Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility, there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain.
How is examining an author’s word choice helpful when comparing two texts?
Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe.In the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. "Oh well," I heard him say finally, behind me: "I guess I have to take your course to find out."A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who—bless their teacher—had just read Things Fall Apart. One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe.
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What factors likely influenced Achebe’s perspective on Heart of Darkness? Select two options.
Read the excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about "distant kinship" as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad.
Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Achebe directly quotes Conrad’s descriptions of a Congolese woman and a European woman, respectively.Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent. . . . She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. . . .She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning . . . She took both my hands in hers and murmured, "I had heard you were coming.". . . She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.
Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe.The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken. It was a wide-ranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenomenon in Malaysia and so on. And all this while the article speaks unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this:In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language.I believe that the introduction of "dialects," which is technically erroneous in the context, is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this is quite comparable to Conrad's withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them dialects!
Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults. In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad's purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouths, Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death by the "insolent black head in the doorway," what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and "taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land" than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?
Which evidence best explains Achebe’s rebuttal to the counterclaim that Conrad knew Africa because he had traveled there in 1890?
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