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This is, in my view, the most powerful Achebe novel, followed by Anthills
of the Savannah.  In the end notes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
Half of a Yellow Sun, she mentions how she
is passionate about Arrow of God; indeed I was impelled to find and read
this book only after Adichie's fervent admiration.

I found the character of Ezeulu, the priest who rebels against his own
people, a fascinating study in character.  The story is told with a powerful
indigenous language, with great detachment.

From Chinua Achebe, by Catherine Lynette Innes, Cambridge U Press, 1992:

     The story is based on an actual incident, recorded by Simon Nnolim in
     The history of Umuchu, in which a priest named Ezeagu rejected a
     chieftaincy in 1913, was imprisoned, and refused to roast sacred yams
     for the months missed. ...

CL Innes and other critics view a large part of Achebe's oeuvre is a
response to Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson.  Both AofG and MJ are set in the
1910s, when this recorded incident is also said to have occurred.  Both are
populated by a large group of mission-educated Igbo who, like Johnson, see
the white man's civilization as the wave of the future.  In both works, the
building of a road is a significant event, the cause as well as the symbol
of the disruption of the ordinary, everyday world of the indigenous
society.

from wiki:Chinua Achebe: 

    The idea for the novel came in 1959, when Achebe heard the story of a
    Chief Priest being imprisoned by a District Officer.[80] He drew further
    inspiration a year later when he viewed a collection of Igbo objects
    excavated from the area by archaeologist Thurstan Shaw; Achebe was
    startled by the cultural sophistication of the artefacts. When an
    acquaintance showed him a series of papers from colonial officers (not
    unlike the fictional Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower
    Niger referenced at the end of Things Fall Apart), Achebe combined these
    strands of history and began work on Arrow of God in earnest.