A dark tale of colonialism and liberation in Africa

This is a remarkable book about religion, racism, sexism, feminism, colonialism, capitalism, socialism …  and about an amazing family that came to Africa as missionaries and learned truths that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with humanity.

The Price family arrives in the then-Belgian Congo of 1959, headed by Southern Baptist Reverend Nathan Price, a wife-abusing, child-abusing, fanatical tyrant and bitter disappointment of a man. He and his captive wife Orleana and his four daughters arrive unwanted in an impoverished Congolese village more interested in day-to-day survival then in being “saved.” The Prices are tolerated with a combination of amusement and contempt by the village until the Rev. Price demands to baptize the village’s precious children in a croc-infested river. The rift dramatically accelerates from there, with both enlightening and tragic consequences.

The political context of the novel is the growing nationalist movement headed by Patrice Lumumba, who was determined to kick out the Belgian and American interests who had been looting the nation of its gold and diamonds for decades, leaving the population perpetually on the edge of starvation. Lumumba gets elected in a free and democratic election on a pledge to reclaim the nation’s wealth for its people, but his rule is not to the taste of the colonial interests who fear an end to their long-running pipeline of profit.

The Poisonwood Bible is told alternately from the standpoints of Mrs. Price, her eldest daughter Rachel, the mis-matched twins Leah and Adah, and five-year-old Ruth Anne. We step first into the shoes of these white outsiders set adrift on the boiling sea that is Africa, but we also get  intimate glimpses into the lives and struggles of Africans determined to retain their heritage, their civil and human rights, and their dignity in the face of near impossible odds of political, economic and natural disaster.

The Poisonwood Bible is about the struggle for liberation–of a people, of a nation, and of a group of women who each have to crawl through the jaws of hell before they can discover their humanity. The Poisonwood Bible is also a startlingly beautiful and brutally honest novel about truths that every American who has ever thought of Africa as nothing more than “the dark continent” has an obligation–indeed, a responsibility—to face.