I beg to differ from Achebe's over-sensitivity. If anything, Heart of Darkness is a critique of colonialism through the eyes of the fictional Charlie Marlow. I didn't find an insult in the book except Conrad's drawn-out description of everything: the sun, the medical examiner, the accountant, and the carriers of goods from the ship to the station (i.e. the Africans who were barefoot and had splay feet). In terms of the poverty, hardship and underdevelopment level in Africa at the time, how else did Achebe want Conrad to describe the situation? Even women do not complain when the book has Marlow think this about his own aunt: women are strange creatures and live in a reality of their own.
Achebe's animosity has caused African writers to rebel against the English language, thus hampering its potential improvement on the continent. I think we should not follow his resentment so blindly. We should read Heart of Darkness for ourselves.
Hello Okafor Williams
I agree that this is a very thoughtful book (with detailed descriptions as you say) and many people seem to apply current values (what we consider acceptable now) to a book written in a very different historical time. In this way, people can get offended and maybe we need to look at it in a different way.
Hi Okafor Okafor Williams and Joseph C Lee
All this negative interpretation was started by Achebe. Our literary people have ever since interpreted The Heart of Darkness in that way. My great-grandfather told us that when the white man visited us, we only covered our groins with tree barks and we tried to kill the strangers. Why do we try to manipulate history in our favour as soon as we receive a fair amount of the white man's education? It really does not make sense. And we claim that greed is a colonial artefact, but as far as I know, it is a human attribute. African tribes took one another as slaves. long before colonisation.
Joseph C Lee Current values have nothing to do with it. Conrad simply described what he saw. I have challenged Achebe's fanatics to quote verbatim the phrases in The Heart of Darkness that are derogatory, but for the past three years, none has sent me even a single excerpt from it. Joseph Conrad had seen my forefathers barefoot, trying to stone the Europeans away. My great-great-grandfather passed down the same story of shoes and mirrors having been an invention of the visiting European. How else do we want writers to say it. I think there is a better way we Africans can assert our intelligence than trying to manipulate history. I am a proud African.
In the same breadth, the British Author, James Hadley Chase used to be very popular in West Africa. Even now, if you search James Hadley Chase on Facebook, dozens of very active groups will pop up, created by us Africans and with thousands of African members. The writer is known for using derogatory words on characters from every non-white race in his novel, is ablist, and the word fat is his favourite word. Why do we love his books? Because 1. We enjoy them. 2. Chinua Achebe did not criticise it. We are merely parrots and few of us have even read The Heart of Darkness.
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