Adebowale Oriku

In a literary forum a few years ago, I chose to disagree with Chinua Achebe’s thesis that Joseph Conrad was inherently racist because of the way he depicted Africans in his books, especially Heart of Darkness. My argument was simple. Conrad was not Achebe’s contemporary, the Pole-turned-Englishman died in fairly old age six years before Achebe was born. Although he lived his latter life in the first quarter of the 20th century, Conrad was essentially a 19th century man, he lived in a time when the white man (man used pointedly) saw himself as the summum bonum incarnate, the ne plus ultra of humanity, the supreme ubermensch.

Conrad’s English compatriot, Rudyard Kipling, was to apotheosise white man’s omnipotence with the phrase White Man’s Burden. For an empire man who was born in India, it took America’s appropriation of the Philippines in 1898 for Kipling to coin this crucial slogan. Truly, the way Conrad portrays Africans in Heart of Darkness is not pleasant.

Since the Portuguese docked on the coast of Africa in the 15th century, Africans - and the Black race generally - had lent themselves to Western writers’ imagination in a rather repellent way. Caricature was the least of the devices deployed by European writers to paint Africans. Some of the more exotic diversions of the 19th century leisured class in Europe were cartoons depicting Africans in a garish, kinked and kooky, light.

By the time Conrad swaggered his way onto the scene with his magniloquent prose style, Africans had long become fair game, or ‘cockshy’ as it might be described then. Heart of Darkness is peopled by gross, grinning and gibbering African people - although sometimes dressed up, fancifully, in that condescending garb of simpleminded, genuflective and primeval one-dimensionality. The phrase ‘the missing link’ was all the rage then and for writers like Conrad, in Africans they had discovered the link in the overinterpreted Darwinian chain of being.

Few Africans would read Heart of Darkness with a smile of gratification. Even though the book was published more than a century ago, it might still nibble at your sense of selfhood that some readers outside of Africa might be wondering - possibly subconsciously - at the degrees of separation between you and the schleppy African characters. Ultimately, you’d see it does not matter anyway, you might as well rage against Shakespeare for making Othello the tragic flubber he is. Oh, no, Conrad was no Shakespeare, but then I am talking about literary timelining here. Conrad is as cavalier to women as he is to Africans in Heart of Darkness.

Beyond characterisation, Conrad had made Africa out not just as the heart of darkness but also the deep and dark terrestrial sea where the best of white men might meet their brutal and often fatal shipwreck. Just like Kurtz, Conrad’s antihero. Through the tortuous ambience of the Congo River, Kurtz travels on a mercantile road to perdition, accompanied only by black dogsbodies and their creepier doppelgangers.

One of the points of my argument against Achebe’s indignation was that he overlooks Conrad’s allegorical representation of Kurtz’s hard ‘white’ head as the seat of European avarice and hubris. By the time Achebe’s Things Fall Apart came out in 1958, few writers would put pen to paper to write about Africa and Africans in the way Conrad did. Of course writers like Joyce Carey and Elspeth Huxley would think nothing of patronizing Africans in their works, they would not go as far as Conrad in begrudging Africans of simple humanity, this was an era when Africans - thanks to Dylan Thomas - took on the bloom of ‘junior brothers’ to the white man.

Even today, in spite of the crumbs of racism that are still making earthly rounds, it would smack of lazy anachronism to hold forth about how racist Joseph Conrad was. It is just pointless, just as it was pretty much superfluous at the time Achebe wrote his critique. Conrad and his writings are only a purple passage of a curious chapter in global literary history. And one must not forget that Heart of Darkness was topical and somewhat essayistically daring at the time it came out.

Whether we accept it or not, even long before we began to win independence, we Africans had been found ourselves in a tough position of being on the defensive. More than any other race, identity arrogation, racial relatedness and reconstructive self-unmasking reach to the core of our existence. We need to debunk writers like Conrad, disabuse millions of the Watsonian school of thought, we need tell them that Africa is a sweet place and that Africans are not the bizarre ‘Other,’ that mathematically speaking we are part of the essential human integral. We want our civility and cultural maturity to be taken for granted like that of any other people.

Even as the struggle for independence commenced, Leopold Senghor’s Negritude sought to din the fact of black beauty, grace, artistry and ‘emotionalism’ into the ears of whoever cared to listen. And there was hope too that with independence, we would have come of age, there was the belief that the wind of change blowing across the continent would usher in sunshine and splendour.

Now there is no need even to begin a recital of what has befallen the continent since its countries got independence. I would suggest to anyone who really wants to read an indepth of the history of Africa in the last fifty years to try Martin Meredith’s book, Fate of Africa. In a language far less colourful and far more affecting than Conrad’s quaint period tales, Meredith opens up a gloomy, though eminently truthful, apercu on the continent, broaching as no one has ever done before the plodding shiftlessness of a continent whose seeming motion does not translate into movement.

I still read Conrad once in a while, but recently a confluence of things has put me squarely in the mind of the author. The war and savagery perpetrated in eastern Congo by the self-styled General Nkunda and others has almost become typical of not just that region but a good chunk of African continent, and we must not forget that the current crisis in the Congo is one of the several corollaries of the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

It’s easy to blame the piratical late 19th century King Leopold of Belgium for most of the problems of Congo today, but it’s also fascinating to see how difficult it has been for the vast country to wish away the subliminal ‘heart of darkness’ tag. Now Mobutu Sese Seko may be lying, like a dead rat, at the bottom of the dustbin of Africa’s tainted post-independence history, but he is a mummified late rat, he remains one of the more verminous of African ‘strongmen’ of the 1970s. He brutalised and impoverished his people far more than King Leopold ever did.

One of the cultural exports of Congo to fellow African countries like Nigeria is the phenomenon of ‘child witches.’ There is a notion that you can judge a people by the way they treat their animals, especially pet animals. Has anyone ever wondered why some Africans sneer at the love and affection, even a certain amount of respect, some white people lavish on dogs, cats, guinea pigs and even pet rats.

Would those who call their children witches, disown them, turn them into waifs and strays, hammer nails into their heads, scorch their skins with fire, not laugh in your face if you told them that animals have rights of sorts in England?

That person who called himself Bishop Sunday Ulup-Aya - does he not suggest to you a monstrous, deluded psychopath of the weirdest type (being in robes and all that)? And the podgy man wielding his machete, threatening to kill the little ‘witch’ girl - I could only shake my head at the depths of the man’s cheerless vacuity, he is like an Achebe character gone plain bonkers, a celluloid Okonkwo pepped up with speed. And Nigeria’s JK Rowling herself, Mrs Akpabio - the few snippets of her book that I read are far more iniquitous than the worst passages of the medieval Malleus Maleficarum, the ‘witchhunter’s bible’ of the then Christian world.

Now Akwa Ibom State aside, the whole of Nigeria is one vast ethical badlands. For the most part and for most people, life is Hobbesian anyway - life is poor, nasty, brutish and short. That is why the so-called government and its agencies can do nothing about the situation in Akwa Ibom state. Such monstrosities are not unwholesome fare for the maggoty psyches of our ‘leaders,’ and indeed some of the led - the ‘leaders’ fatten themselves while the led subsist on cancers such as these.

One of the most poignant images of the documentary of the ‘child witches’ was when Gary Foxcroft, the British charity worker, sat at the side of a dusty road, worn with care, exasperated by the bloody-mindedness of it all. You could see that for him the problem was as much what was being done to the children as the casual, dense righteousness of the offending adults. There, with the best will in the world, sat a white man with a devil of a burden. No, that isn’t a sight for sore eyes. It’s way too allusive to be ignored.

I don’t know how Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe’s ghostly foe, would have reacted if he could watch the documentary. He might just as well have muttered the last words Kurtz whispers before he dies in Heart of Darkness: "The horror! The horror!"

Robot  # 1 | 08.12.2008 04:38

Adebowale Oriku In a literary forum a few years ago, I chose to disagree with Chinua Achebe’s thesis that Joseph Conrad was inherently racist because of the way he depicted Africans in his books, especially Heart of Darkness. My argument was simple. Conrad was not Achebe’s contemporary, the Pole-turned-Englishman died in fairly old age six years before Achebe was born. Although he lived his latter life in the first quarter of the 20th century, Conrad was essentially a 19th century man, he lived in a time when the white man (man used pointedly) saw himself as the summum bonum incarnate, the ne plus ultra of humanity, the supreme ubermensch. Conrad’s English compatriot, Rudyard Kipling, was to apotheosise white man’s omnipotence with the phrase White Man’s Burden. For an empire man who was born in India, it took America’s appropriation of the Philippines in 1898 for Kipling to coin this crucial ...Read the full article.

UDEMEAKPAN  # 2 | 16.12.2008 05:49

Bravo! An excellent read, though I surmise that the essence of your submission has to be the pogrom on those children in the repulsive child-witch saga. A major part of this write-up was unnecessarily wasted on the vituperations of Joseph Conrad and his ilk. The thrust of your argument, now appeared as an afterthought. This is reasoned treatise all the same.