Comparison of cultures in Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness A culture defines what people perceive about evil, the place it gives women, and its relationship with other cultures. The Ibos and Europeans in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart have two distinct cultures that begin to merge when white men come as missionaries and try to communicate and live together with the Africans. European culture also differs from the native culture on the rivers of the Congo in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Only one man, Kurtz, truly connects with the natives and then is carried away dying by his fellow Europeans. Evil is defined by its culture, both by how the culture accepts another culture and condemns it as evil and by identifying specific elements as evil. In Things Fall Apart, the Ibo culture disguised Africans as primitive natives who believed different ways and traditions, seen as evil. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow saw the natives Kurtz was with as evil and feels their evil when he met them after traveling along the river. When he learned that Kurtz had ordered the natives to attack his ship, his opinions changed slightly. Marlow experienced the evil that Kurtz did, and he also had the disease that Kurtz died from. In both of these novels, specific places represent evil things in different cultures. Europeans treat a church as sacred ground, but to the Igbo culture who did not know Jesus, it was just a building built by the white invaders who settled among them. The Europeans found the Congo River and a city on its banks and it was considered evil because they had not experienced life there or the vines that covered them as they traveled along the river contributed to the idea of ​​an evil atmosphere. In Things Fall Apart, the clan refers to a forest as an evil forest and they throw everything they deem into it. For example, twins were considered a curse when they were born, so they were thrown into the forest and left to die. The evil forest did not seem so evil to the European missionaries who arrived because they had not adopted this particular belief of evil into their culture. In fact, the clan purposely granted land in the evil forest to the missionaries for their church, believing that evil would destroy them, but the missionaries resisted until the church was burned by clan members..