StudentWriting  African Cultures & Literatures StudentWriting

Colonialism and its Discontents: Imagining Africa

            Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness portrays an image of Africa that is dark and inhuman.  Not only does he describe the actual, physical continent of Africa as “so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness” (Conrad 94), as though the continent could neither breed nor support any true human life, but he also manages to depict Africans as though they are not worthy of the respect commonly due to the white man.  At one point the main character, Marlow, describes one of the paths he follows: “Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement” (48).  Conrad’s description of Africa and Africans served to misinform the Western world, and went uncontested for many years.

            In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his first and most widely acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart.  This work—commonly acknowledged as the single most well known African novel in the world—depicts an image of Africa that humanizes both the continent and the people.  Achebe once said, “Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach.  Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story” (Gikandi 8-9); Achebe openly admits that he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrible characterization of Africans in many European works, especially Heart of Darkness.  In many ways, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric depiction of Africa and Native African lifestyle portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

            Throughout Heart of Darkness Conrad uses images of darkness to represent Africa.  Darkness is everything that is unknown, primitive, evil, and impenetrable.  To Conrad, Africa is the very representation of darkness.  Marlow often uses the phrase, “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness” (Conrad 68), to describe his progress on the Congo.  By traveling farther and farther down the Congo, Marlow and his crew get closer and closer to the epicenter of this foreboding darkness, to the black heart of evil.  Because of Africa’s physical immensity and thick jungles, it appeared to be a land of the unknown where “the silence . . . went home to one’s very heart—its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life”(56). This portrayal of Africa as both a romantic frontier and a foreboding wilderness continues to dominate in the minds of Westerners even today.

            Conrad depicts Africa as a land where the prehistoric has been preserved.  He describes the journey up the Congo as something similar to a trip on a time machine:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings . . . There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence.  And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace.  It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. (66)

 In Conrad’s eyes, Africa is a land where the past is sustained.  As Marlow goes deeper into the continent, Conrad’s depiction of Africa is infused with a sense of fear and loathing, a sense that there is some darker, unknown evil at work. 

            Of course Conrad’s illustration of Africa does not center only on the continent, it carries over to his characterization of African natives.  Conrad describes Marlow’s first encounter with an African ceremony as, “a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling . . . ” (68).  He goes on to portray Marlow’s reaction to this frenzy of natives “as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse”(69).  Conrad’s description of these people shows them as crazed, frenzied, out-of-control savages, not an image any turn-of-the-century Westerner could warm up to.  Nor could his English speaking readers understand these people to be anything more than beasts, as they only had the written word to go on. 

            Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902, well past a time when “nigger” was considered an acceptable word to use when addressing, or referring to Africans or African Americans.  Despite this fact, Conrad repeatedly uses the offensive slang term in reference to the Africans Marlow encounters.  At his first stop on the Congo, Marlow lists the things he sees: “Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass wire sent into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory”(46).  He groups the Africans coming through the station with inanimate objects, as though they all carried the same value. 

            Conrad lived through a time when European colonies were scattered all over the world.  This phenomenon and the doctrine of colonialism bought into at his time obviously influenced his views on Africa and Africans.  Colonialism has been defined by Lee C. Bucheit as “the domination of a people by foreign government and the inability of the colonial subjects to control their own political destiny, often coupled with a degree of economic exploitation and denial of human rights” (“Doctrines on Colonialism” 2).  At the time of Heart of Darkness’s publication, very few people saw anything amiss with colonialism.  From a Eurocentric point of view, colonialism was the natural “next-step” in any powerful country’s political agenda.  The colonizers did not pay heed to the native peoples in their territories, nor did they think of the natives as anything but savages. 

            Conrad depicts Africans as though they are “other,” not a part of normal humanity.  Naturally, Chinua Achebe, a native of Nigeria, shows that the Africans in question (the Igbo tribe) in his novel Things Fall Apart are certainly not “other,” they are just as much members of the human family as any other group.  Achebe’s main character, Okonkwo, is a wealthy and successful member of his clan:

Okonkwo’s prosperity was visible in his household.  He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of red earth.  His own hut, or obi, stood immediately behind the only gate in the red walls.  Each of his three wives had her own hut, which together formed a half moon behind the obi.  The barn was built against one end of the red walls, and long stacks of yam stood out prosperously in it. . . .  Near the barn was a small house, the ‘medicine house’ or shrine where Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits.  He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm-wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children. (Achebe 10) 

  Achebe describes this man and his living quarters with no sense of surprise or mystery, as Conrad would have done.  Okonkwo is a normal and well-respected member of his clan.  There is certainly nothing significant or remarkable about him in comparison with other clan members, or other human beings.

            The rituals that Conrad was so mystified and disgusted by are, in reality, no different from many of the rituals Westerners participate in.  Body painting, bizarre chants, and odd dances of victory are considered normal at many sporting events.  Achebe illustrates the excitement Okonkwo feels for the upcoming wrestling match:

Just then the distant beating of drums began to reach them.  It came from the direction of the ilo, the village playground. . . . The drums beat the unmistakable wrestling dance—quick, light and gay, and it came floating on the wind.  Okonkwo cleared his throat and moved his feet to the beat of the drums.  It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth.  He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue.  It was like the desire for woman. (30) 

This expression of excitement is both a thoroughly humanizing feeling, and a sense of excitement that any human could identify with.  Obviously, by showing the feeling behind the “frenzy” Conrad sees in African ritual, Achebe lifts the Igbo people above the status of mere savage.  They are shown to have passion, desire, and excitement, feelings any person is familiar with.  He characterizes the people as though they could indeed be respected and understood.

            Things Fall Apart takes place both before and during the time when colonialism started to take hold in Africa.  Many colonized countries first began to feel the grip of colonialism in their lives with the comings of missionaries and Christian churches.  Okonkwo loses his first born son to the missionaries in his village.  He is both confused and angered by his son’s decision: “A sudden fury rose within him and he felt a strong desire to take up his matchet, go to the church and wipe out the entire and miscreant gang. . . .  Why, he cried in his heart, should he, Okonkwo, of all people be cursed with such a son?” (108). 

            Soon it becomes clear that the white man does not only wish to save the souls of these “savages,” he also wishes to rule them.  Foreign government followed closely on the tails of the churches.  Once Okonkwo realizes that the fight for his people’s way of life is lost, he takes his own life rather than allowing outsiders to slowly take it from him.  One of his closest friends, Obierika, says to the District Commissioner, “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia.  You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog . . . ”(147); whether he is addressing the District Commissioner specifically or the colonists as a whole is beside the point: Okonkwo was overtaken with grief because of what was happening to his village and his people. 

            In the very short time between 1880 and 1900 nearly all of Africa was seized by the European imperial powers of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy; and Africans were converted into colonial and dependent subjects (Boahen 27).  Nigeria, the country in which Okonkwo’s clan dwells, was seized by Great Britain.  Many African clans, primarily the people of Nigeria, fought against colonial expansion; A. Adu Boahen notes in his book, African Perspectives on Colonialism, “In the Niger delta . . . most of the Ibo [Igbo] peoples . . . fought the British in defense of their lands” (50).  The tribe to which Okonkwo was a member was bitterly opposed to British expansion, but because of England’s high-tech weaponry the Igbo tribe could not win their fight against colonialism. 

            One of the most reprehensible results of colonialism in all parts of Africa is both an immediate response to, and a long-term effect of, colonialist rule.  Boahen states that the

worst psychological impact has been the generation of a deep feeling of inferiority as well as the loss of a sense of human dignity among Africans.  Both complexes were surely the outcome of . . . the practice of racial discrimination and the constant humiliation to which Africans were subjected throughout the colonial period. (108)

 Achebe’s character Okonkwo obviously feels the brunt of the psychological pain caused by colonialism.  Unfortunately, Boahen points out that many Africans have not regained a sense of dignity and importance, even decades after European occupation (108). 

When writing Things Fall Apart, Achebe sought to reinstate the sense of self that Africans had lost in colonialism and in the writings of Eurocentric authors.  By providing a story of an ordinary tribesman who leads an ordinary, respectable life until colonists invade his territory, Achebe humanizes what Conrad has dehumanized in Heart of Darkness.  Through Conrad’s racial slurs, frightening depictions of Africa and Africans, and his overall disregard of Africans as people, he manages to break another bone in the backs of a people recovering from colonialism, and to place another layer of cloth over the eyes of Western readers.  Achebe says in his article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” “Heart of Darkness portrays 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 bestiality” (Achebe 252).  In Things Fall Apart, Achebe contributes the first strong argument attesting to the sovereignty and humanity of African natives.  His work is the confutation to the representation of Africa and Africans in Heart of Darkness.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua.  "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Heart of             Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism.  3^rd            ed.  Ed. Robert Kimbrough.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.  251-262.
---.  Things Fall Apart.  Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959.
Boahen, A. Adu.  African Perspectives on Colonialism.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
        University Press, 1987. 
Conrad, Joseph.  Heart of Darkness.  London: Penguin Books, 1989.
“Doctrines on Colonialism.”  The Government of Tibet in Exile.  3 May 2000. 
         <http://www.tibet.com/Humanrights/Unpo/chap2.html>. 
Gikandi, Simon.  “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature.”  Classics in
        Context: Things Fall Apart.  Chinua Achebe.  Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational
        Publishers, 1996.

© Emily Wiggins, 2000

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