Images of Africa in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart Essay

stoves of Africa in Heart of twilight(prenominal)ness and Things Fall isolated Joseph Conrads novel Heart of Darkness portrays an image of Africa that is dark and inhuman. Not only does he describe the actual, physical continent of Africa as so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness (Conrad 94), as though the continent could neither breed nor support whatsoever true human life, but he also manages to depict Africans as though they are not worth(predicate) of the respect commonly due to the white man. At matchless express the main character, Marlow, describes one of the paths he follows Cant say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement (48). Conrads description of Africa and Africans served to misinform the westward world, and went uncontested for some(prenomina l) years. In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his first and most astray acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart. This work-commonly acknowledged as the single most well cognize African novel in the world-depicts an image of Africa that humanizes both the continent and the people. Achebe at once said, Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of discretion comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story (Gikandi 8-9) Achebe openly admits that he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrible characterization of Africans in many European works, especially Heart of Darkness. In many ways, Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric depi... ...t of Darkness. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism. 3rd ed. Ed. R obert Kimbrough. New York W.W. Norton, 1988. 251-262. ---. Things Fall Apart. Greenwich Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959. Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. capital of the United Kingdom Penguin Books, 1989. Doctrines on Colonialism. The Government of Tibet in Exile. 3 May 2000. http//www.tibet.com/Humanrights/Unpo/chap2.html. Gikandi, Simon. Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature. Classics in Context Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe. Portsmouth Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996