8/9/2020 Africa: Student Writing 2

n Cultures & Literatures

StudentWriting Africa StudentWriting

Student Essays
bu Emily Wiggins, "Colonialism and its Discontents: Imagining Africa"

Student Websites
bu Dawn Hendrix, Exploring the Contact Zone: A Personal Journey Through
Multicultural Education
Home Page: http://www.cocc.edu/hum299/hendrix/index.html bu Colleen
Matthews, "African Folktales: '...storytellers survive'" (Chinua Achebe)
Colleen's Trail: http://www.cocc.edu/hum299/colleen/ african/index.htm

Emily Wiggins

Foreword
The following paper was written for an AP English class at Mountain View High School, Bend, OR. Emily Wiggins has been
a concurrent student at COCC, and she took the initiative to seek me out in spring 2000, to recommend sources for her
research paper. Emily was interested in ongoing and lively postcolonial literary debates centered in Conrad’s portrayal of
Africa and Africans in Heart of Darkness. Things Fall Apart (1958) was among the first and most influential examples of
“African response literature”: that is, literature of [formerly] colonized peoples of the [British] Empire “writing back” to the
West to counter reductive and prejudiced Euro-centric depictions of the “Third World” and its peoples. (Things Fall Apart
has, since 1958, been widely translated and is the most widely read and highly esteemed African literary work in the world.)
The postcolonial debate over Conrad’s racism was initiated by Achebe in his 1988 essay entitled “An Image of
Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (based on a late 1970s lecture first delivered at University of
Massachusetts-Amherst). That debate continues today in academic forums across our globally-interconnected world, and
Conrad’s defenders have been forced to take Achebe’s charge of racism very seriously.

Conrad was indeed appalled by what he saw firsthand when he went out to the Belgian Congo in the later nineteenth century,
and in Heart of Darkness he presented a scathing indictment of European colonialism—viewed from limited Western
perspectives. But the novel, which depicts the trip up the Congo River as an atavistic journey into the human prehistoric past
among “primitive” sub-human beings, would hardly strike Africans like Achebe in the same way. Inescapably, Conrad was--
as we all are--a product of his cultural and historical context, including the limitations its attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices. He
went farther than his contemporaries would go in indicting European colonialism at the turn of our century--but he could go
only so far, and no farther, given his ideological blind spots and aesthetic preferences

In her paper, Emily strove to understand Conrad’s work from a non-Western perspective--that of Africans like Chinua Achebe.
Her paper demonstrates the difference one’s cultural position can make—and it can make a world of difference!— in
evaluating accepted Western canonical works like Heart of Darkness in a global perspective. My sincere thanks to Emily
Wiggins for giving me permission to webpublish her essay as a resource for the study of African literature.

--Cora Agatucci, August 2000

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8/9/2020 Africa: Student Writing 2

Colonialism and its Discontents: Imagining Africa

Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness portrays an image of Africa that is dark and
inhuman. Not only does he describe the actual, physical continent of Africa as “so hopeless
and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness” (Conrad 94),
as though the continent could neither breed nor support any true human life, but he also
manages to depict Africans as though they are not worthy of the respect commonly due to the
white man. At one point the main character, Marlow, describes one of the paths he follows:
“Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a
bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be
considered as a permanent improvement” (48). Conrad’s description of Africa and Africans
served to misinform the Western world, and went uncontested for many years.

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his first and most widely acclaimed novel, Things
Fall Apart. This work—commonly acknowledged as the single most well known African novel
in the world—depicts an image of Africa that humanizes both the continent and the people.
Achebe once said, “Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I realized that I was one of those savages
jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you
realize that someone has to write a different story” (Gikandi 8-9); Achebe openly admits that
he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrible characterization of Africans in many
European works, especially Heart of Darkness. In many ways, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric depiction of Africa and Native
African lifestyle portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Throughout Heart of Darkness Conrad uses images of darkness to represent Africa.

Darkness is everything that is unknown, primitive, evil, and impenetrable. To Conrad, Africa
is the very representation of darkness. Marlow often uses the phrase, “We penetrated deeper
and deeper into the heart of darkness” (Conrad 68), to describe his progress on the Congo.
By traveling farther and farther down the Congo, Marlow and his crew get closer and closer
to the epicenter of this foreboding darkness, to the black heart of evil. Because of Africa’s
physical immensity and thick jungles, it appeared to be a land of the unknown where “the
silence . . . went home to one’s very heart—its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its

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concealed life”(56). This portrayal of Africa as both a romantic frontier and a foreboding
wilderness continues to dominate in the minds of Westerners even today.

Conrad depicts Africa as a land where the prehistoric has been preserved. He
describes the journey up the Congo as something similar to a trip on a time machine:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees
were kings . . . There were moments when one’s past came back to
one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to
yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream,
remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this
strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of
life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an
implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. (66)

In Conrad’s eyes, Africa is a land where the past is sustained. As Marlow goes deeper into
the continent, Conrad’s depiction of Africa is infused with a sense of fear and loathing, a sense
that there is some darker, unknown evil at work.

Of course Conrad’s illustration of Africa does not center only on the continent, it
carries over to his characterization of African natives. Conrad describes Marlow’s first
encounter with an African ceremony as, “a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of
hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling . . . ” (68). He goes on to
portray Marlow’s reaction to this frenzy of natives “as sane men would be before an
enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse”(69). Conrad’s description of these people shows them
as crazed, frenzied, out-of-control savages, not an image any turn-of-the-century Westerner
could warm up to. Nor could his English speaking readers understand these people to be
anything more than beasts, as they only had the written word to go on.

Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902, well past a time when “nigger” was
considered an acceptable word to use when addressing, or referring to Africans or African
Americans. Despite this fact, Conrad repeatedly uses the offensive slang term in reference to

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