Analyze how the novel presents the arrival of European missionaries through multiple, conflicting points of view, and evaluate why some villagers convert while others resist.
While Okonkwo serves his exile in Mbanta, European missionaries arrive there first, and the novel refuses to present their arrival, or the village's response to it, as simple. A lone missionary preaches an unfamiliar religion to a bemused, sometimes mocking crowd, and Achebe lets the reader see the encounter from multiple angles at once: what looks like clear invasion from one angle looks, to some villagers, like a message finally worth hearing. Nwoye, Okonkwo's son, has quietly struggled for years with practices in his own culture he finds difficult to accept, including the abandonment of twin infants in the forest as a matter of custom, and Okonkwo's harshness toward him specifically. When the new teaching offers him a different way of understanding the world, he converts -- a decision the novel treats with real sympathy even as it devastates his father.
The missionaries themselves are not presented as a single, uniform force. Mr. Brown, the first missionary to establish a permanent presence in Umuofia, works to accommodate and understand the village's own beliefs, builds a school and a small hospital, and generally avoids direct confrontation with local authority. His successor, Reverend James Smith, is rigid and zealous where Brown was patient, intolerant of any compromise with local custom, and his approach escalates tensions that Brown had spent years carefully managing. By refusing to flatten either side into a single perspective -- some villagers convert for genuine reasons, some village customs are shown as troubling even from within the culture, some missionaries seek understanding and others do not -- Achebe builds a far more difficult, and more honest, picture of cultural contact than a simple story of invaders and victims would allow.
Mastery looks like: They can explain Nwoye's conversion as a sympathetically motivated choice, contrast Mr. Brown's and Reverend Smith's approaches with specific evidence, and describe how the novel uses multiple points of view rather than a single verdict.
Common stumbles: Flattening the missionaries into a single uniform force rather than distinguishing Brown's and Smith's sharply different approaches; dismissing Nwoye's conversion as simple weakness rather than engaging with its stated causes.
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