Post-colonial Critism of Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Oh, how different it must have been to read Heart of Darkness in Blackwood’s magazine in 1899, a time when it was acceptable, and widely practiced, for Europeans to call people of different skin colors, religions, or cultures words like “savage.” The issue of race, or Conrad’s treatment of, and feelings about, racism in his work has been a divisive topic in the Post-colonial critical assessment of Heart of Darkness. I will examine this critical split with three essays, each from a different point of view, about the treatment of race in Heart of Darkness: Chinua Achebe, who believes Conrad was unequivocally racist; Hunt Hawkins, who believes Conrad was speaking out against imperialism, and by extension racism; and Patrick Brantlinger, who thinks Conrad “offers a powerful critique of at least certain manifestations of imperialism and racism, at the same time that it presents that critique in ways that can only be characterized as both imperialist and racist” (Conrad 305). I believe the institutionalized denigration of other cultures in Europe influenced Conrad to view European culture as “right,” while his journey into the Congo made him question many of these assumptions, and Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s attempt to reconcile his view of European superiority with the horrors that he saw being enacted in its name in the Congo. I am going to attempt to extend Brantlinger’s argument with evidence from Achebe, Hawkins, and my own interpretation of the text.

It seems appropriate to begin a discussion of the critical split in Post-colonial criticism with Chinua Achebe’s assertion that Conrad was “a bloody racist” (Achebe 9) and Hunt Hawkins’s contrary reading of Heart of Darkness as an attack on imperialism. Achebe is offended by Conrad’s insistency on portraying Africa as “the antithesis of Europe, and therefore civilization” (Achebe 3), relaying “comforting myths” (Achebe 4) of Africa to make Europe look civilized or “good” by comparison. Hunt Hawkins, however, believes that Conrad was speaking out against imperialism, and by extension racism, by describing the violence and destruction it was causing, while employing racist rhetoric to pander to his European audience. Hawkins suggests that Conrad used the Congo to make a point about the destructive nature of colonialism without alienating his British audience.

Achebe and Hawkins agree that Conrad employed racist language throughout his novel; however, they view his use of this racist language with different perspectives. Achebe feels that Conrad is using the offensive language earnestly, to denigrate the African people in attempts of praising Europeans, while Hawkins views the use of this language as a means for Conrad to win over his, mostly European, audience, in attempts to make them realize the horrors of imperialism. The point at which their arguments diverge is in their different interpretations of the phrases in which Marlow calls attention to the common humanity of the Europeans and Africans. In regards to the kinship that Marlow mentions as he enters the Congo Achebe feels Conrad was scared and suspicious of, even threatened by, a common ancestry between Africans and Europeans, “it is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry,” (Achebe 3) while Hawkins feels Conrad embraces the common bond, “Marlow is sufficiently sensitive to [native] culture to realize that in Africa drums might have ‘as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country’” (Hawkins 296).

Brantlinger is less convinced that Heart of Darkness has a unifying theme and single message. He believes that in the novel “the African wilderness serves as a mirror, in whose “darkness” Conrad/ Marlow sees a death-pale self-image” (Conrad 316). Therein lies the problem with reading Heart of Darkness as an utterance of a single message; Conrad portrays Africa as “darkness,” or “otherness,” while simultaneously identifying with it. In this way, “Conrad inscribes a text that . . . cancels out its own best intentions” (Conrad 321) because he simultaneously portrays Africa as the home of “darkness” and barbarity, while describing a feeling of commonality with its inhabitants. Conrad is trying to explain that savagery, or “darkness,” if you like, is inherent in all people, using the African “savage” as a shortcut for pre-historic, “uncivilized” man.

The notion of “proving” Conrad’s racism is very tricky. It is impossible to know a person’s intimate thoughts of anything, let alone something as tricky as the racism of a man who has been dead for almost a hundred years. We can only rely on the writing and letters that Conrad left behind to make our assessment of his feelings, however precarious this practice may be, and to this end there are some troubling ideas on race in Heart of Darkness. As Achebe has stated on multiple occasions, the characterization of Africa as the site of corruption, “the earliest beginnings of the world” (Conrad 48), is wrong, because it de-humanizes the people who live in Africa, making the continent simply “setting and backdrop” (Achebe 9). The standards by which Conrad, or at least Marlow, judges imperialism, i.e. “efficiency” and “the idea,” also proves to be troubling in their inherent neglect of African humanity and autonomy. By making a distinction between different kinds of imperialism, having Marlow say upon seeing “a large shining map, marked with all the colours of the rainbow,” “There was a vast amount of red— good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work was being done in there” (Conrad 24), Conrad gives credence to at least some forms of imperialism, and the racism inherent in that system.

While supporting the English and their interests abroad, Conrad also provides some devastating criticism of imperialism when, early in his tale, Marlow explains to the men on the boat, with an allusion to Roman colonization of England, some colonists have better intentions than others. Conrad’s motivation for alluding to the Romans seems two-fold, the first being his criticism of imperialism as “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (Conrad 21), and the second being to point out that England had once been colonized, just as the Congo, the rest of Africa, and most the rest of the world, has been by Europe in their time. With this passage Conrad seems to be saying that the people in Africa are no different from the Europeans, who were similarly colonized in the past. Conrad is pointing out the commonality of the human experience, and drawing upon the “remote kinship” to frame his tale (Conrad 51).

This acknowledgement of African/ European kinship, i.e. Conrad’s critique of racism and imperialism, is not untempered, as is, in fact, nothing in Heart of Darkness; Conrad uses ambiguous language, contradictory juxtaposed images, and oxymoronic phrases in his struggle to internalize African autonomy. This struggle to find a coherent way to describe the colonists or the Africans suggests that Conrad recognized his views on Indigenous African cultures as racist, and was struggling to reconcile that with his experiences in the Congo. Conrad’s use of oxymoron to describe the colonists embodies this struggle. Conrad calls the colonists at the main station “faithless pilgrims” (Conrad 38), and gives Kurtz, a man who “looked at least seven feet long” (Conrad 75), and name that means “short” in German. Similarly, in one of the most challenging, and startling, passages in the novel, Marlow uses contradictory logic to describe the Africans in his crew. Marlow first identifies them as cannibals, and then praises them for their self control and discipline for not eating the rest of the crew. This passage is at once outrageously insulting, as there is no documented cannibalism in the Congo at this time, and complimentary, showing the Africans had self-discipline and a moral structure.

Thus, Heart of Darkness is essentially a text about a man arguing with himself. This struggle makes the text interesting, but it also makes it endlessly frustrating, because it undermines any criticism of imperialism by engaging some of the same prejudices and rhetoric of the colonists. While this inconsistency makes the text seems indecisive and schizophrenic, it also stimulates debate and forces the reader to assess the problems of imperialism and his/her own feelings about racism. I believe this is the very reason Heart of Darkness is still so widely read and taught today.

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa." Research in African Literatures 09.01 (1978): 1- 15.JSTOR. Web. 25 May 2011.

Conrad, Joseph, and Ross C. Murfin. Heart of Darkness: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. Print.

Hawkins, Hunt. "Conrad's Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness." PMLA 94.2 (1979): 286-99. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.