4 - Religion and power in Africa: Arrow of God

Summary

What can be more fascinating than the work of the religious imagination, for good or evil, on men's minds and so upon history …?

Joyce Cary, Preface to The African Witch

Wherever something stands, there also Something else will stand.

Igbo proverb cited by Achebe

Published in 1964, Arrow of God tells the story of a priest, Ezeulu, who declines an appointment as warrant chief during the years when District Officers were attempting to apply Lugard's policy of indirect rule to Eastern Nigeria. He is imprisoned for several weeks, and so is unable to announce the appearance of the new moon in his village. As a result the feast of the New Yam is delayed, the villagers suffer from hunger as their old supplies of yams run out, and some begin to turn to the harvest festival of the Christian god as an alternative. The novel's closing pages show Ezeulu isolated in his madness following the death of his favourite son. Achebe has based his novel on an actual incident, recorded by Simon Nnolim in The History of Umuchu, in which a priest called Ezeagu rejected a chieftancy in 1913, was imprisoned and refused to roast the sacred yams for the months missed.

Insofar as it is the story of the interaction between colonists and colonized, Arrow of God can be seen as yet another response by Achebe to Mister Johnson and the literary and historical perspective it represents, a response which, as Robert Wren has argued, illustrates complexities of cause and effect barely guessed at by Joyce Cary and his colonial administrators.