ELTALL (English language teaching, applied linguistics and Literature) Vol. 3 No. 2, 2022 Available online at https://jurnal.iainponorogo.ac.id/index.php/eltall RETHINKING THE PEDIGREES OF AFRICAN CULTURAL WATERSHED: A POST-COLONIAL INQUEST NTO CHINUA ACHEBE’S ARROW OF GOD Malesela Edward Montle University of Limpopo Department of Languages (English Studies) School of Languages and Communication Studies Faculty of Humanities edward.montle@ul.ac.za ABSTRACT The African cultural identities have undergone earth-shattering shifts from the pre- colonial epoch to the colonial and post-colonial periods. It is the colonial empire that advented in the African continent in the 15 th century and attempted to erode and stigmatise African cultural practices as part of its mission to take control of Africa. Despite Africa being under a democratic administration today, African cultural identities are still marginalised, chiefly, by colonial remnants that have not yet been successfully uprooted. Thus, this paper aims to re-anatomise the African cultural identity-crisis in the present day from the onset of colonialism in the continent. It utilises a qualitative method to crystallise this African cultural watershed from a literary perspective. This noted, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God is purposively sampled for this paper as a primary reference point by dint of its conformity to the main theme of the study. The paper, comprehensively, blames the enduring colonial fragments in the present day for the African cultural identity-crisis as they hinder decolonisation and peril African cultures. The colonial legacies in Africa today, like in the colonial times, are found to be championing Western identities at the expense of African cultural identities, hence, the latter is still menaced. Keywords: African identities, Colonialism, Culture, Western identities INTRODUCTION The pre-colonial antiquity of Africa depicts the continent as an institution of civilisation that richly embraced cultural belief systems. According to Montle (2021), these cultural norms served as guiding principles in all spheres of African endeavour. They were, inter alia, utilised to assert gender roles, educate, communicate, convey meaning and maintain peace and discipline. Essentially, cultural conventions served as an educational device in the pre-colonial African context where the culturally-driven tuition was and is still dubbed oral literature. This encompasses an engagement with riddles, proverbs, folktales, songs, myths, idioms, legends and epic poems for a particular objective such as to have fun, guide and educate. Rodney (1972, 70) notes that “the colonisers did not introduce education into Africa; they introduced a new set of formal educational institutions which partly supplemented and partly replaced those which were there before.” It is the colonisers that arrived in the African continent and perceived Africans as being in possession of “no cultural traditions of their own, no religious, economic or political background worthy of serious attention” (Roscoe 1970, 1). As a result, the coloniser imposed Western cultures, religions and ideas upon the African natives