ABSTRACT
In commenting on his fictional relations with Africa, Joseph Conrad once remarked that ‘An Outpost of Progress is the lightest part of the loot I carried off from Central Africa, the main portion being of course the Heart of Darkness’.1 It is an assessment that should sound a note of warning for critics as well as writers of literature about Africa. The imperial spirit that inspired a ‘scramble for’ Africa is by no means dead: perhaps the firmest yet most oblique hold it has found is in the domain of literary criticism. However much time David Ward spent in Africa, his writing now ‘from the Centre’2 places him in imaginative exile from it-yet his attempt to deconstruct white writing about Africa leads him to claim the territory as his own.
