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What is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
In the first of three lectures delivered at Harvard in 1998 and subsequently published under the title Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe reflects on the state of so-called African literature under British colonial rule. The vogue of “riveting adventure stories among savages” that began as an “ancillary service to the slave trade,” he writes, reshaped itself following that trade’s abolition “with the tools of trendy scholarly fantasies and pseudo-sciences” to serve the aims of colonial occupation (30f.). From the ship captain John Lok’s 1561 vision of West Africans as “people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts” to Joyce Cary’s description nearly four centuries later of a Sudanese town where “jealous savages… live like mice or rats in a palace floor,” Achebe finds a consistent tendency (quoting Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow) to portray “African behavior, institutions and character… as the negation of all human decencies” (26ff.). For African writers of the early 1950s, already energized by the prospect of Africa’s decolonization, this foreign appropriation of the “absolute power over narrative” was experienced as a form of dispossession (24). “What is both unfortunate and unjust,” Achebe writes,
is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening. (70ff.)
In the last of his Harvard lectures, Achebe looks back on the twentieth century as having unleashed “the process of ’re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession” and expresses the hope that the twenty-first century will “see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world’s peoples” (79). This idea of balance, which Achebe derives from Igbo tradition, is fundamental to his world view. Reflecting on Achebe’s prose style, critic Annie Gagiano writes that his was
essentially a dialogical imagination and all his novels are characterized by heteroglossia (multi-voiced narrative), for one of the fundamental tenets of the Igbo world view, as he encountered it, was its lessons about the perpetuity of alternative possibilities, translated by him into English as: ‘Wherever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it.’ (1080)
The trope of balance—or its analogue, that of constitutive tension—is everywhere in Achebe’s writing: in the language of his novels and essays, in his conceptions both of spirituality and of democracy, and in the way he thinks of colonialism’s effects on the Igbo people. Reflecting on the democratic institutions he and others propounded as members of Biafra’s National Guidance Committee, Achebe speaks of valuing “a fusion of the good ideas of the West with the best that we had produced in our own ancient African civilizations” (Country 146).
Late in his life, without wanting in any way to justify the British colonial enterprise, Achebe would express several “piece[s] of heresy”: that the British governed the colony of Nigeria “with considerable care” and eventually implemented “a well-thought-out exit strategy”; that the educational infrastructure they put in place “celebrated hard work and high achievement”; and that the British provided Nigerian writers like Achebe with a “unifying language”—namely, English—that could be effectively highjacked to foster a greater diversity of cultures (Country 43, 48, 27, 25, 60). At the same time, Achebe recognizes—characteristically because dialogically—that “[h]istory teaches us that people who have been oppressed… are often too ready to let bygones be bygones” (Country 49).
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Although Achebe’s later novels—A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987)—will make ample use of Naijá (a.k.a. Nigerian pidgin), those of his African trilogy—Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964)—are written largely in standard English. That said, they are deeply infused with the power of Africa’s great oral traditions. To reclaim his people’s stories and history by ‘writing back’ to the West, Achebe reports:
I borrowed proverbs from our culture and history, colloquialisms and African expressive language from the ancient griots, the worldviews, perspectives, and customs from my Igbo tradition and cosmology, and the sensibilities of everyday people. (Country 55)
Thus Achebe speaks of extending what he learned at Government College Umuahia and the University of Ibadan through “the education from life I picked up from our tradition,” seeking out orators—typically uneducated—who embodied “a wholesome African wisdom” grounded in the “traditional values that had sustained our societies from the beginning of time” (Country 146). Igbo sayings and proverbs were of particular value to Achebe insofar as they reflected “the complexity of the world” to a far greater degree than the “doctrinaire, self-righteous strain” of Christianity he was raised under (Country 12). It is therefore fitting that Achebe begins There Was a Country’s initial exposition of the milestones in the long history of Igbo dispossession at the hands of Europeans—including the slave trade, the 1884-5 Berlin Conference that carved up Africa, the amalgamation of hitherto autonomous states as Nigeria, the experience of indirect rule, and the loss of the habit of self-rule—with an Igbo proverb that “tells us that a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body” (1ff.).
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Throughout this work, I have circled back to five significant touchstones for the assessment of wisdom: an attention to social and historical context, an appreciation of situational complexity, a commitment to empathy, a respect for communitarian values, and intellectual humility. In varying degrees, Achebe’s work exemplifies all five of these.
Achebe’s novels and essays are deeply contextual. Indeed, the novels have been widely praised for allowing readers—including Nigerian readers—to learn more about the country’s history of colonial and postcolonial struggle.
Rather than “turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating complexity,” Achebe suggests, the writer must “conquer its mystery by battling with it” (Country 59). In her Introduction to an edition of The African Trilogy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie rightly notes that a “reader expecting to find simple answers in Chinua Achebe’s work will be disappointed, because he is a writer who embraces honesty and ambiguity and who complicates every situation” (x).
Achebe’s commitment to empathy and social justice is manifest in his recognition “that decency and civilization… insist that the writer take sides with the powerless” and his insistence, after Elie Wiesel, that “[t]here may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest” (Country 58, 249). Achebe thus situates himself within an ancient Igbo tradition that
implores intellectuals to transform themselves into ‘warriors of peace’ during periods of crisis, with a proclivity for action over rhetoric. Many of our finest writers and thinkers were armed with this ancient wisdom and worked toward a peaceful resolution to the hostilities. (Country 109)
Despite the individualistic proclivities of both the Igbo and British traditions, Achebe never loses sight of the centralit of community as a perpetual work in progress. All of Achebe’s work, Adiche writes, “is, in some way, about strong communitarian values, the use of language as collective art, the central place of storytelling and the importance of symbolic acts and objects in keeping a community together” (xiii).
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All of these tendencies—a recognition that human action in the world takes place in complex social and historical contexts and, at its best, is attentive to the needs of others and of the community as a whole—come together in a body of fiction that is never didactic and that, with something like humility, leaves space for the reader to puzzle through the actions of its characters. Achebe’s fiction, like his essays, are the work of a “protest writer, with restraint,” of a writer who seeks (as he once said of his mother) “to bring about change gently” (Country 58, 9).
Although Arrow of God was the last novel of Achebe’s African Trilogy to be published, it is set in the 1920s—a generation after Things Fall Apart and a generation before No Longer at Ease—and thus at a crucial moment in the British colonial enterprise. The novel’s protagonist is Ezeulu, a headstrong village priest caught up in a cascading series of conflicts—between him and his wives, siblings, and children; among the inhabitants of his home village of Umuachala; between his clan’s six villages and their respective title holders; between his people and the British colonizers; and finally among the colonizers themselves. The novel is notable for its insistence on the centrality of language, and especially of proverbs and stories as the vehicles of a collective wisdom. It is no less remarkable for its depictions of village life—its social rituals, religious practices, markets, festivals, medical practices, dress, foods, and means of dispute resolution. Like Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God has helped generations of later Igbos, Chimamanda Adichie included, to rediscover their nation’s past.
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Especially pertinent to the question of wisdom is the novel’s dialogic structure. Arrow leaves no doubt as to the traumas imposed on the Igbo by their British colonizers and yet its omniscient narration generally shifts, not without sympathy on both sides, from Ezeulu to the head of the local British mission, Captain T.K. Winterbottom. Fully committed though he may be to the British colonial project, Winterbottom shows great insight in “stonewalling on” the centerpiece of Britain’s indirect rule system—namely, the imposition of Warrant Chiefs upon the Igbos, “a very democratic people” who have seen “what the uncontrolled power of kings could do” (Arrow 224ff., Country 246). Thanks in part to this dialogic structure, “the novel eschews any simple moral and makes the Igbo past something endlessly complex” (Kortenaar 129). Or as Ezeulu’s friend Akuebue puts it in suggesting that Ezeulu has been too hard on his impetuous son Obika: “It is the pride of Umuaro… that we never see one party as right and the other wrong” (273).
I have suggested that Achebe’s approach to both fiction and political action is generally wise. The paradox here, in the case of the novels, is that their manifestation of wisdom entails putting wisdom at stake, often through the telling of competing parables. Five years before the main action of the novel, Ezeulu had counseled the leaders of his “sorely divided” Umuaro clan not to fight an “unjust war” with the neighboring clan of Okiperi, saying that “[i]f you choose to fight a man for a piece of farmland that belongs to him I shall have no hand in it” (181f.). Just prior to the recounting of this scene, the narration reflects Ezeulu’s thoughts on Umuaro’s desire for war with reference to a parable: “But Umuaro had grown wise and strong in its own conceit and had become like the little bird, nza, who ate and drank and challenged his personal god to single combat” (181). Ezeulu’s rival, Nwaka, responds to Ezeulu’s arguments by saying that “[w]isdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own. Knowledge of the land is also like that. Ezeulu has told us what his father told him about the olden days” (182). Nwaka’s argument carries the day and war breaks out, during which Ezeulu tells the parable of a great wrestler who is crushed by his “personal god,” because “no matter how strong or great a man was he should never challenge his chi,” his guardian spirit (194). Winterbottom and his soldiers put a quick end to the conflict. Years later, Winterbottom proposes that Ezeulu take on the role of Warrant Chief “because I know that he is a wise man” (348).
Within just this set of passages, apparent wisdom is expressed in a parable (Ezuelu’s great wrestler) yet wisdom itself is also associated with foolishness (the story of the nza), relativism (the goatskin bag), and the colonizer’s self-interest (Winterbottom’s singling out of Ezeulu). Elsewhere in the novel, Ezeulu’s younger wife Ugoye is said to be wise “because she never cooked late on the days she sent food to her husband” (234). Of John Nwodika, a member of the Okiperi who tends to Ezeulu when he is imprisoned by Winterbottom, Ezeulu says: “he acts like a man of olden times, when people liked themselves. Today there are too many wise people; and it is not good wisdom they have but the kind that blackens the nose” (349). Clearly, “wisdom” in Arrow of God functions as something of a floating signifier—most would claim it, but there is little consensus as to where it actually lies.
Much of the novel’s action, like Winterbottom’s high regard for Ezeulu, stems from Ezeulu’s response to Winterbottom’s request to send one of his children to learn the ways of the Christian God and “be my eye” among the British (214). If as prophesized the white man had come to rule the land, Ezeulu reasons, “it would be wise to have a man of your family in his band” (211). Thus he sends his third son Oduche “to learn the white man’s wisdom, for Ezeulu knew from what he saw of Wintabota [Winterbottom] and the stories he heard about his people that the white man was very wise” (211).
And yet Ezeulu’s decision misfires spectacularly when Oduche adopts the ways of the white colonizer with great zeal. Challenged by a fellow convert to kill a royal python sacred to the Igbo goddess Idemili, a still fearful Oduche hits on the “very happy compromise” of locking the python in a box and leaving it to die (219).
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Scandal ensues. Akuebue, having been persuaded of Ezeulu’s “wisdom” in sacrificing Oduche to the Christians, now sees that action as “being used by Ezeulu’s enemies to harm his name” (300). Just prior to Ezeulu’s imprisonment, Nwaka criticizes Ezeulu’s having “shaken hands with a man of white body” in these terms: “Did not our elders tell us that as soon as we shake hands with a leper he will want an embrace?” (320). In so doing, he unknowingly echoes an earlier concern of Ezeulu, who (we are told) “was becoming afraid that the new religion was like a leper” (211). Nwaka then seals his argument against Ezeulu’s supposed wisdom with a proverb: “a man who brings ant-ridden faggots into his hut should expect the visit of lizards” (320).
But it is another decision that brings about Ezeulu’s tragic downfall and thus highlights how the use of parables and proverbs in Achebe’s novel tracks changes in the community’s perception of where wisdom resides. As Chief Priest of the god Ulu, Ezeulu is responsible for eating one of twelve sacred yams with each new moon, then scheduling a harvest celebration—the Feast of the New Yam—after all twelve have been eaten. After refusing to serve as Warrant Chief and while being held captive by a deathly ill Winterbottom, Ezeulu resolves “never to look for the new moon” while in captivity, reasoning that
[h]is quarrel with the white man was insignificant beside the matter he must settle with his own people…. Let the white man detain him not for one day but one year so that his deity not seeing him in his place would ask Umuaro questions. (338)
Reasoning that he was “no more than an arrow in the bow of his god” in Ulu’s fight to the finish with “the jealous cult of the sacred python”—i.e., the goddess Idemili, her Chief Priest Ezidemili, and his associate Nwaka—Ezeulu resolves to “hit Umuaro at its most vulnerable point” by postponing the yam harvest until all three uneaten yams are consumed (372). Having dreamt while imprisoned of Umuaro as “one hostile entity,” he comes to entertain “thoughts of reconciliation” on returning home, then immediately reverts (367). Behind his seeming acquiescence to the will of his god, in other words, there lies an extraordinary display of willfulness against his fellows.
Photo: Ore Iroegbu’s Musings
Predictably, Ezeulu receives a steady stream of friends and confidants seeking to convince him to schedule the Feast and allow the harvest to go forward lest the year’s yams be “eaten by the sun and the weevils” (388f.). They attempt to do so in the language of proverbs and maxims. One argues that “an adult does not sit and watch while the she-goat suffers the pain of childbirth tied to a post” (388). Another proposes that the emissaries take the “abomination on themselves,” saying that “the person who sets a child to catch a shrew should also find him water to wash the odor from his hand” (389). A third reminds Ezeulu of his saying that “a man must dance the dance prevailing in his time,” acknowledging “that we had come—too late—to accept its wisdom” (394). As their recourse to proverbs fails in the face of Ezeulu’s prideful stubbornness not to contravene the supposed will of his god, a fourth cites “numerous examples of customs that had been altered in the past when they began to work hardship on the people” (391). But Ezeulu remains unbowed.
In a masterful stroke of historical irony, Ezeulu’s rigorist and (yes) unwise reading of his god’s traditional mandate dramatically accelerates Umuaro’s (perhaps inevitable) uptake of Christianity. John Goodcountry, an African missionary who leads the Umuaro congregation, sees the “mounting crisis… as a blessing and an opportunity sent by God”; offers the people of Umuaro immunity from Ulu’s wrath in exchange for modest tributes; and plans to use the proceeds from his church’s harvest service to help fund “a place of worship more worthy of God and of Umuaro” (395, 397). While remaining “the only man in Umuaro who knew that Ezeulu was not deliberately punishing the six villages”—the novel in fact suggests otherwise—Akuebue says this of the Christian encroachment: “it looks like the saying of our ancestors that when brothers fight to the death a stranger inherits their father’s estate” (402).
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Increasingly isolated, first banishing Oduche as the “lizard that ruined his mother’s funeral,” then racked by the sudden death of his second son Obika, Ezeulu finds himself abandoned by his god and descends into madness:
Perhaps it was the constant, futile throbbing of these thoughts that finally left a crack in Ezeulu’s mind. Or perhaps his implacable assailant having stood over him for a little while stepped on him as on an insect and crushed him under the heel in the dust. But this final act of malevolence proved merciful. It allowed Ezeulu, in his last days, to live in the haughty splendor of a demented high priest and spared him knowledge of the final outcome. (412)
Ezeulu’s stubborn pursuit of vengeance against his fellow clansmen triggers his tragic downfall and a concomitant shift in where wisdom is shown to reside. Yet Achebe chooses to end his account on a note of compassion and mercy.
The novel’s final lines only serve to underscore the reassertion of collective wisdom both past and present, reappropriating for it the very parable that Ezeulu had flung in the face of Oduche just pages before and insisting on the historical irony occasioned by Ezeulu’s actions:
Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and thus upheld the wisdom of their ancestors—that no man however great was greater than his people; that no one ever won judgment against his clan. / If this was so then Ulu had chosen a dangerous time to uphold that truth for in destroying his priest he had also brought disaster on himself, like the lizard in the fable who ruined his mother’s funeral by his own hand…. Thereafter any yam harvested in [Umuaro’s] fields was harvested in the name of the son. (413)
