Its original purpose is to protect Nwamgba and her son from her husband’s brothers who are trying to take their inheritance, by teaching her son, Anikwenwa, English. Instead religion would create a tear between Nwamgba and Anikwenwa. The first time the people of Nwamgba’s tribe have their first interaction with religion, they laugh. Two white men that are described as, “harmless looking, the color of albinos, with frail and slender limbs” (205). They were expected men with guns, like they had heard about. They were expected the men to come full of wisdom, but instead they came speaking of “their god, who had come to the world to die, and who a son but no wife, and who was three but also one” (205). After her husband’s death’s Nwamgba saw …show more content…
Nwamgba was impressed by the story, she thought that the man “must have had fairly powerful medicine to be able to transform water into wine” (208). Nwamgba was still trying to process the teacher’s bible lesson as if it were a story like the ones her people had been telling. The girls, when they separated the sexes, would be taught how to sew, something else Nwamgba questioned. In her tribe this was a man’s duty. Women were suppose to learn to make pottery. The mission in her mind were teaching the children the wrong thing. What would ultimately make her decide to take her son to a different mission would be the fact that the lesson was not taught in English. The teacher justifies the decision by saying children learn better in their own language. This is not good enough for Nwamgba. She had come in search for English, and English was what she was going to get. She decides to take him to the Catholic mission even though she was warned they were “harsh and did not have the best interests of the natives at heart” (208). This warning would be one of the few times that a religious figure would be shown in a positive …show more content…
He began question his culture, telling his mother to tie her “wrapper around her chest instead of her waist” that her “nakedness was sinful” (210). He would refuse to eat food she prepared because “it was sacrificed to idol” (210). Anikwenwa also refused to participate in his coming of age ceremony with the rest of his age group. He now saw it as a “heathen custom for boys to initiated into the world of spirit” (210). Anikwenwa had been changed by his time at the mission. When Anikwenwa came back from his years at Lagos to be a teacher he was a different man. Now preferring Michael and wearing trousers and a rosary around his neck, he talked of being appointed catechist of a new mission winning the souls of people in their clan (212). This interaction also shows that he has begun to feel superior to his clansmen. Nwamgba would say her son had begun to “treat[] non-Christians as if they had smallpox” (213). Michael would allow the church to meddle when it came to his personal life. When it was time for him to pick a wife, he married a woman from Ifite Ukpo, who was found suitable by the someone at the mission. Before they were married, she would be sent to the Sisters of the Holy Rosary where she would be taught how to be a suitable Christian wife (212). Michael would refuse to allow his soon to be wife to take part in the confession ceremony saying it was sinful since Christian women were not to touched al all before