Mbembe’s claim that power works “convivially,” encircling subjects under the same unconscious, mutually disempowering episteme.Footnote 41 This approach to power—and more particularly to the spread and function of cynicism among disenchanted anticolonials—avoids facile distinctions between victims and victimizers, oppression and resistance, challenging the beautiful soul’s self-exempting politics of blame while asking us to exchange morality and moralism for ethics and implication. Here we see a desire to change the terms, attitudes, and approaches of contemporary critique—from a sanctimony premised on the politics of outrage, guilt, and absolution to an ethics that stresses messiness, interdependence, and association. This desire, in turn, puts into question the slew of vitriolic criticism against Africa’s literature of disillusionment as a literature of elitist, Western-style fatalism that advocates for rather than critiques such fatalism—what, somewhat ironically, Achebe himself in his well-known harangue against Ayi Kwei Armah saw as a politically irresponsible form of modernist navel gazing.Footnote 42
Thus the novel suggests, the joke on Obi is also on the moralist. For in order to critique but not re-create the beautiful soul’s pretension to ethical purity, one should avoid moralizing against moralism, even if such moralism does not abnegate the socius as Obi’s does.Footnote 43 Instructive in this regard is the novel’s last paragraph, which leaves us not with a prescriptive mandate in the New Nigeria’s time of uncertainty and transition, but rather with a skepticism that resists easy answers: “Everybody wondered why. The learned judge, as we have seen, could not comprehend how an educated man and so on and so forth. The British councilman, even the men of Umuofia, did not know. And we must presume that, in spite of his certitude, Mr. Green did not know either.”Footnote 44 Here the novel asks us to avoid the self-righteous punitiveness that Mr. Green, Obi, and the UPU, however differently, deploy throughout the novel.
“If,” as Obi at one point muses regarding his understandable feelings of impotence and frustration at the verge of independence, “one didn’t laugh, one would have to cry. It seemed that was the way Nigeria was built,” then we should take seriously how the novel critiques yet carefully avoids re-creating beautiful soul syndrome and its Manichean politics of blame.Footnote 45 For if we think of Achebe’s satirical fiction as he does—as an attempt to help Africa “regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement”—then we might include among those complexes a beautiful cynicism that recapitulates yet another colonial shibboleth we can do without.Footnote 46
