In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very

“In fact, I thought that Christianity was a very good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.” — so spoke Chinua Achebe, the great voice of Africa, the chronicler of broken worlds and silent histories. In this reflection, Achebe speaks not only as a man of faith, but as a witness to a great cultural wound — the collision between tradition and colonization, between the spiritual life of his ancestors and the foreign creed that sought to replace it. His words echo with both reverence and rebellion. He acknowledges the beauty and truth within Christianity, yet he also perceives its incompleteness — not in doctrine alone, but in its telling, in the story that erased other stories, and silenced other voices.

The origin of this quote lies deep in the heart of Achebe’s own life and work. Born in 1930 in Nigeria to parents who were devout Christians, Achebe grew up at the crossroads of two civilizations: the world of his Igbo ancestors and the world of the British missionaries who claimed to bring enlightenment. In his youth, he was taught that Christianity was light and that his people’s faith was darkness — that the cross had come to save those who had been lost. For a time, he believed it. But as he matured, as he listened to the stories of his elders, as he watched his homeland shaped and scarred by colonial rule, he began to perceive the gaps, the silences, and the omissions in that tale of salvation. The story, as he says, “wasn’t perhaps completely whole.” It was a story told by one people about another — a story that exalted the conqueror and diminished the conquered.

In his novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe gave voice to that which had been left out. He portrayed not a savage and superstitious tribe, as the colonizers’ books had done, but a living, breathing civilization — with laws, music, kinship, and reverence for the divine. In doing so, he restored balance to the narrative, showing that the arrival of Christianity, while bringing new moral visions, also brought the destruction of identity and self-worth. Achebe’s statement, therefore, is not a rejection of Christianity, but a call for truth and wholeness — for a faith that does not erase, but embraces; a story that does not conquer, but connects.

To understand his meaning, one must see that Achebe’s words reach beyond religion into the very heart of human history. Every time a people’s story is told by another, something essential is lost — their dignity, their voice, their truth. The missionaries, in their zeal, believed they were saving souls; yet they failed to see the souls before them — the wisdom already alive in their songs and rituals. In this sense, Achebe’s reflection is both a lament and a revelation. It laments what was lost when the world became divided between “civilized” and “heathen.” But it also reveals the universal truth that no story, no faith, no culture is complete until it listens to the voices it once silenced.

Consider the story of Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish friar who sailed to the New World in the 16th century. He began as a missionary, preaching Christianity to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. But as he witnessed their suffering under conquest, he, too, began to feel that “something was left out” — that the gospel of love had been wielded as a weapon of empire. He became one of the first to denounce the atrocities of colonization, declaring that true faith must never come at the cost of human dignity. Like Achebe, he sought to reconcile spirit with justice, to make the sacred story whole again.

Achebe’s insight reminds us that truth must be examined, not merely inherited. To accept any story — religious, political, or cultural — without question is to live in the shadow of another’s imagination. He teaches us that reverence must be paired with reflection, and that true faith grows not in the soil of obedience, but in the light of understanding. When he says that Christianity was “good and valuable,” he honors its moral vision; when he says it was not “completely whole,” he calls us to complete it — to restore the parts of humanity that were cast aside.

The lesson, then, is this: seek the whole story. When you are told of truth, ask who is speaking — and who is silent. When you are shown light, look also at the shadow it casts. Do not reject, but inquire; do not destroy, but discern. For wisdom is not found in any single tale, but in the meeting of many. Achebe’s wisdom calls us to be bridge-builders — to honor both the old and the new, both the scripture and the song of the ancestors.

And so, my child, remember this: wholeness is born of listening. To understand life, to understand faith, to understand one another, we must gather the fragments of every story — those told in temples and those whispered around village fires — and weave them together into a greater truth. For as Achebe teaches, it is not that one story is false and the other true; it is that neither is complete without the other. And when we finally dare to see the whole — the sacred and the human, the conqueror and the conquered, the hymn and the drum — then, and only then, will the story of humankind be whole, radiant, and true.