The Rupture in Sacred Time: Ezeulu's Discontent and the End of History in Arrow of God

Much has been written about the novels of Chinua Achebe, particularly his engagement with the conflicts arising from the intrusion of European colonialists in African societies. Much of the discourse on Achebe also invariably centers on his first novel, Things Fall Apart, and the tragic defiance of Okonkwo, the Umuofia warrior. But not as much has been said of his third novel, Arrow of God, Achebe's powerful, introspective, and solemn look at a different kind of event within colonialism and with a different kind of central character, the reflective and philosophical high priest Ezeulu, through whom the novelist of Arrow of God, I argue in this paper, navigates the clash between the "colonial time" of Europe and the "European enlightenment" and the "sacred time" of Africa and its desiccated moral condition. In this paper, I examine the impact of the rupture of an "African time"—the symbolic and metaphysical regulator of an ancient moral order—that results in what I conclude is catastrophe; a kind of apocalypse that results, by the death of the god Ulu, in the death of that African world. I argue here for a necessary reexamination of the condition of colonial history within the context of what amounts to Chinua Achebe's lament of the moral disorder that framed the rupture of an African time, the "crisis in the soul" that haunts that world at the end of colonization and the subsequent refraction of that fragmentation of sacred time in the disorder that the novelist began to apprehend in the events that began to shape the newly decolonized nations. The linkages between the destruction of time, the death of a god, and the disappearance of a moral order, I attempt to clarify in this essay, is at the roots of postcolonial disorder.