Reflections on Heart of Darkness through West Africa

Chinua Achebe, the author of both this critical essay and Things Fall Apart, believes that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a racist work of literature and does not portray Africans in a positive viewpoint.I tend to support Achebe's accusation, however I do not feel that this is necessarily Conrad's fault as a person or a writer.

Emily Shriver and I were just discussing the importance of a Socratic question pertaining to whether or not every book truly has some sort of racism hidden between the lines. Achebe is deeply passionate about the African people and infuriated with the "savage" image tied to Africans, yet we wondered as readers if Achebe ever evaluated his own work. Consequently, Things Fall Apart is somewhat of a "through the looking-glass" perspective of Heart of Darkness. In Achebe's novel, the Umofians are considered the superior, dominant culture. The traditional Umofians view the Europeans as the inferior race coming in to destroy their culture. It is this same uncooperative behavior that Achebe categorizes as defining Heart of Darkness as a "racist" novel. As a reader, one passage that stood out to me was when the Africans made fun of the white man by referring to how a leper is known as a white man. In the same way as leprosy, the white men are viewed as a people carrying an infectious burden, this being a new culture instead of an illness.

One of the most interesting points I felt Achebe brought up in his article was almost at the very beginning. He mentioned that he had received letters from high-school students that had read his novel. Achebe commented on how one of the students said he enjoyed learning about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe, and then went on to say that the student is unaware that the life of his own tribesmen is full of odd customs and superstitions. Why do we feel we'd need a trip to Africa to encounter such things? So many world cultures have assimilated into today's melting pot of cultures, regardless of what an individual believes "American culture" to be. There is so much of the world that we still do not know about, even with all of the advancements we have made to society today. Perhaps our mission as people, readers, and students is to try to dismiss this "racist" tendency and learn to utilize our cultures to our best advantage.