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Two Sides of Colonialism: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart vs. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

 We read Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart back-to-back. They're both about colonialism in Africa, but Achebe famously criticized Conrad. Are they actually similar in how they portray African people?

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By Suresh Answered 3 months ago

They are perfect opposites, and that's what makes the comparison so powerful. Conrad's novella shows Africa and its people through the distorted, terrified psyche of a European colonizer they are part of the incomprehensible "horror." Achebe's novel is the direct rebuttal: he portrays the Igbo with full humanity, complex social structures, history, and agency. The similarity is only in the setting the clash with colonialism. But one is a view from the outside, looking in with fear; the other is from the inside, looking out with assertion. Achebe gives voice to what Conrad could only see as a mystery.

By Henry Answered 1 month ago

I've taught this pairing for over a decade, and I've learned to resist reading them as simple antagonists. Conrad, writing in 1899, gives us the colonial unconscious the anxiety, the emptiness, the profound inability to see Africans as fully human. Marlow travels upriver and finds only projections of European darkness. Achebe, writing in 1958 from the other side of independence, performs the recovery of interiority. He grants Okonkwo a full inner life, a cosmology, a tragic dignity. I would recommend approaching them not as correct versus incorrect depictions, but as diagnostic artifacts of two different historical positions: one trapped inside the colonial gaze, the other excavating what that gaze could never perceive.

 

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