An Image of Africa

Content Warning: This guide makes references to racist portrayals of people of color and out-of-date depictions of non-Western cultures. 

In the essay “An Image of Africa,” famed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe explores Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, to expose the author’s—and Western culture’s—racist views of Africa. A Professor of African Literature at the University of Massachusetts at the time, Achebe is moved by both a letter from a high school student about Things Fall Apart and a passing conversation with an older white man to draw two important conclusions about the West’s attitude toward Africa. First, the West remains largely ignorant of the cultural nuances of African societies, relegating them to mere customs and superstitions, while remaining ignorant to the fact that Western culture is full of its own peculiarities. Second, and most important, the West’s dismissal and diminishment of Africa and its people is willful: Achebe argues that Western psychology “[sets] Africa up as a foil to Europe” to elevate European virtues against the “flaws” of Africa (251). Achebe uses Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s famous 1889 novella, to illustrate this impulse in Western culture. Deemed one of the most important pieces of 19th Century English literature, the novella sets up Africa as the “primitive”

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