Images of Africa in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart Essay

Images of Africa in Heart of night and Things Fall Apart Joseph Conrads novel Heart of sinfulness portrays an image of Africa that is dark and in gentle. Not only does he describe the actual, bodily continent of Africa as so hopeless and so dark, so lumbering to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness (Conrad 94), as though the continent could neither breed nor support any true human life, but he also manages to depict Africans as though they atomic number 18 not worthy of the respect commonly due to the white man. At one point the main character, Marlow, describes one of the paths he follows Cant say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles further on, may be considered as a permanent improvement (48). Conrads description of Africa and Africans served to misinform the Western world, and went uncontested for many years. In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his comm encement and nearly widely acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart. This work-commonly acknowledged as the single most well known African novel in the world-depicts an image of Africa that humanizes some(prenominal) the continent and the people. Achebe once said, Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I agnise that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. at once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a varied story (Gikandi 8-9) Achebe openly admits that he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrible ikon of Africans in many European works, especially Heart of Darkness. In many ways, Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Europocentric depi... ...t of Darkness. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York W.W. Norton, 19 88. 251-262. ---. Things Fall Apart. Greenwich Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959. Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London Penguin Books, 1989. Doctrines on Colonialism. The Government of Tibet in Exile. 3 whitethorn 2000. http//www.tibet.com/Humanrights/Unpo/chap2.html. Gikandi, Simon. Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature. Classics in Context Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe. Portsmouth Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996