Arrow of God

Ezeulu’s story becomes “just another story in the life of the six villages” (193). Obika’s wife grows pregnant, Ugoye and Matefi continue to fight, and Oduche makes progress in his learning. Obika returns to drinking. Even Ezeulu seems to move beyond his bitterness.

The six villages each celebrate village-specific feasts and festivals. Together, the villages join to remember their dead. For one feast in Ezeulu’s village, Obika’s age group was to present a new Mask, carved by Edogo, to the village. The elders of the village worked, this year, to enhance the sense of mystery around these ancestral masks. Although a man from outside the village would wear the Mask, to remove suspicion that the Mask-wearer is a man, Obika is one of the men chosen to slaughter rams in front of him. He is nervous.

The day of the event, Obika sharpens his knife. A crowd forms, waiting for the event to begin. Otakekpeli, who is “a wicked medicine man” (196), appears at the edge of the crowd. Everyone suspects that he is there “to try out the potency” (197) of his magic. They hope that the young men in the ceremony have protected themselves against such evil forces.

Obika is the first arrival. When he sees Otakekpeli, he runs for him, then stops abruptly. He orders the medicine man to go home while the older man laughs in return. Okuata, Obika’s wife, reels on the outside of the circle watching. Obika throws the medicine man into the bush, drawing cheers from the crowd, as the Mask arrives.

The Mask stands “for the power and aggressiveness of youth” (199). Some young men hold a rope around its waist to keep it under control. One young man fails to catch a machete he throws into the air, which provokes a boo from the crowd. At the same time, the Mask begins to greet the elders, starting with Ezeulu. Edogo watches the performance, finding some flaws in the mask he carved. In action, “it had come to life” (200).

The event climaxes when Obika and Obikwelu behead the rams before the Mask. Obika succeeds, but Obikwelu, who had already dropped his machete forward, fails in his task on the first try. Although he eventually succeeds, the crowd is already laughing.

At the feast of the New Yam, Ezeulu decides to “hit Umuaro” (202). The feast is intended to reenact that coming together of the villages. All men from all six villages carry a seed-yam to Ulu; this helps him to know the total number of men. The festival’s other purpose is to celebrate minor deities without their own feasts; this is the only time all year that they emerge. Thus, it brings “gods and men together in one crowd” (203).

Men arrive, one day, to ask when the New Yam festival will be. By their counting, more than a year has gone by since the last. Their presumption angers Ezeulu. When the men leave, he seems satisfied, until he hears his younger children, Obiageli and Nwafo, chanting something strange. They confess that they are saying: “Python, run! There is a Christian here!” (204), which is intended to scare away snakes. Ezeulu breaks “into a long, loud laughter” (205).

The leaders of Umuaro come to address anger surrounding Ezeulu’s refusal to declare the New Yam festival. He reminds them of the custom, that he will “only call a new festival when there is only one yam left from the last” (207). Even though they understand him, they worry that “the harvest is ripe in the soil and must be gathered now or it will be eaten by the sun and the weevils” (207). Onenyi blames the fact that the old yams are not finished on the white man.

They ask him to eat the rest of the yams, but Ezeulu reminds them that “those yams are not food and a man does not eat them because he is hungry” (207). The leaders of Umuaro urge him to eat the yams and, if that angers Ulu, to “let it be on the heads of the ten” (208) of them. Ezeulu stands firm in his belief that “[t]he gods sometimes use us as a whip” (208).

The next morning, Ezeulu visits the shrine of Ulu. The meeting is fruitless, and the news “that the six villages would be locked in the old year for two moons longer spread such alarm as had not been known in Umuaro in living memory” (210).

In a fight with his friend, Nwafo grows angry that the other boy insulted his father and punches him in the mouth. Matefi is mocked by other women at the market. She calls Obika and asks him to appeal to his father.

Other men see that “because the six villages allowed the white man to take him away” (212), Ezeulu is punishing Umuaro. Akuebue defends him against these accusations. Nonetheless, it seems as if “a priest like Ezeulu leads a god to ruin himself” (213).

The catechist of the Umuaro church, John Jaja Goodcountry, sees this new panic as an opportunity. His school and church had been thriving as opinion spread that “the best way to deal with the white man was to have a few people like Moses Unachukwu around who knew what the white man knew” (214). Goodcountry decides to tell the villagers that “if they made their thank-offering to God they could harvest their crops without fear of Ulu” (215). 

As famine sets in, families begin to die. Amalu comes first. His son, Aneto, needs to decide whether to hold a funeral without a yam feast or to wait on yams. Even Ezeulu’s family feels the pain of the famine. They have “a larger stock of old yams” (219) and do not need to buy them from other villages, yet these yams are tasteless and hard to cook.

Ezeulu suffers in silence. He wants “to hear what Umuaro [is] saying” (219), but no one will speak with him. Only Akuebue visits him sometimes. He is worried “because it looks like the saying of our ancestors that when brothers fight to death a stranger inherits their father’s estate” (220). He tells his friend that villagers have taken yams to the church.

Ezeulu calls for Oduche after Akuebue leaves. With great sadness, he rebukes Oduche for the fact that his “father cannot count on” him and calls him a “lizard that ruined his mother’s funeral” (221).

Finally, Ezeulu eats the new yam and announces that the New Yam feast will come in twenty-eight days. He has a strange dream that night, in which he hears a burial service passing by his compound. When he seeks his family, he finds them missing, Matefi’s hut burned and Ugoye’s hut burning.

In the dream, he feels a “blind alarm” and “life-and-death urgency” (223) that disappear when he wakes up. He fears that this is madness like the kind that had taken over his mother. He struggles to sleep again, especially as the Ogbazulobodo runs around the village to mark Amalu’s burial.

Aneto asks Obika to carry the Ogbazulobodo. Although he is sick, he reluctantly agrees. That night, as he carries it, he is overtaken the spirit and is “at once blind and full of sight” (226). He runs fast, knowing his path assuredly, and feels “like two separate persons” (226). When he returns, the men struggle to get Obika to speak. They carry his body to Ezeulu. In the morning, Obika’s death is announced. It shakes “Umuaro to the roots” (228).

Ezeulu is filled with despair and wonders: “[W]hy had Ulu chosen to deal thus with him, to strike him down and then cover him with mud?” (229). This final event turns Ezeulu into “a demented high priest,” to the point where he cannot really notice what “the final outcome” (229) of his village is.

Winterbottom recuperates in England, then returns to his seat and marries his doctor. He never hears of Ezeulu again, especially because John Nwodika leaves his service: “In the end […] only Umuaro and its leaders saw the final outcome” (229).

To the men of Umuaro, the god took their side “against his headstrong and ambitious priest” (229). Ruining Ezeulu upheld “the wisdom of their ancestors” that “no man however great was greater than his people” (229). Destroying Ezeulu brings disaster on Ulu; “the Christian harvest” happens just after Obika’s death, with many men accepting the new religion. After this conversion, “any yam harvested in his fields was harvested in the name of the son” (230).