Achebe's Impartiality in Things Fall Apart Knowledge of Africa and the inhabitants of the vast continent were often described as barbaric beasts by the first missionaries who entered the Earth. Because of the distorted writings of European missionaries, their readers were painted a picture of a wild Africa saved only by benevolent and civilized Western influence. Achebe successfully attempts to redirect this attitude. Educationally, Achebe has the means to convey a different perspective, an advantage that most other individuals of his culture lack. In his novel Things Fall Apart, instead of glorifying Ibo culture, or even offering a new vision, Achebe acts as a conduit for information to flow freely without bias. Achebe's parents were among the first to convert to Igbo, which exposed him to both African Igbo culture and Western Christian ideology, and can therefore explain his meaning and experiences on both sides. Achebe is, without a doubt, an African novelist, not a novelist writing about Africa; it seems neither to condemn the missionary system nor to condone it. I intend to demonstrate that Achebe portrays the missionary with the same objectivity as he portrays the Ibo culture in Things Fall Apart. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in Nigeria, but not into a traditional Nigerian home. His mother and father were both converts and "devout Christians" (1). In an interview appearing in The Paris Review at the Unterberg Poetry Centre, Achebe says: "they were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, he withdrew and returned with his family to the ancestral village" (interview... middle of paper... his culture as superior, but a symbolic unraveling of historical events. It is the collision of these two social aspects and the religious structures that create the poignant drama these people find themselves in, not the particular structure itself. In an interview Achebe recalls when he first started reading about adventures and wasn't sure which side he should be on. "I instinctively took the side of the whites. They were good! They were intelligent. The others were not... they were stupid and ugly so that I was made aware of the danger of not having their own stories" (2).Works Cited(1) //infoco.net /hasbinz/fiction/general_fiction/achebe_/index.htm(2)(interview) parisreview.com/pages/issues/chinua3.html(3)Achebe, C. Things Fall Apart. Great Britain. 1958.