“In 1899 Joseph Conrad published a
short work of fiction called Heart of Darkness. This novella
is often read, discussed, criticized in literature programs throughout the
world. It is a work that allow us to tackle a variety of topics, and is
therefore responded to in a variety of ways. The work itself as one critic
puts it “might most usefully be considered hyper-canonized” (Padmini “Why”
104). The work is taught beyond the realm of a normal work in the
literature program. Many forms of criticism have taken on the subject
matter within the book feminism, psycho-analytic, Marxism have all had things
to say about the novella. They’ve discussed things such as imperialism,
the psychology of Marlow and Kurtz, the role of women in the novella (both
literally and symbolically), all these issues are important topics in the
novella. For a long time, however one crucial issue in the work was not
addressed, that of race.
It was not until 1975 when Chinua Achebe gave his famous lecture, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that the issue of race was tackled head on in Conrad’s work. It is this lecture that has become the cornerstone of writing and criticism of Heart of Darkness. It would be hard to find an essay since then that doesn’t in some way discuss or acknowledge Achebe’s essay. Even critics who do not use take into account historical or auto-biographical details of a work, such as Miller, have written responses to Achebe. In Miller’s essay “Should we read Heart of Darkness?” he discusses, in his own way, the essence of Achebe’s argument that the novella should not be read because of its racist undertones. On critic has even gone on to say that Achebe’s essay has become a work included in the literature canon.
The lecture given at the University of Massachusetts in early 1975 was published as an essay in The Massachusetts Review, and later republished in The Norton Critical Edition Heart of Darkness. Achebe’s main theme within the essay is “the need—in Western psychology to set up Africa as a foil to Europe” (“Image” 252). Within the context of this theme he goes on to criticize what he considers a work of “permanent literature”, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He discusses how within the context of the work we can see that Conrad was nothing more than a racist. The entire argument of the essay, both the ignorance of Western literature and Conrad’s racism, can be summed up in the following passage:
It was not until 1975 when Chinua Achebe gave his famous lecture, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that the issue of race was tackled head on in Conrad’s work. It is this lecture that has become the cornerstone of writing and criticism of Heart of Darkness. It would be hard to find an essay since then that doesn’t in some way discuss or acknowledge Achebe’s essay. Even critics who do not use take into account historical or auto-biographical details of a work, such as Miller, have written responses to Achebe. In Miller’s essay “Should we read Heart of Darkness?” he discusses, in his own way, the essence of Achebe’s argument that the novella should not be read because of its racist undertones. On critic has even gone on to say that Achebe’s essay has become a work included in the literature canon.
The lecture given at the University of Massachusetts in early 1975 was published as an essay in The Massachusetts Review, and later republished in The Norton Critical Edition Heart of Darkness. Achebe’s main theme within the essay is “the need—in Western psychology to set up Africa as a foil to Europe” (“Image” 252). Within the context of this theme he goes on to criticize what he considers a work of “permanent literature”, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He discusses how within the context of the work we can see that Conrad was nothing more than a racist. The entire argument of the essay, both the ignorance of Western literature and Conrad’s racism, can be summed up in the following passage:
Africa as a setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as a human factor … Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization… can be called a great work of art. My answer is: “No it cannot (“Image” 257). It is interesting how most critics focus on the first two sentences of the beginning of this passage, the idea of Africa as the setting. Few it seems what to take on the charge that Heart of Darkness is not a great work of art.”1
“Achebe's criticism has become a
mainstream perspective on Conrad’s work. The essay was included in the
1988 Norton
critical edition of Conrad’s novel. Editor Robert Kimbrough called it one of “the
three most important events in Heart of Darkness criticism
since the second edition of his book ...”. [121] Critic
Nicolas Tredell divides Conrad criticism “into two epochal phases: before and
after Achebe”. [122] Asked frequently about his
essay, Achebe once explained that he never meant for the work to be abandoned: “It's
not in my nature to talk about banning books. I am saying, read it – with
the kind of understanding and with the knowledge I talk about. And read it
beside African works”. [121] Interviewed
on National
Public Radio with Robert Siegel, in
October 2009, Achebe remains consistent, although tempering this criticism in a
discussion entitled “‘Heart of Darkness’ is inappropriate’: “Conrad was a
seductive writer. He could pull his reader into the fray. And if it were not
for what he said about me and my people, I would probably be thinking only of
that seduction”. [123]2
(University of Massachusetts Amherst [chapel and library])
For more details, please contact:
Professor Stephen Clingman,
director, The Interdisciplinary Studies
Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst, clingman@english.umass.edu
Michael Thelwell, writer, author and professor emeritus of African American Studies, University of Massachusetts
Amherst, emthelwell@gmail.com
***********************************************************************************************
Chinua Achebe: The lecture heard around
the world
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of
Darkness’” Massachusetts Review. 18.
1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources
Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co.,
1988, pp.251-261
In the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at
the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning
such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were
hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first
flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked
to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was
a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature.
Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same
thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain Community College not
far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had
thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was
walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I
have to take your course to find out.” A few weeks later I received two very
touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who – bless
their teacher – had just read Things Fall
Apart. One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and
superstitions of an African tribe.
I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy
conclusions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them.
But only, I hope, at first sight. The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age but
I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware
that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs
and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he
needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things.
The other person being fully my own age could not be excused on the
grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again I
believe that something more willful than a mere lack of information was at
work. For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford,
Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African history did not exist?
If there is something in these utterances more than youthful
inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply
it is the desire – one might indeed say the need – in Western psychology to set
Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and
vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual
grace will be manifest.
This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable
responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon
dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the
exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply
in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European fiction:
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and
need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of
books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude
that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is
undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller
into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a
different class – permanent literature – read and taught and constantly
evaluated by serious academics. Heart of
Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has
numbered it “among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English
language.” I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may
seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in
some of the matters I will now raise.
Heart of
Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the
other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place
where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by
triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting,
peacefully “at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race
that peopled its banks.” But the actual story will take place on the River
Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly
not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension.
We are told that “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world.”
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one
good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the
differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common
ancestry. For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” It
conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if
it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible
risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling
victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first
beginnings.
These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad's famed evocation of the African
atmosphere in Heart of Darkness. In
the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous,
fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence
and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37
of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding
over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the
edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious
change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for
example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.
The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to
Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.”
That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have
tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of
artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents
and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his
readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much
more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are
well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his
subject well – one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the
psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to
contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting
myths.
The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the
indulgence of my reader to quote almost a whole page from about the middle of
the stop/when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo
encounter the denizens of Africa.
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. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. 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, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. 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 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. It would come slowly to one. 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. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend.
Herein lies the meaning of Heart
of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: “What
thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours… Ugly.” Having
shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page later, on a
specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is
not just limbs or rolling eyes:
And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. 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. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity – and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.
As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly
admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at
least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of
breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance.
“Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place,” he tells us pointedly.
Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving
its safe stronghold between the policeman and the baker to like a peep into the
heart of darkness.
Before the story takes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this
nice little vignette as an example of things in their place:
Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks – these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and hue as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at.
Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite
unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress
to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a
formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:
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.
This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable
nature, for two reasons. First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s
special brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of
the story: a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step
forth to end the story:
She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning… She took both my hands in hers and murmured, “I had heard you were coming.” ... She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.
The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is
conveyed in too many direct and subfile ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the
most significant difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of
human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. 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.” They “exchanged short grunting phrases” even among themselves. But
most of the time they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two occasions
in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and
confers speech, even English speech, on the savages. The first occurs when
cannibalism gets the better of them: “Catch ‘im,” he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a
flash of sharp teeth – “catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us.” “To you, eh?” I asked; “what
would you do with them?” “Eat ‘im!” he said curtly… The other occasion was the
famous announcement: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of
generosity from Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults.
In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far
served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad's purpose of
letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing
the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the
sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous
evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the
announcement of Mr. Kurtz’s death by the “insolent black head in the doorway”
what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of
that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the
powers of darkness and “taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land” than
the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?
It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but
that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad
might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears
to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and
the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a
narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through
the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the
moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally
wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an
alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions
of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that
provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad’s
complete confidence – a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between
their two careers.
Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one
holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal
tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by
atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or
wherever.
Thus 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/Conrad touched all the
best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. It took different forms
in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the
ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. That
extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers
in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the
same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a comment which
has often been quoted Schweitzer says: “The African is indeed my brother but my
junior brother.” And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the
needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical
practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being.
Naturally he became a sensation in Europe and America. Pilgrims flocked, and I
believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the prodigious
miracle in Lamberene, on the edge of the primeval forest.
Conrad’s liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzer’s,
though. He would not use the word brother however qualified; the farthest he
would go was kinship. 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.
It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is
concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on
it. 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: “... the thought of their humanity – like yours … Ugly.”
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.
Which is partly the point. Africa as 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. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus
reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of
Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to
foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this
dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called
a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad’s great
talents. Even Heart of Darkness has
its memorably good passages and moments:
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across tile water to bar the way for our return.
Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often
penetrating and full of insight. But all that has been more than fully
discussed in the last fifty years. His obvious racism has, however, not been
addressed. And it is high time it was!
Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican
missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not
his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man
was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made
for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there
remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which
his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first
encounter with a black man is very revealing:
A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that
word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on
blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description:
A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms…
as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to
wave white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad’s obsession. As a matter of
interest Conrad gives us in A Personal Record what amounts to a companion piece
to the buck nigger of Haiti. At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his first
Englishman in Europe. He calls him “my unforgettable Englishman” and describes
him in the following manner:
(his) calves exposed to the public gaze … dazzled the beholder by the splendor of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory … The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men … illumined his face … and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth … his white calves twinkled sturdily.
Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of
that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender
foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the
community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the
most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In
his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes
inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long
disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet
not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the
discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer’s mind
those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that
Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad
absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in
the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.
Whatever Conrad’s problems were, you might say he is now safely dead.
Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why
an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as “among
the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language.” And why it is
today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature
courses in English Departments of American universities.
There are two probable grounds on which what I have said so far may be
contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about
whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about
pleasing people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar
fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered
untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways
and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of
black people is called in question.
Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after
all, did sail down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in
arms. How could I stand up more than fifty years after his death and purport to
contradict him? My answer is that as a sensible man I will not accept just any
traveler’s tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself.
I will not trust the evidence even off man’s very eyes when I suspect them to
be as jaundiced as Conrad’s. And we also happen to know that Conrad was, in the
words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, “notoriously inaccurate in the
rendering of his own history.”
But more important by far is the abundant testimony about Conrad’s
savages which we could gather if we were so inclined from other sources and
which might lead us to think that these people must have had other occupations
besides merging into the evil forest or materializing out of it simply to
plague Marlow and his dispirited band. For as it happened, soon after Conrad
had written his book an event of far greater consequence was taking place in
the art world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art historian,
describes it:
Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant individual act of turning to a non-European culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when European artists were avid for new artistic experiences, but it was only about 1904-5 that African art began to make its distinctive impact. One piece is still identifiable; it is a mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was “speechless” and “stunned” when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze … The revolution of twentieth century art was under way!
The mask in question was made by other savages living just north of
Conrad’s River Congo. They have a name too: the Fang people, and are without a
doubt among the world’s greatest masters of the sculptured form. The event
Frank Willett is referring to marks the beginning of cubism and the infusion of
new life into European art, which had run completely out of strength.
The point of all this is to suggest that Conrad’s picture of the people
of the Congo seems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to
the ravages of King Leopold’s lnternational Association for the Civilization of
Central Africa.
Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.
But even those not blinkered, like Conrad with xenophobia, can be astonishing
blind. Let me digress a little here. One of the greatest and most intrepid
travelers of all time, Marco Polo, journeyed to the Far East from the
Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent twenty years in the court of
Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in his book entitled Description of the World his impressions
of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. But there were at least two
extraordinary omissions in his account. He said nothing about the art of
printing, unknown as yet in Europe but in full flower in China. He either did
not notice it at all or if he did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly
have for it. Whatever the reason, Europe had to wait another hundred years for
Gutenberg. But even more spectacular was Marco Polo's omission of any reference
to the Great Wall of China nearly 4,000 miles long and already more than 1,000
years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may not have seen it; but the Great
Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is visible from the
moon! Indeed travelers can be blind.
As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we
find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western
imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to
bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the
West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its
civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with
Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance
periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith
and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the
picture is to Dorian Gray – a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical
and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.
Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be
hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa,
or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness
should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have
kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the
wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.
In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it
nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my
privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West
might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to
look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but
quite simply as a continent of people – not angels, but not rudimentary souls
either – just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly
successful in their enterprise with life and society. But as I thought more
about the stereotype image, about its grip and pervasiveness, about the willful
tenacity with which the West holds it to its heart; when I thought of the
West's television and cinema and newspapers, about books read in its schools
and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews about the need to send
help to the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was possible.
And there was, in any case, something totally wrong in offering bribes to the
West in return for its good opinion of Africa. Ultimately the abandonment of
unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward. Although I have used the
word willful a few times here to characterize the West's view of Africa, it may
well be that what is happening at this stage is more akin to reflex action than
calculated malice. Which does not make the situation more but less hopeful.
The
Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than
most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on
the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who
speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is
spoken. It was a wide-ranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in
America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual
phenomenon in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the article speaks
unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this:
In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language.
I believe that the introduction of dialects which is technically
erroneous in the context is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive
desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and
India. And this is quite comparable to Conrad’s withholding of language from
his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them
dialects!
In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to
the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible
redress. Look at the phrase native language in the Science Monitor excerpt.
Surely the only native language possible in London is Cockney English. But our
writer means something else – something appropriate to the sounds Indians and
Africans make!
Although the work of redressing which needs to be done may appear too
daunting, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and
condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the
racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the victims of racist slander
who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to
have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with
the gifts of a Conrad.
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
Nice one from Achebe rest on Sir
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