By Charles Nnolim 
more elevated niche jn the annals ot Nigerian literary 
history vet Munonye ria.s not been eclipsed by Acne be an Igbo 
writer. The point at which the two writers converge the issue of 
culture conflict is also the beginning of their divergence. For Achebe the conflict 
of cultures attendant on colonial intrusion into Africa could only result in a general 
sense of loss for Africa, and, all Achebe heroes including Okonkwo, Ezeulu, 
and Obi Okonkwo-are losers in some ways, as African culture, clan unity, religion, 
and language suffered setbacks during the colonial period. But while 
Achebe's philosophical pessimism wears the face of tragedy, Munonye's novels 
of culture conflict ultimately wear the face of comedy, as they record the collective 
gain from Africa's contact with Europe. While for Achebe the Igbo encounter 
with Europe led to the death of several protagonist, and to the death of the Igbo 
way of life, for Munonye the coming of Europeans with their new administrations, 
religion, and schools offer his protagonists new challenges, opens new 
vistas, and provides better alternatives that lead to progress. In Munonye's novels, 
villagers move out to the new cities, form social clubs and cooperatives, and 
change backward-sounding village names to more modern prototypes in order 
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to attain modern amenities such as pipe-borne water electricity, and good roads for 
their villages. To effect these changes, old men who are regarded suspiciously as 
antagonistic to progress are ignored, and young men, iconoclasts eager for a definite 
break with the past, are appointed to committees that transform their communities. 
These are optimistic village novels focusing on the plight of the common man 
and on his efforts to improve his lot in life. Munonye agrees that the predicament of 
the common man in society is the central theme of his novels. And society for him is 
not just an abstract idea but a living body that in many cases hinders rather than 
helps the individual who is weak, lonely, and neglected. Traditional societies were 
sometimes indifferent to their members, exploiting the talents of an individual for 
their own selfish ends but making no arrangement for his welfare. Nor are modern 
societies any better; especially if they have no welfare schemes, no social services, no 
insurance coverage, no free education, and no free health-care services. Munonye 
complains, 'Nigeria sends millions of Naira (dollars) to the liberation movements 
outside Nigeria. This is not wrong in itself. But this altruism is not matched by similar 
concern for the downtrodden in Nigerian society who need to be liberated from the 
slavery of poverty, ignorance and disease:' 
Munonye was born on 28 April 1929 in Akokwa, in eastern Nigeria, and was the 
fourth of seven children. His education began in his hometown, then continued at 
Christ the King College in Onitsha, where he graduated in 1 948. Going on to University 
College, Ibadan, he studied history, Latin, and Greek, earning his B.A. in 
1952. He moved to England for his postgraduate work, attending the Institute of 
Education at the University of London. After returning home, he took a job with the 
Nigerian Ministry of Education in 1954, later becoming principal of the Advanced 
Teacher Training College at Owerri. He has now retired. Munonye is married and 
has two children. 
" J l t f . c a n n p t read My^onye f?r Jong without being struck 
by his abiding interest in family relationships. He revels in.de.- 
picting boys and girls living in a close-knit family, with their 
parenTs anxiously watching them grow up, fall in love, and get married. Munonye 
extols happy marriages and happy family life within the nuclear household. Of 
this interest in the family he says: 
One wonders if it could be otherwise. We grew up in the village and we knew 
how closely knit families, even on an extended scale, had to be. Life wasn't terribly 
secure then. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody came to everybody's defence 
or rescue, when anything threatened or happened from outside.... 1 must also 
admit that the family has a fascination for me as an individual-a happy family 
Maybe because 1 came from a large family... But the man-woman relationship, the 
husband-wrfe, the mother-son, it has a fascination for me. It is poetic and-let me add 
a word-pure. 
Often this interest in the familycentres on the welfare of children. In The Only Son 
( 966) rt ,s the delicate relationship between a troubled widow and her only son that 
supremely matters. Obi (1 969) focuses on the temPtat,ons that beset a young, childless, 
Christian family under pressure from society. In old Man of Obange (1971) 
excessive parental love and concern for the welfare and educational progress of the 
children lead to disaster. Munonye admits his interest in young people: '1 think my 
books have been of p a r t i c u | a r r e | e v a n c e f o f h e jn N , ^ Q f e e | i n g 
or young people; they can really absorb things. I always tell my colleagues ... that 
tS h l n 9 ;:;;n d° f°r ^ " 
Munonye's novels are set at definitexeriods in Nigerian history. He says that the 
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John A/lunonye, extreme right, 
with the Nnolims ot the 
University of Port Harcourt. 
'mental span' of his novels is fifty years-from the early days of colonial administration 
in Nigeria (as in The Only Son and Obi) through independence, to the Nigerian civil 
war (in A Wreath for the Man 1973), to post-civil-war events in the I 970s, with attention 
to the political, cultural, and religious climate. Bridge to a Wedding (1978), he 
asserts, 'attempts a dialogue between the old and the new, traditional and modern. 
We do need the bridge.' 
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qnd continestthe corrrffct to the delicate relationship between 
a widowed mother. Chiaku, and her only son, Nnanna, for whose 
welfare she has denied herself everything, including remarriage, until Nnanna 
d i s a p p o i n t s her by becoming a Christian and going away to live with a white 
missionary, Father Smith, at distant Ossa. The Only Son is the beginning of a trilogy 
that includes Obi and Bridge to a Wedding. Therefore those who discuss The Only 
Son in isolation, as a tragedy, forget the openendedness of this work. Chiaku, disappointed 
in her son's 'apostasy,' remarries to begin a new connubial life for herself 
(she is already expecting a baby), while Nnanna charts a new life of adventure full of 
promises under the tutelage of Father Smith. 
In the trilogy the position of Munonye as a writer of comic vision emerges clearly. 
Nnanna's double exile ends in a triumphant return for him as the protagonist in 
Bridge to a Wedding. He becomes the perfect example of the hero of myth coming 
back home with a boon and with a more enhanced status than when he left. Munonye's 
optimism, his belief in the efficacy of the new order Christianity and the new civilization-
is most clearly stated within the trilogy. Embracing Christianity fully, without looking 
back, has stood the Kafo family, for example, in good stead. Their daughter Rose, 
convent educated and a role model for the younger ones, marries Ebeneto junior, 
one of the first graduates from the new university, 4ta disciplined one [who] had 
never been associated with any of the excesses by which many of the young men 
from the university are known. Thus Munonye's optimism about the new order includes 
a belief that modernity need not necessarily spoil the young. Colonialism, 
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which causes such tragic consequences for Africans in the novels of Achebe, becomes 
the leverage for progress in Munonye's fiction. i
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Oil Man of Obange, which may eventually earn stature as Munonye's most artistically 
constructed novel in the timelessness of its tale and the leanness of its narrative, 
is a novel conceived in irony with a touch of MoliLIre: love of one's children, a 
great virtue in itself, when indulged in inordinately, leads to the ruin of parents; and 
the brilliance of all six of Jeri's children in school, a great blessing for many a parent, 
goads Jeri on to disaster in his effort to cater simultaneously to the welfare of all the 
children with his meager resources. Jeri's ambition for the success of his children at 
school is the kernel of his failure as a father. 
In Oil Man of Obange the major theme is hidden in Mica's school motto: 'Da 
nobis recta sapere' (Give us the right discernment), which implies that had Jeri the 
oilman had the wisdom to train only those children he could afford to support with 
his meager resources, he might have succeeded. The unstated social vision is an 
indictment of Nigerian society, which has no social welfare system that could come to 
the aid of Jeri and his children. The novel highlights the pathetic sense of loss, the 
wasted efforts, the indifference of society, and the feeling that the orphaned children 
of Jeri will sink into an abyss of poverty and neglect after his death-that all his efforts 
have been in vain. 
A Wreath for the Maidens, Munonye's most complex and ambitious novel, is a 
roman A clef regarding the Nigerian civil war. It could easily rank as Munonye's least 
successful novel in its lack of thematic focus and lack of artistic distance. It is part 
experience, part biography, and part faction, full of undigested bits of political philosophy 
and boiling like a stew into which a potpourri of Nigerian history has been 
thrown. The subject matter is familiar: the story begins with the struggle for independence 
by corrupt politicians in Nigeria and ends with the civil war, catching in its 
sweep both the activities of acid-throwing politicians before independence and the 
bombing and strafing of the former Biafran territory during the internecine, fratricidal 
warfare. 
Thp 
away. In the novel Sakure State represents the North, where Bokenu citizens 
were massacred, and Doda State is the West, which aided and abetted the aggressive 
military in subduing Bokenu State. Munonye insists 
that this novel is a dialogue on the moral issues involved in the Nigeria-Biafra War. 
The title of the novel was suggested by a quotation from Iphigenia in Aulis by Aeschylus: 
'By the blood of the maidens slain thou shalt pacify the winds.' The youths slain 
during the conflict were sacrificial lambs, as people in positions of power used the 
opportunity to exploit fellow citizens and precipitate sufferings and privations. For 
the two idealists in Munonye's book-Roland Medo and Biere Ekonte-the original war 
they came to fight has abandoned them: "It wasn't ... a war between the righteous 
Biafran s,de and the oppressive Federal side. In fact, it was no longer between Nigeria 
and Biafra, but corrupt Biafrans versus idealist Biafrans." 
A Dancer of Fortune (1974) is unusual in Munonye's canon The dancer Ayasko 
is also a mercenary con man who exploits his talents as a dancer to ruin one patentmed.
c.ne dealer after another until he establishes a monopoly. Those who argue 
that, ,n Munonye's works, society is the victimifer while the individual is the victim, 
agree that Ayasko turns society's weapons against itself and emerges successful. 
Because a trickster succeeds and evil triumphs over good, moralists might.chide 
Munonye for teaching the youth that evil pays 
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Munonye's Bridge to a Wedding, which celebrates the triumphant return of Joseph 
Kafo, was published in 1978. An unpublished novel written after 1978, 'House of 
Enoch,' is about the place of religion and religious affiliations in the lives of Nigerians. 
Since then, Munonye has turned his attention to short stories, mostly on religious 
themes. In 'Horn of Salvation,' 'Land of Prophecy,' and 'The Missing Treasure' he 
concerns himself with the proliferation in Nigeria of religious groups including Anglicans, 
Catholics, the Salvation Army, Brotherhood of the Holy Cross, True Sabbath 
Spiritual Church, Mount Zion Spiritual Fraternity, Divine Fellowship Congregation, 
Holy Evangelist Assembly, Christ Apostle Healing Sabbath Church, and the Supreme 
Sabbath Church of the Most Holy Spirit. In these stories Munonye wonders why the 
same Christian seems as ready to embrace the idol as the cross, why this rush to 'ride 
in a Freudian truck,' why this 'lorgiastic bewildering emotionalism. 'The escape by 
Nigerians into religion, Munonye thinks, is an effort "to dwell close to the frontiers of 
lunacy,' to avoid the rigors of 'rational, logical or constructive thinking,' thus allowing 
'others to come in to do the thinking for us ... to think and research and invent and 
manufacture for us.' 
I k r l l w of the paradoxes .in Munonye's life after his. early retirement 
from the civil service is the inverse proportion of his 
literary output to the amount of time he has on his hands. He 
obviously retired to devote his time to writing, but to his consternation the muse 
seems to have fled with regular employment. In a mild 
lament in 'Letters from Retirement' he writes: 
I must confess that in my own case I had assumed I would soft-land on retirement 
and then set out immediately writing, producing wonderful things. But then, it didn't 
quite work out that way.... 1 felt there was now all the time limitless time, at my 
disposal-so why hurry. Next, my very sweet assumptions of the past concerning the 
environment into which I would be retiring, came in for some very severe tests. In 
those circumstances, it became almost impossible to settle down to creativity.... And 
my instincts began to blunt. Put precisely, I could no longer we with my usual eyes. 
Green leaves whose midmorning sheen had been food for my heart became ordinary 
to the sight. My perceptions and creative response had dulled. Men, women, 
boys and girls had changed terribly too. Were they not now too busy, intense, overambitious, 
blustering. In fact, I need to adjust to this new ambience. 
Given the serious critical attention his novels are attracting, Munonye can be said 
to have already earned a secure place among African novelists of the twentieth 
century. And Munonye will be better known as the years go by.GR 
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