Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Arrow of God is set among the Igbo people of southern Nigeria a few years after the First World War. Though the British had claimed colonial rule over the Igbo land in 1885, expeditions to subdue individual Igbo villages were still being undertaken amidst the First World War. The fictional villages of Umuaro in the novel have had little interactions with the colonial power which claims to rule them before the beginning of the novel and although they have been exposed to Christianity and other aspects of European society retain a traditional social, political, and religious structure.

In 1914, Northern and Southern Nigeria were consolidated by the British government into a single administration headed by Governor-General Frederick Lugard, With his new authority, Lugard extended the system of indirect rule utilized by British authorities in the north into southern Nigeria.. Indirect rule required the creation of local government to serve the colonial agenda. These local governments were believed by the British to require autocratic chiefs, a custom foreign to the Igbo people whose political power was decentralized and typically in the

He played an important role in debates over the future of post-colonial Nigeria in addition to becoming a prolific writer of both poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. He has often referred to his works of fiction in interviews and essays as motivated by a desire to teach the world that culture was not something brought to Africa by its colonizers. Arrow of God like Things Fall Apart with which it is sometimes grouped as two-thirds of an Igbo Trilogy, presents a Igbo society with social, religious, political, and artistic complexity disturbed by the advance of British colonial