Is Conrad Racist?

Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad about a voyage up the Congo River. Conrad uses the main character of Marlow in order to recount his trip. In Heart Of Darkness, Conrad talks about the British imperialism where he describes the way the natives were treated in their land, as well as how the colonial expansion in Africa led to the spread of racism. Many readers believe that Conrad is a realist because his novel showed the real aims of imperialism which claim that colonialism came to civilize Africans. However, others classify Conrad as a racist because of his ugly description of the black Africans and his support to colonial policies against the natives in Africa. So, the question here is whether Conrad was racist in his novella or not.

In the article, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Chinua Achebe describes the novella, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, as being racist. Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa another world that is the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization. According to Achebe, it is not the differences that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship or of common ancestry to the native Africans.

Achebe accounts for Conrad's racism against black Africans because of his personal history. For instance, his text states that "there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing: A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my [Conrad's] conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards." Conrad's own experiences and perceptions with black people could therefore have seeped into the way in which he conveys this race within his own writing. For this reason, Achebe sees Heart of Darkness as a racist text, one "which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. [He is] talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called into question." However, Achebe partly does save the reputation of Conrad when he concedes that "Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination...Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth." This is because his novella novel continues to perpetuate the damaging stereotypes of black people.

Although Achebe makes many valid points, I do not believe that Joseph Conrad intended to make Heart of Darkness a racist work. I think that the racism found in the novella is based on the reader's own interpretation of civilization, savagery, and morality. Contrary to promoting racism, the novella promotes the essence of humanity, in that all human beings contain their very own heart of darkness. Conrad was attempting to exemplify the cruelty of the European imperialists by using Marlow’s perception of his African surroundings. Nonetheless, since Heart of Darkness remains Conrad's key piece of literary work, this debate is ongoing. Since the story of Marlow corresponds so neatly with Conrad’s own biography, it is easy to assume among others that Marlow reflects Conrad’ own perspective and prejudice beliefs.