Skinning Cats

Here we can see how many water ways come off the Congo and how easily one could get lostWhile reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness I could not help but be reminded of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The two stories loosely chronicle the beginnings of European colonization of Africa, but from opposite view points. While the two stories may seem very different, I could not help but notice concurrent themes.
Heart of Darkness is told from the European perspective, telling the story of the adventure to find and retrieve the much-discussed Mr Kurtz. Along the way, our narrator makes not of things both horrific and comical, but all of them generally insane. The narrator encounters a cast of characters that all seem to be somewhat off; there does not seem to be any character that is readily identifiable with, not even the narrator. The Africans are depicted as savage simpletons and the Europeans that have begun to enslave them are generally greedy, but hopelessly floundering in a new environment due to lack of organization and dissention born of competitive spirits. While there are dark and convoluted ideas tossed about in the story of enslavement, poaching, murder, lawlessness, madness, and general exploitation, the story also has moments of satire. The comedy of the story is shown in details such as the ship workers bald head, but extensive beard and the little dance he and the narrator do on the steam boat, as well as the brash pilgrim in the incongruous pink “pyjamas”. By simultaneously poking fun at European colonists and creating a sense of deep foreboding, Conrad shows us that the Europeans were not a favorable group in this circumstance and that the Africans were generally misunderstood by them.
Things Fall Apart is told from the perspective of an African tribe elder, Okonkwo, who has worked all his life to meet and exceed the social expectations of his society with passion. Okonkwo is big, strong, skilled in combat, hard-working, has three wives, a house for each of them, and a whole bushel of children. However, things begin to “fall apart” for him when one of his wives keeps giving birth to dead children, his oldest son is immature and weak, and Europeans begin to encroach on his homeland, carrying with them an alien religion. The Europeans begin to convert the Africans, but Okonkwo stays true to his roots and maintains faith in his polytheistic practice that he grew up with. For his defiance towards the Europeans he is exiled out of his village to return to the land where he was born. There he becomes lazy and depressed, but eventually gets up the confidence to redeem himself, but by that time colonization has run too deep for one man, despite his strength of fist and will, to overcome. In this way, Achebe shows us the pain suffered by his ancestors in hanging on to the fabric of a society that was threadbare.
Though the two authors have seemingly polar opposite approaches to European colonization of Africa, they both reach the same end. Colonization was ugly for all involved and was a regrettable part of human history in which people were corrupted by a deep sense of kill, submit, or face death.