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Chapter Sixteen

Note: The British followed a policy in their colonizing efforts of designating local "leaders" to administer the lower levels of their empire. In Africa these were known as "warrant chiefs." But the men they chose were often not the real leaders, and the British often assumed the existence of a centralized chieftainship where none existed. Thus the new power structures meshed badly with the old. Similarly the missionaries have designated as their contact man an individual who lacks the status to make him respected by his people.

1. Why do you think Nwoye has become a Christian?

1. What is the first act of the missionaries which evokes a positive response in some of the Ibo?

1. Achebe focuses on the doctrine of the Trinity, the notoriously least logical and most paradoxical basic belief in Christianity. How does this belief undermine the missionaries' attempts to discredit the traditional religion?

Chapter Seventeen

1. What mutual misunderstandings are evident in this chapter between the missionaries and the people of the village?

1. How does the granting to the missionaries of a plot in the Evil Forest backfire?

1. What does the metaphor in the next to the last sentence of the chapter mean?

Chapter Eighteen

1. "The young church in Mbanta had a few crises early in its life." What are these crises? Why are the people of Mbanta largely content to allow the Christians to remain in their midst at this point--the end of Part II?