Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe

First published: 1964

Type of work: Social chronicle

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: Okperi and the six Igbo villages that compose Umuaro in Nigeria

Principal Characters:

• Ezeulu, the protagonist, the Chief Priest of Ulu
• Nwaka, Ezeulu’s chief rival for power
• Ezidemili, the Chief Priest of Idemili, subordinate to Ezeulu but a secret supporter of Nwaka
• Oduche, Ezeulu’s third son, sent to study with missionaries
• Obika, Ezeulu’s intemperate second son, who dies during a funeral ritual
• Captain Winterbottom, the district commissioner, with fifteen years’ service in Nigeria
• Clarke, Winterbottom’s newly arrived assistant
• John Nwodika, Winterbottom’s steward
• John Goodcountry, a native catechist who practices uncompromising Christianity
• Moses Unuachukwu, the pastor’s warden, a more tolerant Christian

The Novel

Set in the 1920’s, the period in which the British were making the transition from direct to indirect rule, Achebe’s Arrow of God describes the efforts of Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu, to assert and to maintain his religious authority. Ulu is a god created by the people of Umuaro in a time of crisis to rule over the individual gods of the six federated villages and thereby to increase the security of the loose federation. Thus, Ezeulu is the chief authority figure in Umuaro, but the traditional independence of Igbo social structure leaves the true extent of his authority in doubt.

Moreover, Ezeulu’s Umuaro is a divided community, and his religious authority is threatened in two ways. On the one hand, its traditions are undermined by the proselytizing of the Christian missionaries who have built a school and a church nearby. On the other hand, Ezeulu’s authority is challenged from within the community, particularly by Nwaka and Ezidemili, the Chief Priest of Idemili, the leader of the cult of the python. Ezeulu’s situation is paralleled by that of District Commissioner Winterbottom. Winterbottom, a veteran of fifteen years in the colonial service, resists the new British policy of indirect rule because it will force him to delegate some of his secular authority. Each of the two leaders, therefore, is defending his authority against the encroachments of historical change.

Ezeulu’s debate with Umuaro begins when the community, led by Nwaka, insists on going to war with neighboring Okperi over a piece of land. The Umuaro ignore Ezeulu’s warning that Ulu will not support a war that is not just. Their five-day battle with Okperi is halted by the intervention of colonial troops, and Winterbottom orders all the guns in each community destroyed. After a hearing at which Ezeulu is a witness against Umuaro’s claim, Winterbottom awards the land to Okperi. To Ezeulu, this result is a vindication of his judgment, but many in Umuaro see it as betrayal. As the central proverb in the novel warns, “no man however great was greater than his people . . . no man ever won judgment against his clan.”

Three years later, Ezeulu’s ambition leads him to send his youngest son, Oduche, to study with the missionaries. In this way, he hopes to add their knowledge to his own. Although self-serving and manipulative, his action indicates a healthy openness to a variety of perspectives: “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.” Ezeulu’s statement reflects the adaptive nature of Igbo society, the flexibility that had allowed the creation of Ulu; yet Oduche becomes a militant Christian, and to demonstrate his new faith, he tries to kill the sacred python of Ezidemili. The python is saved by Ezeulu, but his son’s sacrilegious act widens the division in the clan.

Meanwhile, Winterbottom, who remembers Ezeulu’s honesty at the hearing, is under pressure to implement indirect rule, and he decides to name Ezeulu secular warrant chief in Umuaro. This appointment would give Ezeulu secular authority to complement his religious authority, but the insulting manner of the messenger who summons Ezeulu angers the priest, and Ezeulu haughtily refuses, maintaining that he will only serve Ulu. Outraged at Ezeulu’s rejection of colonial authority, Winterbottom jails the priest and demands that he accept the position. Instead, Winterbottom comes down with fever, and Ezeulu, flush with anger at Umuaro and pride in his victory over the white man, is released after thirty-two days of incarceration.

Ezeulu is greeted as a hero by the clan, but he is driven to explore the extent of his power, and he is convinced that he must become the terrible agent of Ulu’s vengeance, the “arrow in the bow of his god.” While in prison, he was unable to eat the ritual yams, an act that marks each new moon of the Umuaro calendar; therefore, he adamantly refuses to perform the Feast of the New Yam, the festival which sanctifies the harvest, until two more moons have passed. Unharvested, the crop will rot in the fields, and the cycle of planting and harvest will be permanently disrupted. Unmoved by the pleas of his hungry clansmen, Ezeulu convinces himself that he is responsible only to Ulu, forgetting his parallel duty to the survival of the clan.

Ezeulu’s act of will comes to a disastrous end. Obika, his eldest son, rises from a sickbed to run through the village as a part of a funeral ritual. As Obika finishes his run, he drops dead. Ezeulu believes himself betrayed by Ulu, and the people of Umuaro use Obika’s death as an excuse to accept the missionaries’ opportunistic offer of a Christian Feast of the New Yam in which the foodstuff can be harvested in the name of Christ. Ezeulu falls into madness, and the Christian dominance of the community begins.

The Characters

Chinua Achebe’s Ezeulu is the Chief Priest of Ulu, the preeminent religious leader in the six villages of Umuaro. It is his responsibility to interpret the will of Ulu and to perform the two most important rituals—the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves and the Feast of the New Yam. The first is a purification ceremony through which the villages’ sins are exorcised before the new crop is planted. The second sanctifies the harvest and marks the beginning of a new year. Thus, Ezeulu is an intermediary between the physical and spiritual worlds, a man with dual responsibilities.

Ezeulu is also an ambitious and proud man, who wonders about the true extent of his authority. Is he a mere functionary, powerless to effect real change, or is his spiritual power absolute? In asking such questions, Ezeulu forgets that true authority is communal and that even the god Ulu was created by Umuaro in order to strengthen their confederation.

Like Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart (1958), Ezeulu takes pride in his personal status, which places him in conflict with his community. As it does for Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease (1960), this conflict creates a sense of alienation. In Ezeulu, this alienation eventually takes the extreme form of madness. Ezeulu is unable to compromise his power as Chief Priest to the communal needs of the people; in fact, he believes that anyone who opposes him is an enemy. When his fellow clansmen question his decisions, Ezeulu resorts to his priestly role, denying kinship and demanding unquestioning obedience to his interpretation of the will of Ulu. This sort of rigid authoritarianism is unacceptable in Umuaro, not only because it eliminates the traditional pluralism of the society but also because inflexibility threatens the survival of a living culture.

Ezeulu fails to maintain the balance between his dual responsibilities. First he abstracts his god from the daily life of the community; then he uses his god as a weapon against his kinsmen. Once an advocate of social adaptation, he has, as a result of his hunger for power, become defensive and inflexible, becoming estranged from his family, from his clan, and, finally, from his hold on reality.

Ezeulu is paralleled by District Commissioner Winterbottom, who, like Ezeulu, is uncomfortable with his role as intermediary between the British government and the local chieftains. The British policy of indirect rule forces Winterbottom to invest authority in native chiefs, despite the fact that such centralized authority is unnatural to a nonhierarchical society such as that of the Umuaro. The frustration of his confrontation with Ezeulu leads directly to his fever, which leaves Winterbottom as broken as the priest is at the novel’s conclusion.

Critical Context

Arrow of God has been the subject of extremely contrasting commentary. It is Achebe’s most complex exposition of traditional Igbo religious beliefs, and in it he makes extensive use of Igbo proverbs. Some critics have responded to this effort by calling the novel obscure or suggesting that his gnomic method is unintentionally humorous. His digressive manner of building an awareness of Igbo culture has caused others to see Arrow of God as an example of Achebe’s poor narrative skills. Yet many critics believe that Arrow of God is Achebe’s masterpiece, a work in which he fully realizes the Igbo culture while thoughtfully exploring the universal question of authority. Undoubtedly, Arrow of God reflects Achebe’s rejection of the European stereotype of the alienated artist, for in this work, as in his other novels, he attempts to create art that is communal, functional, and utilitarian.

Although Achebe returned to a historical setting in Arrow of God after portraying contemporary Nigeria in No Longer at Ease, the problems that afflict Umuaro and the Chief Priest of Ulu related directly to the duality of the newly independent Nigeria in which Achebe wrote his novel. To this extent, therefore, Arrow of God is a compromise between the historicism of Things Fall Apart and the contemporaneity of No Longer at Ease.

In 1966, Achebe published A Man of the People, a satiric attack on the corruption of Nigerian politics, a novel which depicts the problems that led to the Nigerian Civil War. After reunification, Achebe turned away from the novel and focused his energies on essays, lectures, poetry, and some short fiction.

Bibliography

Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe, 1970, 1980.

Innes, Catherine L., and Bernth Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, 1978.

Njoku, Benedict Chiaka. The Four Novels of Chinua Achebe, 1984.

Obeichina, Emanuel. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, 1975.

Ravenscroft, Arthur. Chinua Achebe, 1969, 1977.