Chinua Achebe and an Archaeology of the Postcolonial African State

Patrick Chabal, the noted political scientist, should certainly have included non-African scholars of Africa too when he argues perceptively in his book, Power in Africa: An Essay in Political Interpretation, that African writers "did more to reveal the reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars" (8). After all, non-African scholars of Africa actually dominate both the production and dissemination of the myriad of explanations that have been employed to understand and supposedly ameliorate the crisis of the postcolonial state in Africa. To the extent that explanations have a concrete materiality to them--that is, in their ultimate transformation to (basis of) social actions--the crisis of the African state ought to be considered as much social as epistemological. Canonical social science exegeses have always taken the current dominant African sociopolitical institutions as given. But these dominant institutions of politics, economics, and management and administration are completely of colonial origin. Where they are questioned at all, it is with regard to their "improper management" by African political actors. It is partly for the recalcitrant blindness in the explanations that Chabal himself calls them "paradigms lost" (11-32). Rarely was it pondered that the problem might be primarily a crisis of institutions in their entirety in relation to context, not simply of their performance. Here then is the source of the comparative superiority of the fictional investigations of African writers: they have always foregrounded the foundational issue of institutions and their legitimacy, and few with greater perspicacity and subtlety than Chinua Achebe.

Let us briefly revisit Achebe's old and famous text, Arrow of God (1964), for its unusually prescient and canny foreshadowing of the crisis of legitimacy facing postcolonial African states today. Unlike Achebe's other texts we all know and use in our classes for their deep examinations of the African state, Arrow is not specifically about the postcolonial state. It is set at the turn of twentieth-century Igboland, Nigeria, and dramatizes the penetration and ultimate consolidation of British colonial authority over the indigenous societies. In other words, it is set about seven or so decades before independence, decades described by the historian as Basil Davidson as "wasted" in terms of crucial "political and structural development" of the continent (72). "[I]n every crucial field of life," writes Davidson, "the British had frozen the indigenous institutions while at the same time robbed colonized peoples of every scope and freedom for self-development" (72). This arrest and devastation of the indigenous society's general capacity for self-directed evolution is the drama enacted by Arrow of God, while the resulting wasteland is the central focus of the later A Man of the People (1966), Achebe's now classic merciless excoriation of the new postcolonial state.

The largely precolonial Igbo society of Arrow was one of the type political scientists call stateless or acephalous societies, that is, societies without a central state structure in which all power is vested. Political decisions are taken by a congress of titled elders, some of whom are also priests of the important deities. The spiritual and secular are close but also distant, and the slippery and gray area between the two makes the code of morals as well as reparations for violations strict. ¹ To ward off threats of invasion from their enemies, the six villages of Umuaro had, in the distant past, banded together to form a loose alliance. The deity Ulu was created to spiritually cement the union. Ulu was thus the youngest deity but, by common consent, was made preeminent in the pantheon. And in a move that is of great implications for political philosophy and practice, the priesthood of this pivotal god went to the politically weakest of the six villages, to guard against tyrannical concentration of power in one area (Arrow 14-15). The function of Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu, is thus simultaneously spiritual and...