The Flute and the Code: Why Many Programmers Are Becoming Unoka
Source: Portrait of Chinua Achebe
In the book Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s Unoka was easy to dismiss. He sat in his hut playing his beautiful flute while other men farmed yams and went to war. He died in debt, carried to the Evil Forest.
But Unoka is alive today. He is writing code.
Walk into any tech company. You will find brilliant programmers who love the craft the way Unoka loved music. They stay up perfecting elegant functions no user will ever notice. They refactor code that already worked. They argue about tabs versus spaces with the passion of warriors.
But ask them to talk to a user. They grimace. Ask them to understand the business problem. They say it is not their job. Ask them to step away from the terminal and face the messy reality of why people actually need what they are building. They retreat into abstraction. They have become Unoka, sitting in a modern hut, playing a digital flute.
There is nothing wrong with loving your craft. The problem is when the craft becomes an escape from responsibility. Unoka said he hated the sight of blood. He said farming was not his gift. He played his flute instead. But when the lean season came, he begged for yams. When his family needed protection, he had no title. The flute did not save him.
Today, programmers say, “I just want to write clean code.” But code does not exist in a vacuum. Code solves problems. It runs businesses. It pays salaries. It serves people. When a programmer refuses to engage with anything beyond syntax, they are refusing the very reason their craft exists.
Achebe did not romanticize Unoka. He showed us a man who chose beauty over responsibility and paid the price. The flute was not evil. But playing it while the world demanded something else was a slow kind of death. Programmers today make the same choice. They choose the elegance of abstraction over the messiness of reality. They measure themselves by cleverness rather than impact. And like Unoka, they become irrelevant.
Love the code. But let it serve life. Talk to users. Understand the problem. Write beautiful software that actually helps someone. Engage with reality instead of hiding from it. Unoka’s music could have meant something if he had played it in service to his community instead of in escape from it. Your code can mean something too.
Rest in peace, Chinua Achebe. Your stories still speak.