Colonialism and Beyond in Chinua Achebe's An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, No Longer at Ease, Things Fall Apart, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Emmanuel Nelson's Chinua Achebe, Postcolonial African Writers, Willene Taylor's A Search for Values in Things Fall Apart, Colin Turnbull's he Lonely African
This course on colonial and post-colonial literature satisfies my cravings for thought and literature that falls outside of the mainstream of the Eurocentric view of things. Achebe, Walcott, Arundhati, and Kincaid etc. the so-called marginalized- third-world writers provide another perspective, another glimpse of reality as they see and experience it. Hopefully this journal will juxtapose colonial and post-colonial perspectives. I'm also interested in the struggle between the 'old' and the 'new' (tradition vs. modernity) and how this represents itself in African culture and African literature.
One of the most well known post-colonial writers is Chinua Achebe. He was born in Ogidi in eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, to Isaiah Okafor Achebe and Janet Achebe. Even though his parents were devout evangelical Protestants, they still managed to instill in him many values of their traditional Igbo culture. "He attended mission schools, but remained emotionally close to many of his relatives who were not Christians. These early negotiations of cultural duality would later enable him to develop a necessary distance from the competing and conflicting forces that shaped his sense of self and formed his worldview" (Parekh 19)- a distance that he now affirms as a prerequisite to see the totality of life "steadily and fully" (Morning Yet on Creation Day, 68).
In 1944 Achebe enrolled in the Government College in Umuahia and four years later, he entered the London-affiliated University College at Ibadan. He graduated from Ibadan in 1953 and published his first novel, Things Fall Apart, 1958. It was published reluctantly, because Heinemann editors were uncertain if the West would purchase a novel by an African. But the novel was a stunning success and remains Achebe's most widely read work. Achebe has also published four other novels as well as essays, short fiction, and poetry. He has become one of Africa's most outspoken intellectuals.
Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart is the search for values in a world that is constantly beset by change. It depicts three cycles. In the first cycle Achebe depicts Ibo tribal life before the coming of the British near the end of the nineteenth century. This makes way for the beginning of the twentieth century and the Europeanization of Africa with all of its implied consequences for the issues, challenges, and future of a post-colonial Africa.
Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, is the most opposed to change, he desperately tries to hold onto to the traditional values and practices of his Ibo society. He does so in the midst of an alien European invasion which ultimately results in the disintegration of this traditional African society.
Before writing Things Fall Apart, Achebe had become disturbed by the works of European writers which portrayed Africans as noble savages. "These European writers believed that colonialism was an agent of enlightenment to primitive peoples without a valid value system or civilization of their own" (Taylor 28). "Africa was pictured as the dark continent, inhabited by childlike, superstitious, and fearful people only too ready to welcome, and indeed worship the white man" (Taylor 28).
Achebe was particularly disturbed by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He felt that Conrad painted an inaccurate and demeaning picture of the African people. " You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks" (Conrad 17). " The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us- who could tell?" (Conrad 37), and finally "the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly" (Conrad 38).
It is precisely these kinds of images that feed the whole myth of White superiority. A myth which has lived for centuries; it has quite the enduring quality. I am always amazed at the way in which race, class, and politics are used to marginalize people of color worldwide. It is amazing to me that the term minority is still being used in the twenty-first century. The word itself is a misnomer. People of color are not minorities. In fact, people of color represent the majority of the world's population. It is precisely the continuing effect of Eurocentrism, hegemony, and cultural bias which feeds the construction of the so-called minority.
Furthermore, it is a well established fact, for anyone who cares to know that human life originated in Africa. This has been documented by qualified archaeologists and paleontologists for some time now. Ironically, if Europeans search their family trees back far enough, it will lead to Africa. The oldest civilizations known to man are out of Africa.
It is no wonder that Achebe defends Africa so fervently against what he perceives as Conrad's inaccurate racist assault on Africa. In, An Image of Africa, Achebe points out Conrad's portrayal of Africans as basically speechless "rudimentary souls" (255) of Africa. Achebe identifies the two occasions when "Conrad confers speech on the savages" (255). "Give 'em! to us." "To you, eh?" I asked; "what would you do with them?" "Eat 'im!" he said curtly....
(Heart of Darkness). The first occasion refers to cannibalism, while the other occasion was the announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death. Clearly, both of these instances of speech serve Conrad's subverted vision of the Africans. The question for Achebe is "whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is no. No, it cannot" (An Image of Africa 257).
In spite of Achebe's fairly thorough condemnation of Conrad's motives in Heart of Darkness, the novel itself still remains a testimony to nineteenth century thought. Clearly, the book was written during a portion of the nineteenth century which was the period of colonialism, while Achebe and Things Fall Apart is representative of a post-colonial Africa.
During colonialism, the notion of Victorian virtue remained a component of English and European thought and culture. This Victorian trinity involved the notion of work, duty, and restraint. "Conrad wants both, to endorse the standard Victorian moral positives, and to express his forebodings that the dominant intellectual directions of the nineteenth century were preparing for disaster for the twentieth" (Watt 77). This conflict between the nineteenth and twentieth century is expressed by Conrad through his characterization of Marlow and Kurtz, and the tension or philosophical difference of the two. Conrad once said, "what makes men tragic, is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it..."(Watt 78).
I see Marlow's experience up the river, of the dark continent's Congo, as one which is indicative of an evolutionary process, a progression. While, I view Kurtz's response to this environment in opposite terms- Kurtz experienced a digression. The wilderness unleashed the beast within Kurtz which lay just underneath his prestigious Victorian facade of economic expansion in the name of progress. Kurtz purports to stand for the civilizing of the so called savages through economic progress and of course they will also benefit spiritually by way of the residue of his so-claimed Victorian posture.
I believe Conrad does succeed in effectively exposing the decrepancies between colonial pretence and reality. Keep in mind that during the 1880's and 1890's (the time-frame around Heart of Darkness), it was generally held by many that the Victorian World Order was collapsing. Conrad exposes this whole notion of educational, moral, and religious benefits, when he describes colonialism as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration" (Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth Century Thought).
"She talked about weaning those ignorant millions from there horrid ways,'till, upon my word she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the company was run for profit" (Conrad 16). Here Conrad uses Marlow as his moral compass for what is really going on in Africa. While it becomes clear that Kurtz finds the tiger and ape within himself in Africa; and lets them loose. The frenzied Kurtz allows himself to do everything he wants to and claim the righteousness of God for doing it. Conrad once wrote,"Christianity is the only religion which with its impossible standards has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls - on this earth." Therefore, we have reached a point of convergence that both Conrad (Colonial) and Achebe
(Postcolonial) can agree on. Man shall not be God.
There is life after postcolonialism. What happens after the imperialists are booted out? What happens to the colonized when they gain their independence? These are the kinds of questions that place us between postcolonialism and modernity.
There is a struggle going on in Africa. It is a struggle between the old and the new, between tradition and the hegemonic influences of the West (impact of neocolonialism.) It is a struggle which has resulted in the cultural dislocation and confusion of the African.
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