Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe

Abstract

Several critics of African literature have pointed out that one of the major reasons Chinua Achebe was inspired to become a writer was his desire to counter the demeaning image of Africa that was portrayed in the English tradition of the novel.' What is yet to be done is a systematic analysis of the manner in which Achebe's portrait of Africa and the Africans differs from those painted by the European novelists. The aim of this article is to make a point-by-point comparison of the African image in Chinua Achebe's work with the image of the continent that is discernible in the work of Joseph Conrad. Conrad has been chosen as a case study because Heart of Darkness was one of the novels that helped to perpetuate the offensive image of Africa. For the purposes of this study, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1969 edition) will be compared with Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1982 edition) not only because each of them is set in nineteenth-century Africa, but because both of them explore the meaning of the European colonization of the continent. We shall begin with Conrad's Heart of Darkness.