Written in 1899, Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness has greatly contributed to the Western perceptions of Africa as the epicenter of unrelenting evil and ignorance. The story is told through the eyes of Marlow, a river boat captain working for a Company in the Congo. As the story unfolds, our protagonist questions the civilizing mission behind colonialism, and its adverse effects on the already ‘civilized’ men working on the frontlines. Readers of the novel are advised to view Conrad’s racist imagery of the Congo and African people as mere backdrop to the more important development of Marlow’s character. But don’t be fooled. Conrad intended to leave us with the depiction of savage, cannibalistic, and primitive Africans living in a dark abyss of evil. It is the ‘mystery’ of the so called ‘Dark Continent’ that attracted people to this novel in the in 1899. There is no question that this novel uses racism to captivate the western imagination when thinking about Africa. As the author Chinua Achebe demonstrates, Conrad’s racist imagery of the African continent are alive and thriving in the 21st Century.
Achebe points out Conrad’s dehumanization of Blacks as people void of language, reason and history. As soon as Marlow begins to feel a bond with the African helmsman, he pulls back his emotion in disgust. In the novel, Blacks are loathed, yet met with indifference. In the Western view, people of African origin living within the continent or even in Western societies are often met with the classification of extreme otherness. New modern phrases have masked the archaic racist terms of Conrad’s time. Western tourists are still captivated by the wild safari. People take part in cultural tourism, visiting ‘isolated tribes’ before fast food restaurants fall out of the sky and ruin these ‘authentic’ African cultures, It is accepted that Africa is without history, and no one complains about the continent’s absence in history books. Conrad helped to attach the stigma of lack and ignorance in relationship to Africa and its people. The mention of human origins, languages, technology, cities, empires, universities, and writing systems prior to colonization are rarely mentioned or known. Like Conrad, we treat this as a matter of fact.
Should Heart of Darkness be archived as an out of date racist novel? Yes. It could be argued that this novel is a literary masterpiece, and that this Eurocentric attitude was normal during the time Conrad wrote this novel. Truthfully, it was just as racist then as it is today, and its ideas of African inferiority and inhumanity justified Europe’s mission to colonize and ‘civilize’. Today we know the devastating effects of colonialism and how native populations were negatively viewed by European colonists. When assigned in a classroom as literary gold, we cannot expect students to ignore the references to Africa, Blackness, cannibalism, horror and ‘savagery.’ The West holds the yardstick for modernization and development, yet it is not willing to let these dangerously archaic ways of thinking die.
thebrightcontinent 
