CHINUA ACHEBE’s Arrow of God: The Malaise of Colonial Modernity

This episode will be focusing on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and what it tells us of the malaise of colonial modernity. Unlike Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God is set among the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria set in the early twentieth century when the colonial bureaucracy has been fully established and is not simply incipient, as in the earlier novel. We are introduced to Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu among the people of Umuaro. But unlike what we saw in Things Fall Apart, the traditional culture here is full of disagreements and quarrels about everything, even the foundational narratives of the clan. In the midst of this is placed Ezeulu, who as a Chief Priest is also afflicted by doubts about his sphere of social action in the context of the historical changes that his clan is exposed to. I will be arguing that Ezeulu’s crisis is part of the malaise that comes with colonial modernity. For colonial modernity is not simply the historical phase of new infrastructure, colonial bureaucracy, and alternative modes of self-fashioning brought on by Christianity, but that it also ambiguates traditional attitudes regarding their collective pasts. It is this ambiguation that leads to a sense of confusion and malaise, and that in the novel is depicted vividly through the mind of Ezeulu.

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Suggested Reading

Ato Quayson, “Conscripts of Colonial Modernity in Chinua Achebe’s Rural Novels,” in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in January 2021).

Charles, Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14.1 2002: 91-124.

Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction. London: James Currey, 1991.

Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson. London: Penguin, 2004.

Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of the Igbo People. London: Macmillan, 1976.

Nwokeji, G. Ugo. Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: And African Society in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.