Kingsolver states, "People (of the Congo) are angry at the Europeans. They are even hurting (Western) women and little children." She then criticizes Belgium for sending troops back into the Congo. Kanza quotes from a UN speech concerning Belgium's intervention, claiming, "white women raped before their children's eyes, little white girls raped."

In another book, I read that this violence was directed against the families of white officers in the Congolese army. Lumumba did not condone it, but he was unable to stop it. Two website articles about Mobutu Sese Seko state that Belgium sent troops to protect Belgium citizens from the violence. Kingsolver's understatement of the degree of violence makes her readers think Belgium had other motives for sending troops. Her omission of pertinent details slants her reader's opinions.

Kingsolver's statements, coupled with the ineptitude of Nathan Price set against the backdrop of partially described history, serves to make the point that the white man's mistreatment of blacks is more that racial: it is white men poisoned with Christian ideology that inspired them to do what they do in nonwhite countries. As mentioned earlier, Kingsolver sums it up when she has Leah Price say, "Jesus is poisonwood. Here's to the minister of poisonwood (her father), and here's to his five wives (herself, her mother, and her three sisters)."

Kingsolver states her main view of life near the end of her book as, "This is the story I believe in: when God was a child, the Rift Valley cradled a caldron of bare necessities, and out of it walked the first humans, upright on two legs...They made the Voodoo, the Earth's oldest religion."

I do not accept any of this. God was never a child. God is unchanging. Human beings did not originate out of a cauldron of bare necessities in the Rift Valley. God created the first humans. Voodoo is not the Earth's oldest religion. The relationship the first humans had with God is the world's oldest religion.

This is what bothered me about The Poisonwood Bible.