Essay about The Collision of Beliefs in Things Fall Apart

No one likes to be told how to live. In the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, missionaries came to Africa to teach the natives a new way of life, Christianity. The natives had lived one way their entire life, and enacted their beliefs whole-heartedly. European missionaries wanted to convert them from these ways. Each group of people had a difficulties communicating with each other; this caused a type of ignorance towards the other. Joseph Conrad did an adequate job portraying the views of Europeans in his novel Heart of Darkness and why they felt they needed to be in Africa. The traditions and beliefs in these two novels caused a major separation between the natives and whites; could this have caused more damage†¦show more content†¦Were they really wild savages? The natives had a completely different way of life than the Europeans did, and with any religion, the followers believed in entirety. In the novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe develops the African’ s beliefs fully. Many whites thought of the native Africans as being uncivilized. The natives were just as much civilized as the whites, if not more. They seemed to have supplementary structure and followed their beliefs more so than the whites. It was the ignorance of the white men not to realize how civilized the natives really were. The natives were civilized, just in their own way, but the Europeans still wanted to civilize the natives. ‘Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as â€Å"the other world,† the antitheses of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.’ (pg 3 An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) Europeans professed to be great, ‘civilized,’ people, but in reality they were just as civilized as the natives were. The European missionaries wanted to come to Africa to share the good news of Chri stianity to the natives. 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