Missionaries, like many westerners, saw africans as what in need of guidance?

Many of the Western missionaries in Africa took a patronizing attitude towards the local populations and their cultural beliefs. The Westerners saw traditional African cultures as backward or even "savage" in some cases.

Explanation:

Unfortunately, Westerners and by extension many missionaries who traveled and performed their mission work in Africa did not have a good understanding of the native culture there and they saw it as backward and in need of development. They were being ethnocentric in the sense that the Western missionaries held their own belief system in higher esteem and effectively devalued the belief systems that were present in Africa at the time and that had been indigenous to different regions of Africa and African cultures for centuries in some cases.