In Heart of Darkness the writer follows one white
man's nightmarish journey into the heart 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.”