Chinua Achebe used both Mr. Brown and Rev. Smith as his characters for the stereotypical Englishman. Although Mr. Brown tolerated the Umuofians, Rev. Smith had very strong views against their religion:
“ There are no other gods. Chukwu is the only god and all others are false. You carve a piece of wood and you call it a god. But it is still only a piece of wood.”
Again, Achebe demonstrates the simplicity of the European man by making both the missionary leaders adamantly opposed to the Ibo religion. Because the missionaries are almost oblivious to the fact that the Umuofians are content with their own religion, the Umuofians ridicule their claims for Christianity, implying that the Igbo people have more commonsense and the dexterity to think for themselves than the missionaries.
The clashes in religion between the Europeans and the Umuofians are the foundations of the novel after Chapter one. As soon as the missionaries appear in the novel, there is constant conflict at different intensities between them and the villagers right through to the end of the novel. An example of a direct culture clash is when Enoch, a Christian convert, rips the mask off an egwugwu, one of the greatest crimes a man could ever commit:
“ Enoch had killed an ancestral spirit, and Umuofia was thrown into confusion.”
This shows a major difference in cultures as the Umuofians had never experienced such an atrocious act before in their relatively harmonious village. Using this, Achebe puts across the naivety of the Umuofians by presenting something as simple as taking off someone’s mask into something so utterly abhorrent as shown by the egwugwu’s reaction later in the text.
The ways of life are the most distinct characteristics between the Igbo and the European cultures. In the Igbo culture, the Umuofians live alongside nature and are heavily reliant upon it. Many villagers depend on the harvest for titles, to gain wives or even their lives:
“ That year the harvest was sad, like a funeral, and many farmers wept as they dug up their miserable and rotting yams. One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself.”
Achebe presents the Umuofians as one with nature; when the harvest is dismal, the farmers are despondent, to the point where they take their own lives. Presented in this way, the Umuofian lifestyle appears as notably dissimilar to the civilised European way of life.
The missionaries seem to take the opposite view on nature and are plainly ignorant in the Igbo's superstitions. A prominent example of this is shown by “The Evil Forest”. In Chapter Seventeen, the missionaries request a piece of land on which to build their first church. The village elders offer them a plot in “The Evil Forest”, believing that the cursed forest would kill them within four days:
“ Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.”
In this quote, Achebe shows the true magnitude of the elders’ beliefs by them manipulating the missionaries ignorance to sacrifice them to The Evil Forest. Achebe uses this to show that it is impossible to stereotype the African native as anything because, although in this quote the elders are seen as savage and bloodthirsty in a passive way, other villagers are more intelligent and peaceful. Most villagers are also humorous as seen in a clash of languages.
The different languages make it difficult for cultures to communicate with each other, often poor translation leads one another misinterpreting each others thoughts and actions. This tends to lead to each culture making assumptions about one another. For example, during Chapter Fifteen, the missionaries speak to the Umuofians through an interpreter. Although he is an Ibo man, his dialect is from a different region and he used words incorrectly:
“ Many people laughed at his dialect and the way he used words strangely. Instead of saying ’myself’ he always said 'my buttocks’.”
This quote shows that although the missionaries believe that the Igbo language and the Igbos themselves are native, savage and strange, by displaying the Igbos sense of humour and their extensive language, Achebe shows that the Igbos are much more sophisticated than the missionaries could comprehend.
By unravelling these two cultures from each other, The reader can begin to see the colourful characteristics that define them. But when they are woven back together, Chinua Achebe forges a narrative where the cultures work in harmony to enlighten the reader of the complexity of our world and its cultures.
