Universität Köln, Anglistik und Amerikanistik
HS: Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory
Sommersemester 2006, 8. Semester

Images of Africa in Joseph Conrad´s "Heart of Darkness"

by

Elisabeth Weise

1.) Introduction 3

2.) Africa – the Dark Continent 4

3.) Africa - the Underdeveloped Continent  6

4.) Africa – the Black Continent  7

5.) Africa –the Ill Continent  9

6.) Africa - the Mysterious Continent  10

7.) Africa - the Colonisers´ Continent  11

8.) Conclusion  13

9.) Bibliography:  15

1.) Introduction

Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness has been regarded as a canonical work in the English literature and has been praised as an outstanding short-novel. Over the years people have come up with many different interpretation of the story. Critics interpreted Marlow’s journey to the heart of Africa as a psychological odyssey to his own self while others have seen the tale as an apocalypse which anticipates the end of the Western world (Miller 46). Jerome Thale on the other hand interprets Marlow’s voyage as a search for the Holy Grail during which he has to pass different tests before he is allowed to meet his grail Kurtz (Schnuck 89). Stewart Wilcox even thinks that the main aim of Heart of Darkness is to contrast the purity of “Buddha-Marlow” against the dubious moral of the Christian pilgrims. Other critics have seen Kurtz as a modern Faust who sells his soul to the devil in order to gain power and knowledge while still others pointed out striking parallels between Marlow and Dante (Watts 47). Looking at all these different interpretations we see that Heart of Darkness is a very rich and complex text and that Conrad obviously mastered the confrontation with Africa’s “Otherness“ by classifying it according to already existing European motives of literature.
But the tale has not only received positive reviews. Beginning in the 70´s, feminists have accused the text of being sexist since the only two Western women in the story are very weak and naive characters. But the main criticism was that Heart of Darkness is a racist text since the general image of Africa which Conrad portrays is a very negative one. Another reproach is that the story contains offending words like “nigger” strikingly often and that the African people are presented in such a primitive way that the tale calls “the very humanity of the black people into question”, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has put it (Achebe 261). He was the first scholar who questioned in his famous essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” the outstanding position which the novel held in the academic world.
In this essay I want to show that Achebe is right in pointing out that Conrad employs a rhetoric which is supportive of imperial domination and that his novel Heart of Darkness contributes to the stereotyped image of Africa which we still, as Achebe rightly noticed, hold to our heart with “wilful tenacity” (Achebe 261). But I want to disagree with Achebe´s statement that Conrad was a “thoroughgoing racist” (Achebe 257) and that we should therefore not plague ourselves with his heart of darkness any more (Achebe 259). What makes every interpretation of Conrad’s novel very difficult is the internal construction of the story which is presented to us as a ´tale within a tale´. The author hides himself between two narrators, an outside, shadowy narrator and the primary narrator Marlow. Marlow tells his tale in a very ironic way and with a strange kind of inner distance to it so that the story is not so much linked to the personal experiences of its teller, but seems to aim at a more general meaning. By presenting Heart of Darkness this way, “Conrad invites the reader to pursue his […] own meaning and, indirectly, to be sceptical of Marlow’s commentary” (Ressler 13). But he also makes it difficult to conclude from the statements of the characters back to his own opinion. And, as Conrad warned his friend Cunninghame Graham, there is the danger of missing the whole point of the story: “There are two very instalments in which the idea is so wrapped in that You - even You may miss it!”¹

2.) Africa – the Dark Continent

At the end of the 19th century the connection between Africa and darkness was deeply established in the Western mind. The wide-spread reports of the famous Africa traveller Henry M. Stanley Through the Dark Continent (published in 1879) and In Darkest Africa (published in 1891) helped to bring this image to a new popularity. In the established Western discourse on darkness, Africa was seen as a dark continent, morally as well as culturally. Even if Conrad did not read Stanley’s books himself, he was surely influenced by the images they contain as the enigmatic title he chose for his novel shows.
Darkness can only be perceived if there is light as a contrast. Brantlinger argues in his essay Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent that Africa only became dark when the Western explorers, missionaries and scientists “flooded it with light” (Brantlinger 166). This light was reflected through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of savage customs in the name of civilization. The West’s conviction of its own superiority led to a view which became famous as the “myth of the dark continent” (Brantlinger 166). In this context, colonialism was a necessity, “a moral imperative as well as a political and economic one” (Spurr 29). Even for those who were like Conrad critical towards the imperial enterprise – “the conquest of the earth […] is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”, he says (Conrad 50) - had difficulties to resist this myth.
As Conrad’s title Heart of Darkness promises, darkness is the prevailing motif of the novel. One of the very first sentences of the story is: ”The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth” (Conrad 1). Interestingly, right from the beginning, darkness is not only connected with Africa, but also with “the biggest town on earth”, the centre of the empire ´on which the sun never sets´, namely with London. So although Conrad was influenced by the Western ´myth of the dark continent´, he shows on the very first page of his novel that he sees things a bit more differentiated.

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1 Conrad in a letter to Cunninghame Graham, 8. February 1899, cited according to Guetti 68.