Heart
of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad about a voyage up the
Congo River into the Congo Free State, into the heart of Africa. The story's
narrator is Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on
the River Thames which is in London, England. One central idea in Conrad’s work
is the idea that there is little difference between the civilized people in the
novel and those described as savages. Heart
of Darkness raises important questions about imperialism and racism. Along
with this, Chiuna Achebe, an African Literature teacher wrote an essay called “An
Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, in which he discusses
Conrad’s ideas in the novella Heart of
Darkness.
In "An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," Chinua Achebe criticizes Joseph
Conrad for his racist stereotypes towards the continent and people of Africa. Rather
than portraying Africa for what it actually is, Achebe claims that Conrad broadcasted
the "dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination”. Chinua Achebe
then goes on to make a bold statement about Joseph Conrad and his novella Heart of Darkness. Achebe believes that “Joseph
Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist”. In his essay, "An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," Achebe documents the ways that
Conrad dehumanizes Africans by reducing their religious practices to
superstition, saying that they should remain in their place, taking away their
ability of speech, and belittling their complex geography to just a single mass
of a jungle. One of Achebe’s main claims
was that in Conrad's work, the African landscape was degraded to a mere prop
necessary for the story of a European man to be told.
Through Achebe’s various claims, he
was trying to convey Conrad’s true intentions as a racist. It would be hard for
us to say that he was an outright racist as Achebe claims. This is because the
structure of Heart of Darkness does not make it easy for us to tell whether or
not Marlow is really a reliable narrator or not. However, we must recognize the flaws of any
work of literature and the flaws that may be contained within any historical
context. Of course that does not mean
that we can excuse something immoral just because of the time period it was
written in. To do so would open up
excuses for immoral behavior now and in the future. However, on the basis of
Chiuna Achebe’s essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness" and the basis of only the claims made in the essay I think it is
fair to say that Joseph Conrad was being racist. Heart of Darkness describes
the bad living conditions where blacks used to live. It highlights how they
suffered from starvation and diseases in addition to racial discrimination and
the ill-treatment of the whites to the blacks who were working as machines. Conrad
was downgrading a culture by oversimplifying their way of life which does dehumanize
the people who live within this certain culture and knows the true complexity
and depth of it.
