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Mbanta And Umuofia Essay

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The missionaries enter Mbanta and Umuofia and intrude upon the land; they divide the tribes and their religions to advance the Christian agenda without regard to the traditional values of the tribes. At first, the Ibo people tried to deny the coming of the missionaries into Umuofia and Mbanta. Two years into Okonkwo’s exile, Okonkwo’s friend and foil throughout the story, Obierika, comes to visit him in Mbanta. He tells the story about when the first missionary comes to Umuofia: “‘He was not an albino. He was quite different...And he was riding an iron horse. The first people who saw him ran away, but he stood beckoning to them...The elders consulted their Oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction …show more content…
None of his converts was a man whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people. None of them was a man of title,” (143). This explanation of the events shows that the Christians are relentless in spreading their faith. One of their own was killed by the Ibo, yet they persist and continue their mission. But when Achebe writes “but many of them (the leaders of the clan) believed that the strange faith and the white man’s god would not last,” he is illustrating that the Ibo continue to hang onto the hope that the Christians will give up on their conversion goal and that the traditional Ibo culture will persist,” (143). Achebe goes on to say that none of the converts are men held in high regards in the tribe. By this, he accentuates that the Ibo do not expect that the missionaries will get a foothold in the tribe due to the fact that nobody respects their converts. Further, the Ibo continue to disregard the change occurring. The change becomes more concrete when the missionaries build a church. The Mbanta give them a piece of land in the Evil Forest which is where twins are thrown to die when they are born and where some people were

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