Colonialism, There Are Seemingly Countless

¶ … colonialism, there are seemingly countless examples of the inherent dehumanizing racism that drove the policies and actions of those who were at the heart of the movement. Recent scholarship makes it clear that the tides of pot-colonial studies are leaning in the direction of redefining the racism of colonialism to its purest state, that of simple and clear racism, driven by greed. The recent works take the context out of the movement and make it clear that the discrimination that was so much a part of the movement is simply racism driven by ignorance.

Many years have been spent softening the blow of the destructive racism of the Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, with the faulty argument that it was contextually appropriate, or in layman's terms his racism was just like everyone else's, so it is somehow excusable. Yet, the truth is that the work represents the pinnacle of time that is desperately racist, and regardless of the collectively racist nature of the time, there is no excuse for the excuses and destruction that was had because of it. It would be much like saying the Nazi's weren't purely racist because anti-Semitism existed in Europe for centuries prior to WWII.

The outline of the work is demonstrative of the destructive and dehumanizing position that African men and women were placed within during the African colonization. People were enslaved, murdered and even killed through neglectful disease spreading, while they watched their homeland stripped of natural resources, cleanliness and even its very beauty. Though Conrad does in some ways assail the institution of colonialism Chinua Achebe assigns him the role of a simple racist, plain a clear. Creating a line for this argument any reader can see that the ultimate sin committed within the work was the act of one man allowing the jungle to make him "go native."

One of the most controversial issues relating to Heart of Darkness concerns Conrad's attitude toward colonialism and race. Though most critics view the novel as an attack on imperialistic exploitation, other commentators, such as the African novelist Chinua Achebe, see Conrad himself as guilty of racist tendencies.

It goes without saying that the creation of a work of fiction is a process that should allow the writer the opportunity to express things he or she both agrees with and disagrees with the language within Heart of Darkness, with regard to the treatment of the native African's clearly relates them as inferior and in many ways inhuman.

Though he admits that the novel criticizes colonial exploitation, Achebe brands Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist" who presents Africa and Africans as intellectually and morally inferior to European civilization. Rather than viewing Conrad as a writer who genuinely challenged imperialistic assumptions about race, Achebe scorns him as a "purveyor of comforting myths."

Conrad details the reality of the existence of the black African's as simply the objects of the colonial arm of exploitative slave labor.

Moreover, Achebe points to the grunting sounds made by natives in Heart of Darkness and to the contrast of Kurtz's barbaric mistress and his refined European Intended as evidence that Conrad did not feel anything more than a remote sense of kinship with the "rudimentary souls" of Africans. He does not venerate the culture or the place.

His words are entirely representative of a shadowy very European quest. In this case the quest is a clear avenue to wealth, and fame.

Achebe grudgingly grants that Marlow's perspective may not be identical to Conrad's, but he finds no sign of an alternative point-of-view in the novel. Thus, he finds Conrad representative of the European liberal attitude that disparaged colonial exploitation but never affirmed the equality of white and black people.

Conrad gives the natives in his work a representation driven by his own ignorance. He does not stop at any point to even ignorantly idealize the culture. He challenges no stereotypes and in fact could be said to simply fulfill them without regard for difference or equality. He may have felt that the Africans did no deserve the treatment they were getting but he never said they deserved to be treated as equals. They were completely foreign to him, and also represented more as emasculated animals than individual humans.

Achebe] Lamenting that Conrad employed Africa primarily as a backdrop for the story of a European who psychologically disintegrated, Achebe condemns Heart of Darkness as a xenophobic text that denies humanity to African people.

It is also clear that Achebe is not the only academic who feels this way about Conrad's work. Not only is it clear that Conrad does not explore the lives or culture of the Natives, he simply expresses their existence as a backdrop to the narrative, which is ultimately his greatest fear, dying from an unknown disease as a morally corrupted white man in Africa.

Ian Watt acknowledges that Conrad "habitually uses the derogatory racial terms which were general in the political and evolutionary thought of his time," but he points out that Conrad's novel does not focus on Africans but on the "empty vanity" and "intolerable hypocrisy" of the colonial agents

Regardless of there redemptive assassination of the emptiness of colonial desires, the lack of humanitarian view of native Africans creates and empty representation of what is being lost in these oft repeated quests through pristine lands for profit. The culture is not examined, and in some ways could be said to be despised by Conrad's treatment of it. The people are not given a human character; they are shadowy ghostlike figures falling into the leafy backdrop of the foreign and fearful world.