Achebe on Conrad

[jbor]

More articles:

http://past.thenation.com/cgi-bin/framizer.cgi?url=http://past.thenation.com
/issue/000710/0710north.shtml

"In the end Achebe is not asking the rest of the world to go to the other
extreme, to revere Africa as a source of superior, tribal wisdom. All he
wants, as he writes in critiquing Conrad, is for the West to start to look
at Africa as "quite simply a continent of people--not angels, but not
rudimentary souls either--just people, often highly gifted people and often
strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society."
[ ... ]
"Chinua Achebe's influence should go on and on, outliving petty African
warlords and small-minded Western writers alike, teaching and reminding that
all humankind is one."


http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/316kunit3/icheartofdarkness.ht
ml

"It is very important in seeing that this is racist. If we do not question
knowlege and preconceived notions in works that every scholar reads, how do
we move forward?"


http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/uk/conrad/conrad1.html

"Achebe accounts for Conrad's racism against black Africans because of his
personal history-- "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.

Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers."


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