An Image of Africa

After reading the essay by Chinua Achebe I was a little confused by some of the points he made. Although he was thorough and made a lot of good points a couple in particular stuck out to me as odd. On first read through my jaw dropped when point number 37 came up,

"The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz."

Racist?! I could not believe that this word was coming up among everything else that has been written about Africa. When I was reading Heart of Darkness I thought Marlow was a little odd in his explanations about the events happening but I never even considered that he was showing prejudice over the Africans. In Marlow's descriptions of the things happening to the African slaves I admit he was a little unemotional, but I didn't get the impression that he was uncaring. He seemed concerned at what was happening, but a little too involved in his own personal life and work to spend too much time on the people. In class we discussed that Marlow was outraged, yes this may have come after he thought about the situation, but his text didn't show lack of concern or prejudice.

As far as the European minds deterioating, yes he spent time on the subject because if someone told you they wanted to measure your head before you went to Africa to see if it shrunk you would be baffled too. Marlow's opening line about this too being the darkest place on earth gives the first impression that what he saw and experienced in Africa was not happy and careless. He did notice the pain and suffering the Africans were put through but at the time he was more concerned with other things, namely Mr. Kurtz.

On the 38th point, Achebe discusses the dehumanization of the Africans in Conrad's book. This is apparent in the reading however, when you look at the situation and background Marlow is coming from it makes sense. Marlow was coming from a place where white people were supreme and the Africans were nothing. When a person is taught to believe this and is shown this over and over again, its hard not to believe it for yourself. Arriving in Africa and seeing the people was horrifying yes, but he had already been pre-warned that these people were criminals, slaves and meant to be punished by this inhumane torture. Now, Marlow knew that this was not right by his text,

"but these men could by no stretch of the imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals..."

He was being very blunt in saying that what the Africans were labeled was completely insane, but who was he to say any different. If anything Marlow was just following human instinct and looking out for number one and turning a blind shoulder to what the Europeans were doing. Marlow even describes a run in with a dieing African under the tree. He didn't simply huff and kept walking, he stopped observed and even fed them a piece of his own food.

When this happened I imagined a dog pound. The abused animals are sitting there waiting to die of starvation and disease. Most people would not do anything to help these animals but observe what was happening and feel compassion for them. Maybe even offer them a piece of meat. This is exactly what Marlow was doing, observing but not acting. Marlow wanted this job, he wanted to meet Mr. Kurtz, speaking up about this horrible situation could get him kicked out of the Congo and out of a job. Like most people in his situation, he simply left well enough alone. If Conrad didn't care about the well-being of the African people he wouldn't have recorded this testimony in his book. He simply would have left well enough alone. The text itself has no other purpose except for historical reading about Africa. It cannot be mistaken for any other genre of literature, so it must have had an impact on him.

"He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs."

This illustrates my point about the Africans being compared to dogs. Africans were not seen as human beings when Marow was describing his adventure to the Congo. Africans were barbarious, dirty, worthless unless it came to work, unhuman and unrelatable. There were quotes about the language the Africans spoke. It wasn't described as words, it was "a violent babble of uncouth sounds, exchanges of short grunting phrases..." Marlow was just bending to society's views of the Africans. It doesn't mean that was his personal belief. Achebe seems to be attacking Conrad with biased information. His arguements after number 37 and 38 seemed to fall apart and just nit pick at Conrad's book. He even had the nerve to call this praised book a plague in the literature world.