"If You Must Read This..."

Chinua Achebe

In an interview by Robert Siegel on All Things Considered, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe discusses Conrad’s racist attitude towards the natives on his character Marlow’s journey up the Congo River. Achebe published his first book in 1958. Things Fall Apart “stood fiction writing about Africa on its head” because it told about the coming of the British to African as Africans experienced it.

Achebe said he grew up identifying with Marlow, but (Siegel reads a quote from a corresponding article Achebe wrote), “A time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me: I was not on Marlow’s boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness, rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbanks.” Achebe says that was when he realized “how terribly, terribly wrong it was to portray my people, any people, from that attitude, from that point of view.” In the article Achebe says others have argued that Conrad was not endorsing the view Marlow took of the natives, but instead he was “holding it up to irony and criticism.” Achebe defends his argument by saying that Conrad neglected to hint at any alternate frame of reference.

I agree with Achebe in his assessment of Conrad’s novella. “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely, that Conrad was a bloody racist.” His descriptions of the natives withhold any sense of human expression, and establish the natives and the white men as having two opposing humanities. Africa as the setting dissociates the natives from any human factor. They are merely props. Achebe says that Heart of Darkness cannot be called a great work of art because it “celebrates this dehumanization,” and “depersonalizes a portion of the human race.”