Mr. Brown, a missionary who arrives in Okonkwo’s village, quickly resolves to reform the “backwards” natives. “Mr. Brown learned a good deal about the religion of the clan and he came to the conclusion,” the narrator recounts, “that frontal attack on it [the clan] would not succeed. And so he built a school and a little hospital in Umuofia….In the end, Mr. Brown’s arguments began to have an effect.” 13 Mr. Brown gains converts by convincing the Igbo that their traditions were misguided: that the religi...

Mr. Brown, a missionary who arrives in Okonkwo’s village, quickly resolves to reform the “backwards” natives. “Mr. Brown learned a good deal about the religion of the clan and he came to the conclusion,” the narrator recounts, “that frontal attack on it [the clan] would not succeed. And so he built a school and a little hospital in Umuofia….In the end, Mr. Brown’s arguments began to have an effect.” 13 Mr. Brown gains converts by convincing the Igbo that their traditions were misguided: that the religious ceremonies and mores they had established over hundreds of years were the quaint musings of an unenlightened people. As the Igbo assimilated into Christianity, they took on the laws which ruled a Christian life—the white laws—and would be punished if they transgressed those precepts. Brown, the other missionaries, and the district commissioners, thus achieved what the warlike Okonkwo could not accept: they came to rule the Igbo, not through violence, but through cozening. Though obviously with a good deal of pressure, the Igbo nonetheless slowly ceded control to a white minority who claimed to know better.