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Content Warning: This guide makes references to racist portrayals of people of color and out-of-date depictions of non-Western cultures.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” antithesis to “civilized” Europe. While Achebe recognizes the novella’s literary merit, he believes it displays this impulse better than any other piece of Western literature. 

The frame narrative of Heart of Darkness involves an unnamed narrator aboard a boat on the Thames recounting a tale told to him by Charles Marlow, a seaman. Marlow ventured to the Belgian Congo in search of the elusive Mr. Kurtz, an enigmatic colonial officer who went missing deep in the jungle. Conrad portrays the benevolent, civilized Thames in stark contrast to the wild, untamed River Congo. Conrad’s description of the Congo fixates on two opposing concepts: silence and frenzy. Achebe believes that this apparent contradiction represents Conrad choosing “the role of purveyor of comfortable myths,” again reflecting the idea that Africa serves as a backdrop to elevate European ideals (253). Rather than the differences between the Thames and the Congo, it is the similarities that prove disquieting to Conrad. In the same way, the novella focuses on the suggestion of kinship between Conrad’s Western audience and the “ugly” humanity of the people of the Congo. 

Achebe is more concerned with Conrad’s depiction of African people than of the setting. In one instance, Marlow compares a Black boiler operator dressed in European clothing to a dog in human clothing. This dehumanizing description illustrates Conrad’s obsession with things being in their proper place. Therefore, tragedy in Heart of Darkness arises when things leave their proper place. Conrad dedicates a whole page to describing an African woman, Mr. Kurtz’s mistress. Achebe notes how she both fulfills Conrad’s requirement of being in the proper place and becomes a counterpoint to the European woman who ends the story. Conrad bestows the European woman with human expression, which he denies the African woman and most other Black characters. Africans in Heart of Darkness are either engaged in frenzied activities or communicate in rudimentary language. Of the two notable exceptions, the first is linked to cannibalism, and the second is the famous announcement of Mr. Kurtz’s death. For Achebe, these two instances of granting otherwise dehumanized characters English language represent Conrad’s “best assaults” on the African population. The cannibals represent Conrad abandoning consistency for sensationalism, and the announcement of Kurtz’s death by a Black man illustrate the “horror” of a European man fully giving his soul to the darkness of Africa. 

Achebe acknowledges that critics might contend that the attitude of Heart of Darkness is Marlow’s, not Conrad’s; Conrad may be using his protagonist as a means of critiquing the very views he espouses. However, Achebe rejects this notion because Conrad does not offer “an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters” (256). Marlow’s attitude reflects Western liberalism’s consistent failure to live up to the ideals of equality that it preaches. “Kinship” is the closest Conrad will go to equality, though it is Black people laying claim to this kinship which frightens and fascinates him the most. 

Achebe’s main point is that “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (257). White racism against Africans is so normalized that Conrad’s racism has been heretofore glossed over in literary criticism. While some would argue that Africa is not the focus of Heart of Darkness, but rather just a setting for the dissolution of Kurtz’s mind, Achebe argues that that is the point: It dehumanizes Africans, reducing them to props in a drama focusing on one ultimately insignificant white man. Achebe concludes that the novel, which dehumanizes a good portion of humanity, cannot be considered a great work of art, even with all its merits. 

While some of Conrad’s racism is due to him being a product of his times, Achebe contends that his antipathy toward Black people is a product of his peculiar psychology. Achebe contrasts Conrad’s depiction of the first Black man he ever encountered with the first Englishman he ever saw: “Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man” (259). Every instance of a psychoanalytic lens being applied to Conrad’s work has ignored his attitude toward Black people, indicating that Western psychology has normalized such racism. While Conrad is dead, his “offensive and deplorable book” continues to be one of the most frequently read and taught works of English literature. 

Achebe addresses possible objections to his argument. First, fiction should not be concerned with pleasing its subjects. However, he contends that Heart of Darkness upholds prejudices that have caused untold suffering and calls into question the humanity of Black people. Second, Heart of Darkness may accurately depict what Conrad experienced when he traveled the Congo River in 1890. However, Achebe will not accept Conrad’s perspective solely on the grounds of experience when he is so obviously biased and was called inaccurate by his own biographer. 

Most importantly, there is ample testimony about the people of the Congo to contradict Conrad’s portrayal. For example, British art historian Frank Willett describes how a mask from the Fang people, who live just north of the Congo, helped revitalize European art, eventually leading to Cubism. Conrad’s portrayal of Africa is inadequate, even in the face of Belgium’s genocidal subjugation of the region. 

Even the most observant travelers can be astoundingly myopic: Marco Polo failed to mention the Great Wall of China or the Chinese art of printing in his writings. Conrad did not invent his image of Africa; rather, it is the product of the Western imagination to which he, too, was subject. Africa serves as a foil and a warning to Europe, as Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz exemplifies. 

Achebe resists ending his essay on a positive note: There should be no great reward for the West abandoning Conrad’s view of Africa, other than the “abandonment of unwholesome thoughts” (561). He acknowledges that the West’s attitude may be more reflexive than willful, but this makes the situation less hopeful, citing an example in the Christian Science Monitor that describes the languages of India and Nigeria as dialects rather than languages, therefore positioning them as inherently inferior. This reflex denigrates subjugated peoples’ main tool of redress: their words. Redressing Conrad’s slander of Africa may be daunting, but it is necessary. Conrad noted the evils of imperial exploitation but ignored the racism it was built upon. However, “the victims of racist slander […] have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad” (262).