Denounce Heart Of Darkness Analysis

2. Comparison of Purpose

2.1. Achebe: To Denounce Heart of Darkness

Chinua Achebe is considered as the man who redefined our way of reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Indeed, while focusing on the description of Africa and its people, the Nigerian writer laid serious charges against it for its racist stereotypes and highlighted the colonizer’s oppression on the natives. In truth, even after thirty-four years of his first delivered public lecture “An image of Africa”, excoriating the book, he spoke again against it in an interview with Robert Siegel where it seems that, for him, the novella is the product of “a seductive writer and who could pull his reader into the fray.” Thus, he wanted to disclose the truth about its hidden intentions so that the reader would not be fooled by its tricky writing style.

In fact, he wanted to convey the message that Heart of Darkness is a book full of racial discrimination, reducing the image of Africa to “one of the dark places of the earth.” Even more important, despite its status as the canon of Western literature, Achebe discredited it and insisted on that fact that it should not be considered like a great innocuous book as he commented, “a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot." Actually, He gave a great attention to it because, for him, storytelling is not just mere string of words without any repercussion but it