Achebe hitting the mark of Africa’s colonial grudges in Arrow of God.
It has been perhaps almost two decades since I’ve read a book by Achebe, not that I’ve been avoiding him, but the books that I have not read by the great man are often hard to come by. African literature is like that and it’s a shame, because it is a subset of world literature that is often underrated and therefore overlooked. I have been looking for a secondhand copy of Arrow of God for years and I decided that I no longer could wait and bought a new copy from the store.
Achebe is most well-known for his African Trilogy of Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. Each book centres around a male character with a significant post; Okonkwo the village chief, Obi the soon to be government official and Ezeulu, the chief priest. All of these novels deal with the push and pull of traditions and the inevitable yet unwelcome change of colonialism. In this manner, the first two books are very similar.
Achebe does not necessarily side with traditions though it is clear that he opposes colonialism. Yet, Arrow of God is not merely a vessel for the author’s messages, but more of a forum of discussion of what could go wrong, how messages can be misinterpreted, how a lack of understanding will only result in a further rift. Achebe does not mince his words on traditions — showing in full display the fickleness of people and the power plays that exist even if you factor out colonial interventions.
The perennial balancing act of the Chief priest
Ezeulu as the Chief Priest of Umuora is getting on but no doubt he still holds the keys to the village and upholds its most important ceremonies. He’s pretty virile in his life, having bred many children and having three wives (one who had already passed on). He has mature sons who’d take on important roles in the village and follow after Ezeulu’s footsteps. Iboka, for example, is the sculptor of masks in the village, a crucial part of ceremonies.
But the times are changing rapidly and Ezeulu’s influence is deteriorating by the day. In a land dispute on the borders of the neighbouring village, Okperi, his opinion to proceed with caution was overruled by the mob in favour of war, all which resulted in the deaths of villagers from either side, the British powers intervening and the land being rewarded to Okperi anyway. His decision to send one of his sons, Oduche to the missionary school to become the village’s eyes and ears backfired big time when Oduche decided to suffocate a python in a box, considered to be a revered animal.
As people are losing faith in Ezeule, the white men needed a proxy to diffuse their colonialist agenda to the grassroots level. Captain Winterbottom, with his superior airs who thought the natives no better than a tree in the forest (to put it mildly), had to select the tallest tree. Ezeulu stood as the prime candidate and was invited to come to Okperi to talk. But signals get mixed up as they sent a couple of native soldiers to “arrest” Ezeulu instead of politely fetching him. But days later, Ezeulu decided to go there on foot anyway.
It’s unfortunate then that Winterbottom contracted a life-threatening fever as Ezeulu arrived, which forced the latter to be detained in a rather unclear situation. When finally, Winterbottom’s subordinate, Clarke clarified to Ezeulu that he was to be a representative of the colonial government, Ezeulu rejected the offer.
Yet, his detention delayed the harvest of the yams, as tradition dictates that the holy yams must all be consumed before the harvest starts. Ezeulu’s stubbornness to stick with tradition angered many as he caused an unnecessary famine. The villagers would need to look to other markets for food, and the Christian church, ever opportunistic, offered salvation to the villagers without the fear of wrath of their deity if they choose to harvest now. Ezeulu’s downfall was sealed at the sudden death of his eldest son.
Out with the old, in with the new. The age old question of traditions and modernism.
The arrival of the colonial powers to Africa would have disrupted traditions that had remained practically unchanged for hundreds of years. Ezeulu, without the interference of the English would have likely been someone with enough problems in his hands, balancing the jealousy of other tribal chief priests, along with the friction between villages which might result in a brief skirmish or an all out war. We can also therefore speculate the story if the colonials were taken out of it.
What would happen then, if the war between Umuaro and Okperi had continued before the white men took away their weapons? Would Umuaro had reclaimed the land they deemed stolen from them? The war, had it continued may have potentially taken more lives than the resulting impasse, which resulted in Okperi being given the land by the colonial government. Would Ezeulu had seen the ripeness of the new moon to sound the drums of the new harvest if he had not been detained? If he had done so, then life in the village would have continued uninterrupted with a bump harvest. The villagers would not have resorted to another foreign religion if they had been allowed to harvest their own yams.
This is all speculation, but these I think, are the speculations that Achebe want us to make as it is part of the question. Would Africa had done any better if she were left undisrupted? We’d like to think yes, at first instinct. But at closer reading, we read that disruption is normal, that tribes evolve their deities according to the seasons and their fortunes, as Ulu was created for this need. There is violence, disputes, unhappiness and conflict. The Chief Priest try to hold all this balance together even before the white men of the government appeared in the story.
Tradition is the resident tenant being pushed out by the throngs of colonialism. Whether Tradition was the right tenant to begin with is a question outside the scope of this review. Yet traditions grow, hardly remaining static though it evolves over a longer timeline. However, this disruption demands that Africa grows her traditions, to adapt. It is ironic that Ezeulu, who was willing to sacrifice his son to play a spy to the white ways, lest he could help his community to pivot with the changing times, was unable to break the very same tradition to save his village from famine. His inability to adapt to circumstances led ultimately to his downfall. But can we blame a man who staunchly holds on to his beliefs, throwing common sense out the window?
Chinese whispers blurring the lines between black and white
How would the government rule over a land upon which they have no mastery of language, knowledge of culture and a task to introduce new conventions to a system well established over generations past? Arrow of God is a showcase of how colonialism is fated to fail. The seeds of this failure was already planted from the communication gap between the natives and the colonials.
English, unfortunately, was seen by the natives as a prestigious language, that anybody who can barely speak a word or two of the foreign tongue became almost revered. Moses Unachukwu, as a Christian and holding a rudimentary knowledge of English became the mouthpiece of the village, automatically elevating his status in the village. The two black soldiers who were tasked to detain Ezeulu only spoke pidgin English, yet this silenced the villagers in awe, that men who look like them was able to speak a different tongue.
Moses, as the translator, also bastardises the message with his own twist thus distorting the original meaning to an almost unrecognisable mutation:
“Tell them this bloody work must be finished by June.”
“The white man says that unless you finish this work in time you will know the kind of man he is.”
“No more lateness.”
“Pardin?”
“Pardon what? Can’t you understand plain, simple English? I said there will be no more late-coming.”
“Oho. He says everybody must work hard and stop all this shit-eating.”
The white man still holds the superior knowledge of the language, thus endowing himself superior status. Moses’s attempt of English (“Dat man wan axe master queshon.”) puts him in an inferior position. Yet, we can juxtapose the speech of the African when talking to each other, translated for us in English:
“Ogbuefi Akubue, may you live, and all your people. I too will live with all my people. But life alone is not enough. May we have the things with which to live it well. For there is a kind of slow and weary life which is worse than death.”
The natives speak in a heightened language, full of similes and connotations. It is a speech deliberately loaded with wisdom. Achebe, as the omniscient narrator, also writes in this poetic manner the way the villagers would talk to each other, though in a more controlled voice which seldom but surely uses these similes:
“Ezeulu could never get used to this worthless young man who trailed after his son like a vulture after a corpse.”
But in using this language, Achebe reclaims the ownership of his story, that in heightening the speech of the locals, and through his prose, he reinforces the conventions of the native way of life that for a long time had remained sustainable.
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Arrow of God is perhaps after Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s most famous novel. In many ways, the two novels are similar to each other, but also vastly different. While Things Fall Apart is more critical of the colonial powers, Arrow of God is a more meditative novel, one which shows the miscommunication and invisible barriers between the two sides of the natives and their colonial government in their mutual effort to understand each other (though they try to understand each other as chess players study their opponent to take advantage of the situation).
Ezeulu and Okonkwo, both tragic heroes are poster boys for post colonial African literature. They are also important mouthpieces for the African voice, long since seething with latent anger, hungover from the fumes of colonialism while the white men partied in their backyards and expecting the Africans to clean up the mess, after having run off with the family heirlooms. But on the other side of this anger, as for most African literature that I have come across, there is equally a great beauty in its prose and its message.
