Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe's essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Achebe - a highly distinguished Nigerian novelist and university teacher - looked with fresh eyes at a novel that was set in Africa, but in which Africans appear only as onlookers or as indistinguishable "e;savages"e;. Dismissing the prevailing portrayal...