Abstract
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. This motto from Pliny’s Natural History may be taken to mark the beginning of what, following the example of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’, Christopher L. Miller calls the ‘Africanist’ discourse of Europe. The word Africa, as Miller reminds us, was itself a European invention, acquired by the Romans from the Carthaginians, among whom it seems to have been merely an insignificant local place-name.1 With hindsight we can find a latent apocalypticism in the progression from Carthaginian place-name to the signifier of a Roman military triumph (Scipio Africanus) and then to Pliny’s proverb. It was not until 1899, however, that Conrad’s anthropological horror-comic brought into focus the apocalyptic geography inherent in the European idea of Africa. For our present purposes we might venture a rough translation of Ex Africa semper aliquid novi as, ‘There is always something new to be said about Heart of Darkness’ — or so it seems, since Heart of Darkness is by far the most over-interpreted literary text of the last hundred years.
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