ABSTRACT
Chinua Achebe, the author of "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", was one of the most widely read, studied, and honored African writers of the twentieth century. He was born in colonial Nigeria in 1930 so had first-hand experience of colonialism—the social, political, and economic phenomenon by which several European nations established control over nations in other parts of the world. Nigeria's tribes and territories lived under British control from 1885 until 1960. In "An Image of Africa", Achebe proposes that in his critically acclaimed novel Heart of Darkness, the Polish British novelist Joseph Conrad fundamentally misrepresents his African characters so that they reinforce perceptions of African people, culture, and environment as savage and prehistoric. With "An Image of Africa", Achebe became the first critic to challenge the consensus that Conrad's Heart of Darkness was an important anti-colonialist text and a novel worthy of canonical status.
