Research Paper Draft 1

Achebe’s and Conrad’s View of Africa and Africans

                                                By: Brittany Brinegar

Achebe and Conrad have two completely different views on Africa and Africans. Achebe believes that Africans are people who have morals and are more civilized than most. However, Conrad is the complete opposite he believes Africans to be people who have no morals and behave more barbaric than most.

Achebe presents his view through Okonkwo, a leader in his African tribe who lives his life based on how much of a man he his. Then there is Conrad who shows Africa through Marlow, a European sailor traveling up the Congo River. It is because of these differing ways of looking at the world that the depictions of Africa vary in the two novels.

The people are described, not by their movements or skin color, but as having feelings and thoughts” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart)

In contrast Conrad says, “It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the whites of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks.”  Conrad’s views that the African characters do not speak, and his depictions of them only focus on the color of their skin.

To Achebe, Conrad’s descriptions made him racist, an opinion he describes in detail throughout his critique of Heart of Darkness, “that namely that Joseph Conrad is a thoroughgoing racist”. (Achebe, “An Image of Africa”). Achebe believed that Conrad made people believe that Africa was a dark place with no civilization. He also believed that Conrad did not give a voice to the African’s, making them seem like heathens. Conrad on the other hand believed he was saying worse about the Europeans than the Africans and felt pity toward the Africans.

During Conrad’s travels, he actually went up the Congo River, much like the character Marlow, and was profoundly affected by this journey. Thus the book Heart of Darkness came to be. While Achebe says, what is happening in Africa today is a result of what has been going on for 400 or 500 years, from the “discovery” of Africa by Europe. Knowing what the Europeans had done in his homeland had a huge influence on his book Things Fall Apart.

Achebe viewed Africa and it’s people through the eyes of an African, one of them. He had grown up among these people, and had an understanding of their culture. In the book when Okonkwo is banished for Umofia, his feelings are described as, “He is an exile, condemned for seven years to live in a strange land. And so he is bowed with grief” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart).  This depicts an African as having the ability to feel grief and pain, this would not happen with the Africans in Conrad’s novel. Achebe was able describe the feelings of another African. Conrad on the other hand was a European, and he saw things in a European’s way. The entire reason for Europeans traveling to Africa was to conquer the people and to change them they couldn’t accept Africa’s way of life.

Throughout this whole ordeal neither Conrad nor Achebe could see the point the other was trying to make, because they never truly understood the point the other was trying to make.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1994. Print.

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Sickels, Amy. "Salem Press." Salem Press. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. <http://salempress.com/Store/samples/critical_insights/things_fall_reception.htm>.

Spencer, Lisa. "Things Falling Apart at the Heart of Darkness." Lisa Spencer on HubPages. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. <http://lisa-spencer.hubpages.com/hub/Back-and-Forth-into-Darkness>.

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