Heart of Darkness —Racism:
Heart of Darkness follows one white man's nightmarish journey into the interior of Africa. Aboard a British ship called the Nellie, three men listen to a man named Marlow recount his journey into Africa up the Congo River in a steam boat as an agent for a Belgian ivory trading Company. Marlow says that he witnesses brutality and hate between the white ivory hunters and the native African people. Marlow becomes entangled in a power struggle within the Company, and finally learns the truth about the mysterious Kurtz, a mad agent who has become both a god and a prisoner of the "native Africans." After "rescuing" Kurtz from the native African people, Marlow watches in horror as Kurtz succumbs to madness, disease, and finally death. The story of Marlow corresponds so neatly with Conrad’s own biography that it is easy to assume that Marlow registers Conrad’ own perspective, including his prejudices and perhaps racism.
Marlow’s poignant description of native
Africans sounds like racist. Heart of Darkness is criticized for its alleged
partiality: style entirely overrules substance, providing a justification for
immorality and evil. Conrad does not resort to the original image of Africa.
Rather, the images he uses belong to the stereotypical images produced by
“Western imagination”. It is important to notice that Marlow casts Africans as
a primitive version of himself rather than as potential equals, indeed
sub-humans. They become for Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen against
which he can play out his philosophical and existential struggles. Their
existence and their exoticism enable his self-contemplation. This kind of
dehumanization is harder to identify than colonial violence or open
racism.
Chinua Achebe, the most esteemed Post
Colonial critic in his famous 1975 lecture, “An Image of Africa—Racism in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” points to this underlying racism. Achebe's lecture
quickly establishes the belief that Conrad deliberately sets Africa up as
"the other world" so that he might examine Europe. According to
Achebe, Africa is presented to the reader as "the antithesis of Europe and
therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and
refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality".
Achebe sees Conrad's portrayal of Africans
as the most disparaging of African humanity: “We were wanderers on a
prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We
could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed
inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive
toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of
rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a
mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling
under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage.”
According to Achebe, Conrad's long and
famously hypnotically sentences are mere "trickery", designed to
induce a hypnotic stupor in the reader: “The prehistoric man was cursing us,
praying to us, welcoming us — who could tell? We were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and
secretly appalled…We could not understand because we were too far and could not
remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages
that are gone, leaving hardly a sign — and no memories.”
The description of African people in Heart
of Darkness is unpalatable, at least to a conscious African reader: “The earth
seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a
conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and
free. It was unearthly and the men were — No they were not inhuman. Well, you
know that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being
inhuman...They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what
thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought
of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.” “Herein
lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness”, says Achebe, “and the fascination it
holds over the Western mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of
their humanity — like yours .... Ugly." "Fine fellows — cannibals —
in their place", Conrad’s narrator tells us pointedly.
Then there is a "wild and gorgeous
apparition of an (African) woman" pitied against the serene civilized mood
of the Kurtz’s Intended. This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of
a mysterious nature. “She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent
....She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with
an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.” The "worst insult"
is the pitying of the thoughtful life-like white men against the grunting men
of Africa. It is clearly not part of Conrad's purpose to confer language on the
"rudimentary souls" of Africa. In place of speech they made "a
violent babble of uncouth sounds."
Conrad’s narrator Marlow is able to toss
out such ‘bleeding-heart’ sentiments as these: “They were dying slowly — it was
very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing
earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying
confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in
all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on
unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to
crawl away and rest.” The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow is simply
shocking to Post Colonial reader.
When Marlow's African helmsman falls down
with a spear in his heart he gives his white master one final disquieting look.
“And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt
remains to this day in my memory — like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in
a supreme moment.” The black man lays a claim on the white man which is
well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at
the same time fascinates Conrad. Achebe emphatically declares: “The point of my
observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a
bloody racist.”
Achebe is outraged at reducing Africa to
the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind: “Africa [Conrad
sees] as a setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor.
Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into
which the wandering European enters at his peril”. “Whatever Conrad's problems
were”, Achebe sums up, “you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true.
Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still.”
Those who disagree with Achebe put across
a series of arguments that revert back to the ideological environment under
which the novel was conceived and written. They point out that Conrad set his
story in the Belgian Congo of the 1890s when the Africans in the Congo region
were being forced to extract ivory and rubber for the Empire at gunpoint. They
think that Conrad attacks imperialism because he identifies it with clear plunder
and not the pretensions of civilizing the savage and spreading Christianity.
However, even then, Conrad's attack of imperialism has its contradictions.
Conrad questions the morality of colonialism and exploitation but he does not
question the colonial mission itself. One of Kurtz's last utterances:
"Exterminate the brutes!" demonstrates the keynote of Conrad’s
underlying theme. Despite the frenzy, Kurtz knows the clear cut racial
divisions and his “white-men's duties” in Africa.
In addition, "Darkness" in Heart
of Darkness tends to be metaphorical. In Heart of Darkness evil is portrayed as
African and it is also because some white men in the Heart of Darkness behave
like Africans! Reading Heart of Darkness, it is certain that, though, it shows
the extremities of imperialism, but it definitely confirms the western concept
of Africa as the land of non-human savages. If the novel caused sympathy
towards the African, it was that sympathy one has for an animal in agony, not
fellow human beings. Summing up, Joseph Conrad, then, was a thorough-going
racist, who in the words Bernard C. Mayer, his own biographer, “notoriously
inaccurate in the rendering of his own history.”
Reading
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart from the Postcolonial Perspective:
Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a
seminal work of Post Colonial studies, has acquired the status of a classic. Among
the various factors which lead to its publication, the most noteworthy was Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that sparked Achebe’s indignation at mis-representations
of Africans in fiction. Things Fall Apart was written, says Achebe, “to reassert African identity and as part
of the growth of Nigerian nationalism”.
In
a way Things Fall Apart is a counter discourse against Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness. Achebe espoused the idea that Conrad drew the humiliating
images of the Africans as “some other beings”. Edward Said in his
groundbreaking Orientalism (1978) argues that “The [fabricated] Orient was a European invention, and had been since
antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes,
remarkable experiences”
For
imperialists like Conrad, this vast African continent was the haunt of savages;
a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism, destined for contempt--
indeed a country of cannibals. Achebe shatters the notion so popular among the Europeans that
imperialists actually civilized Africa. Achebe emphatically
declares:
“African peoples did not hear of
culture for the first time from Europeans; … their societies were not mindless
but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty… they had
poetry and, above all, they had dignity.”
This conviction pervades all of his works and
they purely reflect African dignity and value. Thus Achebe is, no doubt, an
authentic writer whose writings reflect richly his own contextual realities.
It
is now popular to argue that the post-colonial literatures are primarily
concerned with writing back to the center, by active engagement “in a
process of questioning and travestying” colonial stereotypes. This novel
illustrates the “cultural traditions” of the indigenous Igbo. It
demonstrates cultural, psychological and political impacts of colonialism
on the Igbo. And for making these two points of demonstration successful,
Achebe resorts to the English language as the medium of expression.
In
Things Fall Apart Achebe attempts to assert his own historical
narratives by adhering to the oral tradition. Achebe admits that Things Fall
Apart “was an act of atonement with my past, a ritual return and homage of a
prodigal son”
Achebe
presents to us an all-encompassing and meticulous depiction of the pre-colonial
Igbo society in Things Fall Apart. Achebe unearths the glorious past of
Nigeria through the authentic picturing of the pre- colonial Igbo culture in Things
Fall Apart. He champions the fact that “there
was nothing to be ashamed of” in the pre-colonial past of the Igbo.
Achebe
has recovered the perspective, which is exclusively a native perspective. The
characters reflect on their own socio- cultural values that are crumbled down
after the arrival of the Europeans in Igbo-land. They put forward their
resourceful values that consist of both accuracy and flaws, before the readers
who judge how cruelly that values have been crushed by colonialism.
Things
Fall Apart “recreates
an oral culture and a consciousness imbued with an agrarian way of life”.
To define itself post-colonial writing seizes the language of the center, the
colonizer west. In the course of writing counter-narrative to Euro-centric
misrepresentation of Africa, he successfully harnesses the colonizer’s language
to make it ‘bear the burden’ of his native experience.
Achebe
wants to achieve cultural revitalization through English. He is capable of
capturing the rhythm of the Igbo language. Achebe uses Igbo proverbs, folktales
and vocabulary in the novel. Igbo proverbs are entirely native in character and
use and they contain native wisdom and philosophy. Folktales are important parts
of the Nigerian oral tradition which is deeply rooted in the daily lives of the
Igbo. And then, Achebe uses many Igbo words in the novel to support his message
to be conveyed.
Achebe
is entirely successful in presenting the picture of the pre-colonial Igbo society
in a transparent and direct way. It helps him be authentic and unprejudiced in
doing so. Lastly, the novel immensely shows the key issue in a post-colonial
text, i.e., the impacts of colonialism,
European
colonialism totally destroyed the culture and traditions of the Igbo People.
Before the coming of colonialism, African societies were culturally diverse.
Colonialism trampled the diversity under feet. In Things Fall Apart we
see that before the advent of the colonial power the people of Umuofia lived in
communal agreement in an organic society of economic, cultural, political,
familial and religious stability. But colonial rule turns the social stability
into instability and disintegration. The title of the novel itself signifies
this claim- things are no longer in order; colonialism has made them
disordered.
Colonialism
makes the Igbo ‘drained of’ their ‘essence’. Okonkwo symbolizes the essence of
Umuofia; the suicide of Okonkwo, which is also a colonial effect, signifies the
suicide of Umuofia’s essence. Colonialism makes ‘extraordinary possibilities’
of the indigenous people ‘wiped out’. Okonkwo symbolizes that ‘mighty voices’ which
is ‘stilled forever’ by the colonial power.
The
colonial masters bring with them different ideologies and philosophies about
human relations such as individualism and Marxism. In the African philosophy of
relationship a person is fundamentally defined as ‘being-with’ or ‘belonging
to’. But Western philosophy puts emphasis on the condition of a human person as
‘a being for itself’. The colonial ideology of individualism has caused shattering
impacts on the communal Igbo and on their mutual relationship.
To
conclude, Achebe’s novel shatters the stereotypical European portraits about
the native Africans. By unfolding the devastating effects of colonialism on the
life of the Igbo people in Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe has successfully
made a comprehensible demarcation between the pre-colonial and the colonial
Igbo-land. By setting these two periods opposite to each other Achebe
demonstrates the value and authenticity of the Igbo traditions in a more
unambiguous manner. His strategy of differentiation between the pre-colonial
and the colonial well suits his purpose of writing back by rewriting the
history of the lost traditions and culture of the Igbo.