ABSTRACT
Chinua Achebe's article began life as a lecture and retains some of the immediacy of address of that form. It has probably provoked more discussion, and fiercer arguments, than any other single piece of Conrad criticism because it describes Conrad, who has routinely been accorded the status of 'great' modern writer, as a 'thoroughgoing racist'. Like Nina Pelikan Straus's article, which claims that Heart of Darkness is 'brutally sexist' in its conventions (p. 173), Achebe's piece strikes an overtly personal note and is written in anger. It would be a mistake to take this as indicative of a 'naive' or untheoretical approach. Rather it reflects the emphasis, in postcolonial theory, on the politics of representation (including questions of who is speaking and who is represented), and resistance to a Eurocentric perspective masked by a spurious detachment and universalism. Elsewhere Achebe has attacked the use of 'universal' as 'a synonym for the narrow self-serving parochialism of Europe' (Morning Yet on Creation Day (London, Ibadan, Nairobi, Lusaka: Heinemann, 1975), p. 9), and this issue is integral to his argument in the Conrad essay. What is at stake is not simply Conrad's favourable or unfavourable representation of African people, but the assumption that Africa and its people are available for discursive appropriation by the European writer. Heart of Darkness is sometimes defended as a symbolic examination of the European mind and experience, not a realist representation of Africa. This, however, misses the point that the reduction of African society to a symbol dehumanises and devalues its people and their multiple and complex pre-colonial societies. Achebe's account of the ideological structure of Heart of Darkness is clearly susceptible of modification (see Introduction, p. 9), but the politics and ethics of
retaining as an enormously popular set text and a classic of modernism a work that contains racist assumptions remain problematic. One consequence of the debate has been to encourage 'teaching the conflicts': debating rather than ignoring the question of racism when teaching Heart of Darkness.
