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?

In the quest to appreciate this focus more expansively, Joseph Conrad came in the picture, alongside other soul-searching writers. Having spent time in Africa and in the high seas in the late 1800s, Conrad had witnessed enough human wretchedness. He concluded that something irredeemably wicked ruled the human soul. He explored this theme in The Heart of Darkness and in Lord Jim. He rested his case in Africa as the headquarters of evil – the heart of darkness.

The theme of Black on White is recurrent in Chinua Achebe’s reflections. Achebe said on numerous occasions that he went into writing because of what Europeans had written about Africa. “I was quite certain that I was going into writing, and one thing that set me thinking was Joyce Carey’s novel set in Nigeria, Mr. Johnson, which was praised so much and it’s clear to me that this was a most superficial picture,” he told Nkosi in 1962.

But perhaps it was Conrad, more than any other writer, who upset Achebe most. Conrad has been hailed as “a humanist who was opposed to the excesses of European greed and inhumanity in Africa.” European exegetes state that he has been misunderstood and misrepresented. That the darkness he talks about pertains to the White man’s inhumanity to the Black man. He is like the benevolent European journalist in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, who discloses to the world the atrocious plunder in the Congo by European self-seekers. Nonetheless, his outrageously racist thrust is unmistakable. A respected White man who has lived in Africa for a while “goes native” in Africa. Other Europeans consider him worse than the natives. His alienation from the Western world drives him to insanity that only Africa could throw someone into. Africa makes people mad, by the sheer fact of them being in Africa.

In Heart of Darkness an African tribe adopts a European and makes him a chief. He wallows in blood, human sacrifice and in horrific rites. He becomes a cannibal, like his hosts. Heart of Darkness may indeed be partly about Europe’s dark heart’s excesses in Africa. But it certainly is [also], and more profoundly so, about the perceived darkness of Africa; a darkness that can turn a good White man into a blood drinking savage. Such is Mr. Kurtz.

Yes, Conrad is the great writer who tells stories within stories in slim volumes such as Heart of Darkness. A master of description and casting of canvases. He even defends the Black man against Europeans. Yet, it does not escape the discerning mind that his love for Africa is dangerous, like that of Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. Blixen loves her cook the same way she loves her dog. When you have understood him, you will find that he fights for the African the way animal rights activists fight for dogs’ rights. Is this possibly why Achebe says, “I used to like Conrad? Why “used to”?

Such is the troubled relationship that has informed the intercourse between Africa and Europe. In this day and age when Africa seems to be consciously running away from the Western lands of the setting sun to the Eastern lands of the rising sun, the questions of quality of partnership between Africa and the outside world may need to come back into literary debates and scholarly debates generally.

Eventually it is a search for meaning. What meaning do we construct from these relationships? Achebe was fond of reminding us of a British colonial governor who once said in Rhodesia that the only partnership possible between Europe and Africa was the partnership of the horse and its rider. The African was the horse and the European the rider.

But what has the relationship between Africa and Europe been in the pages of world history? Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s White on Black: Images of Blacks in Western Popular Culture is certainly one of the most comprehensive efforts to explore the changing fortunes of this relationship. The earliest representations of Africa from about 2500 BC trace us back to ancient Egypt. They paint a portrait of integration and intermarriage between Africa and Europe. Black beauty is celebrated. Black is positively valued as the colour of Egyptian culture and of fertility. After 2200 BC, Blacks decline from a mysterious loved people, to a liked warrior people.

They were then at war with the Nubian kingdoms in the south – Kush and Meroe. Subsequently, the identity of both Egypt and Blacks is distorted. They no longer seem to belong together – Egypt and blackness. When Egypt conquers Kush, Blacks are depicted as defeated enemies. There is reversal again to a positive image when Kush conquers Egypt (800 – 300 BC). Blacks become pharaohs. Yet elsewhere in Libya, at this time, the great historian Herodotus only saw blacks as wild beasts.

The story of the conquest of the African civilization of Carthage and its integration into Europe is a tale for another day. The Christian era, however, reintroduces black as the colour of sin and darkness. Origen of Alexandria introduced the allegory of spiritual light against Egyptian darkness. Finally, there is the interesting story of Europe under Islamic siege in the late Medieval Age and the search for the liberating legendary Prester John, who was believed to live somewhere in Ethiopia, and Europe’s tenderness towards Africa.

The search for meaning in this complex web of race relationships where matrices of value take on metaphors of light, darkness, whiteness and people’s skins and souls is not about to go away. Writers who attempt to find meaning in this labyrinth are great, each in his or her own way and in their own space. Tolstoy, for instance, discovers a completely different kind of meaning of life and greatness from the thoughts of Jean Jacques Rousseau and in his own brand of Christianity, which he even tries to impose upon those around him. Time and space allowing, we will possibly address this – someday.