“He saved our fathers from the warriors of Abam, but he could not save us from the white man”: colonization and resistance in The Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to read Chinua Achebe’s novel, Arrow of God (2011), in order to understand and analyze the impact that the British presence had in Nigeria, especially in the imaginary village of Umuora, where the narrative takes place, at the beginning of the 20th century. From the point of view of the native, the high priest Ezeulu, Achebe provides a profound reflection on the violent relationship between metropolis and colony, colonizer and colonized, and how the inequality in the relationship provokes a true ethnic and cultural extermination, what Achile Mbembe (2018) understands to be necropolitics and V. Y. Mudimbe (2013), the marginalization of indigenous societies and the predominance of Eurocentric culture. Thus, Arrow of God, encourages reflection on the end of cultures and the domination of the native by the European.