Do not despair. I know you will not despair. You have a manly and a proud heart. A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure d… - Chinua Achebe

A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.

Although he was still only a child it looked as though the deity had already marked him out as his future Chief. Even before he had learnt to speak more than a few words he had been strongly drawn to the god’s ritual.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.

It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the 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.