Judgement Call

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.