An Image of Africa

Achebe counterbalances his scholarly voice with flashes of scathing, sarcastic, and even bitter language, best demonstrated by one of the most oft-cited lines in the essay: “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (257). The blunt, matter-of-fact tone Achebe takes here is in direct response to a body of literary criticism that had heretofore failed to acknowledge what Achebe viewed as Conrad’s obvious racism. While some have argued Achebe’s refusal of the standard, detached scholarly tone is unprofessional, such critique ignores Achebe’s positionality as a former subject of European colonization, someone intimately connected with The Dehumanization of Africa he decries in “An Image of Africa.” Additionally, while he has been accused of oversimplifying the complex, anti-imperialist message of Heart of Darkness and its author’s complex relationship with the subject, this is not the case. Part of Achebe’s central argument is that Africa and its peoples have been dehumanized, rendered into unintelligible ciphers, devoid of character, culture, and even language—a people and a land without history—until the advent of European colonialism.

While the tone of “An Image of Africa” may be less rhetorically formal than other scholarly essays, Achebe uses a standard structure of academic argumentation: He opens with a relevant

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