Africans Serving Empire

Abstract

Twenty years span Joyce Carey’s Mister Johnson (1939) and Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960), two novels which focus on African agents of Empire who fail to meet the demands of official duty in the colony. As a man who spent part of his life serving Britain in West Africa, and who claimed knowledge of terrain and people, Joyce Cary has none the less been taken to task by Achebe, among others, for his allegedly Euro-centred and distorted picture of Africa.