Between Rwanda and Mandela

AFRICA IS A COUNTRY -  November 26, 2015

I recently reread “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,”  the famous lecture given by the late Chinua Achebe in 1975 and later published in the Massachusetts Review in 1977 (now published by Penguin as one of its Penguin Great Ideas series). It is an excoriating critique of Conrad’s autobiographical novel. Achebe treats Conrad like an overt racist who rendered his African characters as unspeaking brutes, and the African landscape as possessing a virgin innocence as well as an unspeakable darkness. In this way Conrad is shown to be a conventional Victorian racist, and relatedly of deploying some fairly crude gendered tropes to the supposedly African “character.”
Achebe goes on to reflect on the broader European imagination of Africa which Conrad represented. Two excerpts are particularly resonant:

Th[ere is a] desire – one might indeed say the need – in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest…

 And:

The West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray – a carrier on to whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.

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