Re-reading Joseph Conrad
Conrad’s Africa is eerie and foreboding, an omen, and as the narrator voyages along the Congo. He declares: “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”
JOSEPH Conrad’s travelogue, “Heart of Darkness”, is a novella that inevitably attracts fiery responses from African readers because the representation of Africa in this novella deprives it of humanity, agency and history. When the late Chinua Achebe read “Heart of Darkness”, he declared, and not erroneously, that Conrad was “a bloody racist”.
“Things Fall Apart”,’ one of the best novels to ever come of Africa, was a product of Achebe’s disapproval of this representation of Africa.
“Heart of Darkness” extends the Hegelian trope of an Africa that has no history.
According to Hegel, the only history of Africa is the history of the white man in Africa; before that, it’s just darkness.
Not having history means not making history. History is a product of human agency to cause something to happen. Hegel’s search into Africa’s past revealed that this agency did not exist.
There was no language to talk about. There was not intellectual and artistic production to talk about, just foggy darkness rolling back into an African past.
This lack of history, of agency, made the African, in the eyes of Hegel, a child, a half- child half- devil who needed to be saved from this ignoble state of existence. Remember Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”?
The implication is that the colonisers of Africa were fulfilling a divine assignment, “To wait in heavy harness/On fluttered folk and wild-/ Your new-caught sullen peoples,/ Half devil and half child.”
If this cannot attract critical fervour, then I don’t know what will.
Conrad’s Africa is eerie and foreboding, an omen, and as the narrator voyages along the Congo. He declares: “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”
Throughout t he narrative, t he reader is made aware that this is a dangerous expedition. The parodies of humanity that the narrator meets, whose form of communication are unintelligible shrieks and animalistic body movements (and, of course, the frightening drum!), are wont to excite fear and sympathy.
They just look like a collection of limbs that have been given enough motion to move from point A to point B. Their cannibalistic tendencies excite horror.
One of the most memorable passages in “Heart of Darkness” (memorable for its racism) reads: “It was unearthly, and the men were - No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - the suspicion of their not being inhuman.
“It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
“Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you - you so remote from the night of first stages - could comprehend.”
Do you see how he speaks of the “night of first stages” which the African was still trapped in in the game of human evolution?
This explains why this book made me angry for weeks when I read it during my first year of university.
After many years of Conrad-bashing and fervent criticism of “Heart of Darkness”, I became a little bit tired of this routine. I was not alone.
Sheunesu Mandizvidza was tired too. Bashing someone for a decade is no mean feat. Leaves the limbs of your mind broken. So when we wrote the paper, “Re-reading Conrad”, published in “Africa’s Intangible Heritage” and “Land: Emerging Perspectives” (a 2016 publication edited by Ruby Magosvongwe, Obert Mlambo and Even though Ndlovu), we were merely looking for some respite.
And we found that relief in re-reading Conrad, in conjuring a different interpretation in what is undoubtedly a racist text.
In order to avoid a critical backlash (especially in a nation where you are either this or that . . . no grey areas), we started by acknowledging that Conrad is indeed a racist and no amount of intellectual laundering can justify his despicable representation of black people.
However, there was need for further reading beyond the apparent racism of the text. The reading that we suggested focused on Kurtz.
What if we use Kurtz, the white man, as an example of the kind of human being we do not want to be? What if we forget Conrad’s racism for a while and learn something from this “mad” white man?
“Vamwe vakaudzwa hondo nemurwere wepfungwa”, remember that one? So we decided to find out what it is that we can learn from “Heart of Darkness”
We started from these three statements: 1. “He struggled with himself, too.
“I saw it - I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”
2. “The mind of man is capable of anything.”
3. “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”
The most common implication that runs in these statements is that Kurtz epitomised the “heart of darkness”. Why?
Because he had abdicated the very things that made him human and chose, instead, to be answerable to himself.
What makes us human are the people around us. Our accountability to them is what provides checks and balances to our actions.
In an Africa in which Kurtz was not answerable to black people (they were not human after all), his soul became a “heart of darkness”.
That barber, t hat baker, t hat butcher, that neighbour … we need them around us, because without them we become accountable to ourselves. Africa needs this.
Africa needs people who are accountable to their fellow human beings. Kurtz is a warning, a warning that when you are “hollow at the core”, devoid of the sensibilities that drive humanity, you can become an animal and jeopardise the future of your community, your nation or your continent.