AFRICAN PROSE ISIDORE OKPEWHO: The Last Duty With reference to the text, discuss the theme of war

Answer Details

Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty is set against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War, though the conflict is transposed into the fictional struggle between Nigeria and the breakaway region of Simba. War is not merely a background event in the novel; it is the engine that drives the plot, exposes human weakness, and destroys individual lives and communal trust in the small garrison town of Urukpe.

War as a pretext for private greed and betrayal. The most striking treatment of war in the novel is Okpewho's demonstration that national conflict becomes a cover for personal ambition. Chief Toje Onovwakpo exploits the war economy to eliminate his business rival, Mukoro Oshevire, by falsely accusing him of being a saboteur who supplies the enemy. The war provides the machinery of arrest, detention and suspicion that allows a private grudge to be pursued as though it were a patriotic duty. Through Toje, Okpewho shows that war corrodes moral judgement and rewards the unscrupulous.

War and the suffering of the innocent. The Oshevire family is shattered by a conflict they did not start. Oshevire is imprisoned without genuine evidence; his wife Aku, an Igabo woman married into a Simba community, is left isolated and vulnerable, watched with suspicion because of her ethnicity; their young son Oghenovo is neglected and eventually wounded. The child's blinding at the close of the novel is Okpewho's bitter emblem of how war maims the future and the guiltless.

Ethnic suspicion and the breakdown of trust. War inflames ethnic hatred. Aku is treated as an enemy within because of her origins, and the whole community of Urukpe lives in an atmosphere of fear, rumour and denunciation. Neighbours become informers; loyalty is measured by tribe rather than character. Okpewho exposes how war reduces complex human beings to ethnic labels.

The moral corruption of authority. The soldiers stationed in Urukpe, notably in the person of Major Ali, must navigate the temptations that war creates. Toje attempts to bribe and manipulate the military; the machinery of security is turned toward private ends. Yet Okpewho balances this with figures of integrity, so that war becomes a test that some pass and many fail.

The psychological toll. Through the multiple first-person narrators, Okpewho lets us hear the inner disintegration that war produces: Toje's impotence and desperation, Aku's loneliness and guilt after her affair with Toje's kinsman Odibo, Oshevire's dignified but broken faith in justice. War is shown to wound the mind as deeply as the body.

Conclusion. In The Last Duty, war is portrayed not as heroic combat but as a moral catastrophe that unleashes greed, ethnic hatred, injustice and the suffering of the innocent. Okpewho's final vision is deeply pessimistic: even when Oshevire is released and attempts to rebuild, the damage, symbolised by his blinded son and the violence at the novel's end, cannot be undone. War, the novel insists, leaves no true victors.