Is Africa the heart of darkness?

People walk past a burning barricade during a nationwide protest against long-serving President Joseph Kabila, in Goma, on May 26, 2016. Photo: Courtesy

I discovered Joseph Conrad in my ‘A’ Level literature class, a generation ago. At the core of our focus was the quest to understand what drives the human soul. What sits at the heart of the human soul? We were grappling with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Golding was preoccupied with the bestiality that seems to rule the human soul. He was overwhelmed with man’s inhumanity to man.

In a surrealistic moment in which one of his more saintly characters falls into a trance in Lord of the Flies, he tells us that things don’t work “because of the darkness of man’s heart.” Man seems to be fundamentally and naturally drawn towards doing evil things. On this account, man is totally incapable of doing anything good. But if man is so wicked, is Africa the heart of wickedness?