My critique of this type of approach “colonialist-paternalist” is that there is rarely an analysis of what was happening before the colonialists arrived and whether things were better before or after.

As an example, for all of Cortes' perfidy in Mexico, the conquistadors watched Aztecs tearing the heart out of living human beings and saw (or heard about) human sacrifice of up to thousands at a time.

I remember reading a book—White Nile, Blue Nile, maybe—in which early explorers in Africa witnessed a king demonstrate his reign by randomly picking out individuals and having them executed, just because he could. Slavery and despotism started long before any whites made it there. Ms. Kingsolver perhaps doesn't realize this.

My critique of this type of approach “colonialist-paternalist” is that there is rarely an analysis of what was happening before the colonialists arrived and whether things were better before or after.

As an example, for all of Cortes' perfidy in Mexico, the conquistadors watched Aztecs tearing the heart out of living human beings and saw (or heard about) human sacrifice of up to thousands at a time.

I remember reading a book—White Nile, Blue Nile, maybe—in which early explorers in Africa witnessed a king demonstrate his reign by randomly picking out individuals and having them executed, just because he could. Slavery and despotism started long before any whites made it there. Ms. Kingsolver perhaps doesn't realize this.

I won't deny that Kingsolver presents a mostly one-sided picture in the novel. Perhaps I've been more tolerant of that because I believe she wasn't setting out to produce a documentary, as it were, of mid-twentieth-century western missionary efforts, nor was she attempting to document as a historian would African history or politics–though her novel is very much immersed in both. As I've said before, I think she was using the time-place-circumstance as a canvas upon which to paint a bigger picture of the dangers of the colonialist-paternalist attitude, wherever and whenever it rears its head.

Also, although admittedly she is a lot harder on the West and on whites–and at points probably over-romanticizes native African culture–she does not hide from the brutality and corruption of certain African rulers themselves. Of course, even there she reminds us that in most cases those dictators could not have accomplished what they did without the backing and support of the West, America in particular.

Late in the novel she does have one of the characters bring up the fact that an important link in the slave trade was Africans capturing and selling fellow Africans. But she is there to remind us that no buying or selling takes place unless there is a market, and white Europeans and Americans provided the very lucrative market.

A little balance please, Ms. Kingsolver

There is a missionary couple in the novel who are portrayed in a very positive light because they were the polar opposites of the Prices. They sought to learn about and appreciate the Kongolese culture and thus were able to truly serve. But they're doctrinal syncretism (they had come to see the natives' animism as just another way to worship God) is probably too much for most Christian readers to swallow.