Chinua Achebe and an Archaeology of the Postcolonial African State

Abstract

Patrick Chabal, noted scientist, should certainly have included non-African 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 reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars (8). After all, non-African of Africa actually dominate both production and dissemination of myriad of explanations that have been employed to understand and supposedly ameliorate crisis of postcolonial state in Africa. To extent that explanations have a concrete materiality to them?that is, in their ultimate transformation to (basis of) social actions?the crisis of African state ought to be considered as much social as epistemological. Canonical social science exegeses have always taken current dominant African sociopo? litical institutions as given. But these dominant institutions of politics, eco? nomies, and and administration are completely of colonial origin. Where they are questioned at all, it is with regard to their improper management by African actors. It is partly for recalcitrant blindness in explanations that Chabal himself calls them paradigms lost (11-32). Rarely was it pondered that problem might be primarily a crisis of institutions in their entirety in relation to context, not simply of their performance. Here then is source ofthe comparative superiority of fictional investigations of African writers: they have always foregrounded 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 ofGod (1964), for its unusually prescient and canny foreshadowing of crisis of legiti? macy facing postcolonial African states today. Unlike Achebe's other texts we all know and use in our classes for their deep examinations of African state, Arrow is not specifically about postcolonial state. It is set at turn of twentieth-century Igboland, Nigeria, and dramatizes penetration and ultimate consolidation of British colonial authority over indigenous societies. In other words, it is set about seven or so decades before independence, decades described by historian as Basil Davidson as wasted in terms of crucial political and structural development of continent (72). [I]n every crucial field of life, writes Davidson, the British had frozen indigenous institutions while at same time robbed colonized peoples of every scope and freedom for self-development (72). This arrest and devastation ofthe indigenous society's general capacity for self-directed evolution is drama enacted by Arrow of God, while resulting wasteland is central focus of later A Man ofthe People (1966), Achebe's now classic merciless excoriation of new post? colonial state.