The answer to your question can be found in Chapter 13 of
this excellent novel, after Okonkwo has been banished and Obierika is sitting down and
thinking about his friend's punishment. It is clear that he feels somewhat ambivalent
about the kind of punishment that people face when they committed a crime either in
ignorance or inadvertently. The situation reminds him of his twin children that he had
thrown away. Note what he says about them:
Why should a man suffer so greviously for an
offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found
no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife's twin
children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed? The Earth had decreed
that they were an offence on the land and must be
destroyed.
Clearly, Obierika
questions such "justice" and punishment when the people involved have no responsibility
or choice over the way that they offend Earth. Just as Okonkwo killed by accident, so
his twin children had no other option but to be born as twins, yet both were punished
indiscriminately. Obierika's questioning shows how unsatisfactory he finds this
arrangement.
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