The Narrative of Conversion in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God

Wherever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute. I am the truth, the way, and the life would be called blasphemous or simply absurd, for is it not well known that a man may worship Ogwugwu to perfection and yet be killed by Udo?

—Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet On Creation Day

O.so. mgbada bu nugwu
The speed of the deer
Is seen on the hill

—Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God

It is a commonplace of academic and popular discussions of black Africa's problems to stress the colonial underlay of the different countries that today claim sovereignty on the continent. Now perhaps more than ever, it is useful to be reminded that the boundaries of the nation-states of contemporary black Africa were drawn by European powers at the Berlin conference of 1884–85. This act of mapping and naming was in line, by and large, with the interests of the main European powers themselves. The geographical and juridical authoring of many sub-Saharan African nations derives, then, not from historical or political logics internal to the continent itself, but, rather, from late-nineteenth century Western European exigencies. In this sense, the project of nation-building advocated by pan-African nationalists since the decolonization struggle of the 1950s might be thought of as one of engineering African versions of a pre-constituted Western model. Black African nationalism of the mid-twentieth century was all along an attempt to "translate" a Western category of the nation-state by recreating it in an African political space.

Current Anglo-American cultural criticism, and more specifically the vector of postcolonial studies within it, has shown the problems in rhetorics of nationalism and modernization. The critiques of the elisions of nationalist rhetoric in current studies of postcoloniality yield useful insights into the situation in black Africa.¹ Taking up one of the insights of postcolonial theory and cultural criticism, we may use the idea of translation to resituate the lofty colonial categories underpinning the continent's modernity. To talk of recreating or translating a "Western" form in a non-Western space is to adopt a questionable understanding of the dynamic of cultural encounter and historical change. Briefly, this understanding grasps the encounter between the colonized and the colonizer fundamentally as one of "transfer." The transfer would straddle both the realms of thought as well as action, mind as well as social structure. The process would be passive, and the translation would be successful or not, depending on the extent to which it mimics a stable original. By first rejecting essentialist notions of originality that serve Eurocentric representations of formerly colonized societies, we begin to approach the actively deconstructive sense of translation that can productively inform the way we frame the contemporary problems of black Africa.

In this essay, my general claim is as follows: if understood simply as a project of replicating the nation-state form inherited—through colonial imposition—from Western Europe, the nationalist project of translation was doomed from the outset. Further, and more specifically, this doomed project was simultaneously endorsed and criticized in literary treatments of African societies since the decolonization era of the 1960s. I use the example of Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God to argue that the achievement of the best of modern African novelists should not be located in the success with which they translate Eurocentric ideologemes about nationhood and the proper destiny for modern African societies. Rather, the achievement should be located in the depth with which they reveal the problems in the nationalists' undertaking. Achebe opens up a way of conceiving and representing collective life in Africa, such that the continent's failures appear, not primarily as a catalogue of woes but, very specifically, as temporal flashes in an uncanny continuum, where a different future can neither be foreclosed nor guaranteed. Here, what we have is a representational mood that stresses notional possibility (what is and can be), rather than relational calibration based on a spurious norm or a non-existent model.

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