Heart of Darkness

Marlow takes a steamer up the Congo to retrieve a company agent named Kurtz who has stopped filing reports and started being worshipped. Conrad had commanded a river steamer in Leopold II’s Congo Free State in 1890, and the novella has been read for a century as an indictment of the imperial enterprise — the “civilising mission” as a cover for extraction.

It is also genuinely contested, and on one specific ground: Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa” argued that the book uses Africa as a backdrop and Africans as scenery, and called Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist.” That argument has never been settled, and Things Fall Apart is on the same list.

Context: Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish-born British novelist who wrote in English as his third language after roughly twenty years at sea. Heart of Darkness draws directly on his 1890 command on the Congo River.

Connections

• Joseph Conrad — the author.
• Chinua Achebe — his most consequential critic.
• Things Fall Apart — the counter-text, also on this list.
• Africa
• Literature