topics: |  fiction | africa | nigeria

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.