One night, as Okonkwo is settling on his bed, he hears the beat of a drum and the voice of the town crier. The messenger summons every man in Umuofia to gather at the marketplace the next morning. Okonkwo wonders whether the emergency concerns war with a neighboring clan. War does not frighten Okonkwo, because he knows that it frightened his cowardly father. In Umuofia’s most recent war, for example, Okonkwo brought home his fifth human head.
The next morning, Okonkwo joins the men in the marketplace to hear the important message. A powerful orator shouts a welcome to them by greeting them in all four directions while punching his clenched fist into the air; the assembled men shout in response. After silence returns, he angrily tells the crowd that a Umuofian woman has been killed in Mbaino while she was attending the market. The outraged crowd finally agrees that Umuofia should follow its usual course of action: Give Mbaino a choice of either going to war with Umuofia or offering Umuofia a young man and a young virgin as compensation for the death of the Umuofian woman.
Umuofian’s power in war and magic is feared by its neighbors, who know that Umuofia will not go to war without first trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement and seeking the acceptance of war by its Oracle. Everyone knows that a war with Mbaino would be a just war, so the clan sends Okonkwo as their emissary to negotiate with Mbaino; he returns two days later with a young man and a virgin offered by Mbaino.
The elders of Umuofia decide that the girl should live with the man whose wife was killed and that the young man, named Ikemefuna, belongs to the clan as a whole. They ask Okonkwo to take fourteen-year-old Ikemefuna into his home while the clan decides what to do with him. Okonkwo then gives the care of Ikemefuna to his senior wife, the mother of Nwoye, his oldest son, who is twelve. Ikemefuna is quite frightened, especially because he does not understand what has happened or why he is in Umuofia, separated from his family. The elders decide that the teenage boy will live in Okonkwo’s household for three years.
Because Okonkwo is continually afraid that someone may consider him weak, he rules his household with a stern hand and a fierce voice, causing everyone to fear his explosive temper. When he was a child, a playmate called his father agbala, which means woman and also a man who has taken no title. Okonkwo learned to hate everything his father loved, including gentleness as well as idleness. He also sees signs of laziness in his son Nwoye. To purge himself of the reminder of his father, Okonkwo nags and beats Nwoye daily.
In his family compound, Okonkwo lives in a hut of his own, and each of his three wives lives in a hut of her own with her children. The prosperous compound also includes an enclosure with stacks of yams, sheds for goats and hens, and a medicine house, where Okonkwo keeps the symbols of his personal god and ancestral spirits and where he offers prayers for himself and his family. He works long hours on his farms and expects others to do the same. Although the members of his family do not possess his strength, they work without complaint.
