Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. [6]

Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. [6] Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and so he ate with kings and elders. And that is how he came to look after … the ill-fated lad … called Ikemefuna […;  7]

Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for far of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its right name at night, because it could here. It was called a string. [8]

Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine-men were feared in all the surrounding country. Its most potent war-medicine was as old as the clan itself. No knew how old. But on one point there was general agreement - the active principle in that medicine had been an old woman with one leg. In fact, the medicine itself was called agadi-nwayi, or old woman. […; 10]

The Oracle [10] the Oracle was called Agbala .. no one had ever beheld Agbala except his priestess [13]

Okonkwo … his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and the [10] forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness. [10-11]

Unoka was an ill-fated man. He had a bad chi or personal god, and evil fortune followed him to the grave, or rather to his death, for he had no grave. He died of a swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess … He was carried to the Evil Forest and left there to die … and was not given the first or second burial. [14]

That is why [Okonkwo] had called him a woman [20]

[T]he Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed. [20]

Even Okonkwo himself grew very fond of the boy - inwardly of course Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength. He therefore treated Ikemefuna as he treated everybody else - with a heavy hand. [21]

the beating [22] the nso-ani that Okonkwo had committed [24]

[I]t is a bad custom these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the result? Their clan is full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living. [24]

Nwoye [26]

Ekwefi … ‘Is that me?’ Ekwefi called back. that was the way people answered calls from outside, They never answered yes for fear it might be an evil spirit. [30]

Death of Ikemefuna: As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. he head the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. he heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’ as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak. // as soon as his father walked in, that night, Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry. He just hung limp. He had had the same kind of feeling not long ago, during the last harvest season. […; 44] They were returning home with baskets of yams from a distant farm across the stream when they had heard the voice of an infant crying in the thick forest. A sudden hush had fallen on the women, who had been talking, and they had quickened their steps. Nwoye had heard that twins were put in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest, but he had never yet come across them. A vague chill descended on him and his head had seemed to swell, like a solitary walker at night who passes an evil spirit on the way. Then something had given inside him. It descended upon him again, this feeling, when his father walked in, that night after killing Ikemefuna. [44-45]

At last Ezinma was born, and although ailing she seemed determined to live. […] Everybody knew she was an ogbanje. But […] Ekwefi believed deep inside her that Ezinma had come to stay. She believed it because it was that faith alone that gave her own life any kind of meaning. And this faith had been strengthened when a year or so ago a medicine man had dug up Ezinma’s iyi-uwa. Everyone knew then that she would live because her bond with the world of the ogbanje had been broken. Ekwefi was reassured. But such was her anxiety for her daughter that she could not rid herself completely of her fear. […] she could not ignore the act that some really evil children sometimes misled people into digging up a specious one. [59]

[Cf. 134: This woman had allowed her husband to mutilate her dead child. The child had been declared an ogbanje, plaguing its mother by dying and entering her womb to be born again. Four times this child had run its evil round. It was mutilated to discourage it from returning.]

‘Where did you bury your iyi-uwa?’, asked Okagbue … [60] … a smooth and shiny pebble [62]

The only course open to Okonkwo was to flee from the clan. I was a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it must flee from the land. The crime was of two kinds, male and female. Okonkwo had committed the female, because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after seven years.

[..] They [the men] had no hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo. His greatest friend, Obierika, was amongst them. They were merely cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman. / Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed? The Earth had decreed that they were an offence on the land and must be destroyed. And if the clan did not exact punishment for an offence against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil, it soiled the others. [91]

Ezeudu: A cold shiver ran down Okonkwo’s back as he remembered the last time the old man had visited him. ‘That boy calls you father’, he had said. ‘Bear no hand in his death.’ [88]

egwugwu [spirits/elders] [89]

The missionary ignored him and went on to talk about the Holy Trinity. At the end of it Okonkwo was fully convinced that the man was mad. He shrugged his shoulders and went away to tap his afternoon palm-wine. / But there was a young land who had been captivated. Nwoye, Okonkwo’s first son. It was no the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about the brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul - the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry plate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled. [108]

Why should he, Okonkwo, of all people be cursed with such a son? […] to abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. [112]

Mr Kiaga [114]

These court messengers [of the District Commissioner] were greatly hated in Ufuomia because they were foreigners and also arrogant and high-handed. They were called kotma, and because of their ash-coloured shorts they earned the additional name of Ashy-Buttocks. [127]

[The mission and civilisation:] something vaguely akin to method in the overwhelming madness [130]

Okonkwo was deeply grieved. and it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he say breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women. [133]

destruction of the church [140]

[Okonkwo kills the messenger: 149]

the tree where Okonkwo’s body was dangling [151]

In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilisation to different parts of Africa [the Commissioner] had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a dead man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger [151] and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. perhaps not a whole chapter, but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. he had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.’ [152-52; end]