Heart of Darkness and the Achebe Question

We have read Conrad’s novella as an indictment of empire. But no account of Heart of Darkness is honest that ignores the most famous attack ever made on it — the charge, by the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, that Conrad was ‘a bloody racist,’ and the book a work that dehumanizes the Africans it claims to pity.

Achebe’s case is serious and, in part, undeniable. Conrad’s Africans are rarely allowed to speak; they are a backdrop of shadows and drums against which white men have their crises of conscience. The horror of the Congo is felt chiefly as damage to European souls. A book that condemns imperialism can still be written from imperialism’s point of view — and this one, at moments, plainly is.

And yet the novella survives the charge without being cleared by it. That is the mark of a genuine classic: it is powerful enough to be indicted and to remain worth reading, precisely because the argument it provokes is one we still need to have. To read Heart of Darkness now is to read it with Achebe — the book and its greatest critic locked together, illuminating each other.

Read it, and read against it. That is what the classics are for.

Read Heart of Darkness — the Erato Press edition →