Analysis of Christian Missionaries and their Effects to Africans in Things Fall Apart

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Analysis of Christian Missionaries and their Effects to Africans in Things Fall Apart

The writer’s purpose of writing the book is to edify the readers on the cultural practices of the Igbo people before the arrival of the missionaries and how their arrival threatened to change them. The writer depicts how the missionaries’ arrival led to a conflict in cultures and confusion on which cultural values were right to follow. Basically, Christian missionaries came to Africa to spread the gospel but soon modified their objectives to political and economic gain. This led to imperialism of the Europeans in Africa as described in the novel. Chinua Achebe was calculative in writing how the Christian missionaries destroyed the rich African culture through imperialism. This is where the missionaries termed native cultural practices as barbaric and uncivilized and influenced the Africans to adapt to modern lifestyles and religions (Gagiano, 2014).

Sadeghi (2014) indicates that Cultural features such as human sacrifices, performing birth rights and the art of rainmaking were seen as backward by the European missionaries. The missionaries brought about new ethnic practices such as religion which resulted to confusion and misconception among the Africans. The writer indicates how the Igbo people could not comprehend how and why they were supposed to assume worshiping another God. They were irritated by how the white missionaries demeaned their most esteemed culture and subjected them to a new way of doing things. At some point the Africans were confused on their belonging. Most Africans especially the successive generations were confused on which culture they should adapt hence confused their sense of belonging. Most Africans are forced to adapt to a mixture of the cultural standards due to this confusion…”