The 1970s was a tough time in America along with the rest of world for African culture due to discriminating stereotypes and racism. When writing “An Image of Africa”, Chinua Achebe was fed up with racism and the effects it had on people. The essay is from a speech that Achebe made in the 1970s when race relations were very tense among Americans. Segregation was declining but there were still many people who were set out to suppress the power and the rights of black people. Achebe was exhausted with this idea and he expressed it by critically analyzing Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and dissecting it piece by piece to expose the author’s true reasoning behind his word choice in descriptions of Africa and Africans. Heart of Darkness is a novel by Joseph Conrad that tells the story of a man named Marlow who journeys down the Congo river in Africa to meet a man named Kurtz who is in the ivory trade. Marlow ends up becoming the captain of a steam boat for Kurtz that travels down the Congo river in search of ivory. The author of the novel used his personal experiences from traveling through Africa in the book, but his word choice and the way he describes Africa and her  native people is condescending, dehumanizing, and even racist. The reason for Achebe responding to racism and stereotypes by critically analyzing Heart of Darkness was that he wanted to lay down an example of “the need – in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil in Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” (Achebe 53). Some of the stereotypes that sparked Achebe to give the speech were the stereotypes that Africa did not have any literature and that African history did not exist. The current cultural perpetuation of negative stereotypes of African culture and the racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness served to greatly influence Achebe’s speech “An Image of Africa”.

Conrad portrays Africa as the antithesis of Europe in Heart of Darkness. At the time that Conrad wrote his story, Europe was civilized and for the most part the people had much more than the African people had. Civilization in Europe was advancing quickly and things were coming into order. Achebe tells us that Conrad used all kinds of horrible, degrading adjectives to describe the journey that he took down the river. “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet… But suddenly, as we struggled around a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage.” (Achebe 3). Conrad let his cultural bias show through his dehumanizing word choice such as “whirl of black limbs”, “bodies swaying”, and “droop of heavy and motionless foliage” which objectified the Africans and fortified the stereotype that they were all savages instead of acknowledging that they are human beings. This passage served to further support Achebe’s point that the language Conrad used was a racist choice. Although Conrad brings descriptions of horror and desolation to the table, he cannot be blamed for all of the impact his story made on peoples’ ideas of Africa. It was a common stereotype in Western culture at the time that Africa was a place of horrors, animalistic behavior, and torn people with no history, literature, or any form of credible art. Conrad’s story was merely a response to the pre-set stereotype that people had. He took the stereotype and essentially fortified it. “I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know… For did not that erudite British historian and Religious Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper, pronounce a few years ago that African history did not exist?” (Achebe 52-53).  Achebe was not singling out Conrad, he was singling out the “the need – in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil in Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” (Achebe 53).

Abhorrence is shown towards the fact that Heart of Darkness is regarded as esteemed literature. Achebe expresses that Conrad’s racism and dehumanizing Africans is uncalled-for and that his work should not be considered a great work of art due to its hateful nature. Although Achebe formulates quite the argument towards Conrad’s racism, he did not account for the detail that Conrad was raised in a completely different culture than Achebe was. A culture in which it was considered of the norm to discriminate against the African culture. However, this paper focuses on the cultural context that sparked Achebe’s argument and not Conrad’s novel. In “An Image of Africa”, Achebe brings up the point that many of the Nazis were talented at deeds they performed, but their expressive discrimination still instigated them to be condemned for their perverseness. Achebe wanted to demonstrate that Conrad should be criticized for his racism and perverseness, even though he is considered an outstanding artist. 

After analyzing a single line from the Christian Science Monitor, Achebe makes the reader aware of an interesting point. “In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language” (Achebe 10). Achebe analyzed this line and brought to light that instead of giving Africans and Indians the slightest amount of respect and acknowledging that they speak a language, the editor for the article merely called their languages “dialects”. Achebe shows us that even in context, this word choice is a reduction of Indian and African culture. “According to Achebe, Conrad has an obsession with skin colour: he describes a man as being black, having long black legs and long black arms. Achebe mentions a scene in the novella where after Kurtz’ death, the manager's boy is described as putting his “insolent black head in the doorway.“ (Svensson 8). In this passage from Heart of Darkness, Conrad talked about and treated an African as if he was an incredibly inferior being. Examples of dehumanization such as the previous and Achebe’s cultural background helped influence him to expose the flaws in Conrad’s inaccurate and racially biased portrayal of the African culture.

In his speech, Chinua Achebe used ethos, pathos, and logos to draw in the audience without accusing Joseph Conrad of being a “bloody racist”, until he had laid down enough convincing evidence and examples from his analysis of Conrad’s work. “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely, that Conrad was a bloody racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticism of his work due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected.” (Achebe 58). He knew that even in the current American culture, he would not be listened to if he started off by accusing a white man of something so serious. American culture and his audience influenced the arrangement and style of his speech. Being that a majority of the general public had not traveled to central Africa during that time, Western cultures did not have much besides the common stereotypes to base their idea of Africa on. The people were blinded by the blurs and the shadows described as Africans and Africa while not having enough knowledge or experience of the culture for themselves. “Some critics who claim that this novel (Heart of Darkness) portrays Africa and its natives as dark, mysterious and primitive. Many post-colonial authors, like Achebe, consider this image to be a degrading attempt to perpetuate that image of the African people that is projected in the European system of beliefs.” (NooriBerzenji 710).

Achebe’s wishes were for the people at his current point in history and culture to quit looking at Africa and Africans through this distorted and deformed lens. He did not wish for people to praise Africans and their culture as if they were divinities; he wanted people to see that Africans were not just worthless undeveloped souls. Africa and its’ people are a major part of the world population and an absolute credit to literature and history. Achebe hoped that people would realize that the stereotypes were wrong if he showed people that Conrad was racially biased in his work. 

Achebe found the stereotypes that Africa has no literature or history bothering. In Achebe’s speech, he found it useful to expose the racism in Heart of Darkness so that he could use it as an example of how white racism is sometimes overlooked in society just because it is commonality. The arguments made by Chinua Achebe in “An Image of Africa” were influenced by the cultural perpetuation of stereotypes of African culture and the racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
