Scholars of literature and some keen readers in
Zimbabwe must be aware of a small but very powerful novel by Joseph Conrad
entitled Heart of Darkness.
Although it is a novel of 1899, it has sparked
debate on whether it is indeed a text that is racist. Even the great late write
Chinua Achebe was sucked into this debate that has been going on for decades
now.
Heart of Darkness follows one white man’s nightmarish journey into the
interior of Africa. Aboard a British ship called the Nellie, three men
listen to a man named Marlow recount his journey into Africa up the Congo River
in a steam boat as an agent for a Belgian ivory trading Company.
Marlow says that he
witnesses brutality and hate between the white ivory hunters and the native
African people. Marlow becomes entangled in a power struggle within the
Company, and finally learns the truth about the mysterious Kurtz, a mad agent
who has become both a god and a prisoner of the "native Africans."
After "rescuing" Kurtz from the native African people, Marlow watches
in horror as Kurtz succumbs to madness, disease, and finally death.
The description of African people in Heartt of
Darkness is unpalatable, at least to a conscious African reader. They are seen as
and referred to as SAVAGES. This is what the narrator says about the Africans
and Africa: “It (Africa) was unearthly and the men (Africans) were – no, they
were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it – this suspicion of
their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They (Africans) howled
and leaped and spun and made horrid faces but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship
with this wild and passionate uproar.”
That is not enough because there is some more of
this kind of descriptions: “…as we struggled round a bend, there would be a
glimpse of rich walls, of peaked grass roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of
black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of
eyes rolling… The prehistoric man (the African) was cursing us (white men),
praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell”
The structure and style of Heart of Darkness is the
first challenge. We have a narrator reporting Marlow’s narration of Marlow’s
experiences in Africa. This is a story inside another story, inside a story! You
may say that technically, Heart of Darkness ceases to be Conrad’s story and
therefore if the story is racist, then Conrad is not necessarily racist!
The story is partially Marlow’s because only what
is remembered or deemed important by him gets to be narrated. It is also
partially the narrator’s story because his record of what he heard Marlow say
is his sole experience. We are therefore faced by a situation where we should
not fully ascribe the blame to either Conrad or Marlow. Againa: technically the story
operates from several “subsequent” points of view. We keep on saying: who is racist
here?
Chinua Achebe, Africa’s most prominent novelist,
who happens to find the novel racist, thinks that Marlow speaks for Conrad
because Conrad does “not hint, clearly and adequately at an alternative frame
of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.”
Achebe’s assertion that Marlow speaks for Conrad is further strengthened by the
fact that Conrad himself makes a journey similar to Marlow’s down the Congo
River in 1890. It is the nature of literature to be wholly or very partially
autobiographical.
Those who agree with Achebe insist on the point
that: in the nineteenth century where adventure novels are heavily loaded with
the author’s experiences as in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, the authors
tended to agree to be associated with their major characters. Conrad, who
tended, throughout his life, to see the multiple conflicting dimensions of one
thing, would definitely not want to disassociate himself from Marlow, who
undertakes the same journey as his creator
For Achebe, Heart of Darkness is racist because it projects
the image of Africa as “the other world, the antithesis of Europe… the question is whether a novel which celebrates
this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be
called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt
Conrad's great talents. Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages
and moments..."
The “Achebe school” is also angered by the
portrayal of the Thames River as representation of modernity against the savage
muddiness and hazardous Congo River of Africa. There is also the “wild and
gorgeous apparition of an (African) woman” pitied against the serene civilized
mood of the intended (white woman). The “worst insult” is the pitying of the
thoughtful life-like white men against the grunting men of Africa.
Those who disagree with Achebe and company put
across a series of arguments that revert back to the ideological environment
under which the novel was conceived and written. Their argument is that the
writing of Heart of Darkness was done at a time when considering Africans as savages
as and lesser beings than non-Africans was the norm.
They point out that Conrad set his story in the
Belgian (King Leopold II’s) Congo of the 1890 when the Africans in the Congo
region were being forced to extract ivory and rubber for the Empire at gunpoint.
Those who resisted got killed or dismembered and to imagine a kind of discourse
that saw blacks as having equal humanity with other races was unthinkable. They
even think that Conrad attacks imperialism because he identifies it with clear
plunder and not the pretensions of civilizing the savage and spreading
Christianity.
However, even then, Conrad’s attack of imperialism
has its contradictions. Conrad questions the morality of colonialism and
exploitation but he does not question the colonial mission itself. Although
Conrad’s Africans are pitiable, they are nonetheless niggers and are victimised
quite as much by their own stupidity and ignorance as by European brutality.
One of Kurtz’s last utterances: “Exterminate the
brutes!” demonstrates that the term “going native” does not mean becoming one
with the savages. Despite the delirium, Kurtz knows the clear cut racial
divisions and his white man’s duties in Africa.
In addition, “Darkness” in Heart of Darkness tends
to be metaphorical. Darkness holds a multiplicity of meanings. The only
unequivocal meaning of darkness in the novel seem to be one’s descending to
inhuman levels of thought and behaviour – like Kurtz and the whole Belgian
colonial establishment. In Heart of Darkness evil is portrayed as African and if
it is also African that is because some white men in the Heart of Darkness
behave like Africans!
Reading Heart of Darkness, you are certain that for
the western readers of the 1890s, it must have shown the extremities of
conquest, of course, but, it definitely must have confirmed the western concept
of Africa as the land of savages. If the novel caused sympathy towards the
African, it was that sympathy one has for an animal in agony, not fellow human
beings.
It is important to note that Chinua Achebe, who
developed a revulsion against this kind of writing, vowed to write a literature
that redeemed the black image and rightfully, his novels; Things Fall Apart and
Arrow of God, portray Africans as real beings with strengths, weaknesses,
philosophies and languages.
+(by Memory Chirere)
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