The novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is about a man's trip up the Congo River and his sightings of the different villages. The novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is about a man trying to keep the white men from taking over his clan and destroying their cultures. The two books seem very different, but they are very much alike in many ways. The two novels parallel each other in the killing of the first white men, the coming of the missionaries and the way the black man is viewed by the white men. .
In the novel Things Fall Apart they were afraid that the white man "would break their clan and spread destruction among them, so they killed the white man and tied his iron horse to their sacred tree." Then a few weeks later "three white men and a very large number of other men surrounded the market [and] they began to shoot, everybody was killed [except for the ones at home and the few who managed to escape from the market.]" This part of Things Fall Apart is similar to the novel Hart of Darkness were "Fresleven was jabbed with a spear [which] went right between his shoulder blades, [killing him], at first nobody seemed to trouble much about [it, but then the white men came back to the village and] mad terror scattered [the Negroes] through the bush, and they never returned." As one can see both novels point out the fact that if you kill one white man there will be many more to follow.
Another way the two novels are alike is coming of the missionaries. In Heart of Darkness the rivets came throughout three weeks, in sections "headed by a donkey carrying a white man in new clothes and tan shoes." In Things Fall Apart at first one man had come to the clan to spread the word of Christ then two the three and so on. In both of the novels the missionaries or white men had not all came in at one time they came in the villages in sections. They would send the first people in to win over the natives then section by section more missionaries would dribble in until the whole village was basically in their control.
