This chapter focusses on the employment of the Bible in two colonial novels: Sydney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) and Akiki K. Nyabongo's Africa Answers Back (1936). Sydney Owenson (1783–1859), who later became Lady Morgan through marriage to a knighted English physician, Charles Morgan, was an Irish literary figure. Her literary production extended over six decades; it included novels, poems and travel and political writings. She was a complex personality. She championed the cause of Irish nationalism but was reluctant to support women's participation in politics. Nyabongo, an African chief from Uganda, was educated at Yale and Oxford and played a critical role in Uganda before and after independence. Besides his political involvement, he was visible in international literary guilds and acted as the editor of African Magazine.

Both novels, The Missionary and Africa Answers Back, were shaped by a confused mixture of religious enthusiasm, colonial attitudes to people, and the forces of modernity which came in the wake of colonialism. The Missionary takes a Eurocentric view of India and of colonial practices, in which identities of both the colonizer and the colonized are questioned and reframed. Africa Answers Back, on the other hand, takes a nativist view of colonialism and seeks to invoke through the main character the uneasiness and uncertainty of the colonized ‘other’. Both novels expose intra-Christian differences which have implications far beyond Europe.