Chapter Fourteen
Okonkwo arrives in Mbanta and is greeted by his mother’s younger brother, Uchendu, who is now the eldest surviving member of that family. Uchendu recalls having received Okonkwo’s mother twenty‑ten years earlier and, recognizing Okonkwo’s sad and weary company, asks no questions. The next day Okonkwo recounts the events that led to his exile; Uchendu listens, declares “It is a female ochu,” and arranges the necessary rites. He allocates a plot for Okonkwo’s house and two or three additional plots for farming. With the assistance of Uchendu’s kinsmen, Okonkwo builds an obi and three huts for his three wives, installs his personal god and the symbols of his departed fathers, and receives three hundred seed‑yams from each of Uchendu’s five sons. After a prolonged, scorching heat, a dramatic thunderstorm brings the “nuts of the water of heaven,” and the land revives. Okonkwo and his family plant the new farm, but the work feels like “learning to become left‑handed in old age”; he no longer enjoys labor and spends idle moments in half‑sleep, lamenting that his chi has turned against him and that his earlier ambition has been shattered. Uchendu observes Okonkwo’s despair and resolves to speak to him after the isa‑ifi ceremony.
Later, the youngest of Uchendu’s sons, Amikwu, is preparing to marry a new wife. The bride‑price has been paid, and all rites except the final confession have been performed. The family gathering includes twenty‑two women (the umuada) from various villages, who sit in a circle while the bride sits in the centre holding a hen. Uchendu, holding the ancestral staff, asks the bride—through his eldest daughter Njide—how many men she has lain with. She answers “none,” swears on the staff, and Uchendu slits the hen’s throat, letting its blood fall on the staff. The bride then becomes Amikwu’s wife.
Two days later Uchendu calls together his sons, daughters, and his nephew Okonkwo. Men sit on goatskin mats, women on a sisal mat on a raised earth bank. Uchendu, pulling at his grey beard, begins a formal address. He asks Okonkwo why the common name Nneka (“Mother is Supreme”) exists when a man is the head of the family and a child belongs to the father. He also asks why a woman is buried with her own kin rather than her husband’s. Okonkwo admits he does not know. Uchendu explains that when a father beats a child it seeks the mother’s hut, and when a man faces sorrow he seeks refuge in his mother‑land; thus “mother is supreme.” He warns Okonkwo not to bring a heavy face to his mother‑land, to comfort his wives and children, and to return to his father‑land after the seven‑year exile, lest his sorrow cause the death of his family. He then reminds the assembled that he himself has suffered great loss—six wives, many buried children, a daughter Akueni who discarded twins—and cites the funeral song “For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well.” Concluding, he declares that they are now Okonkwo’s kinsmen and warns him against becoming the greatest sufferer, reminding him that many men have been banished or lost all their yams and children. He ends his speech with “I have no more to say to you.”