Africa was very indigenous, until the Europeans conquered Africa from its aboriginal. The Europeans believed that the people were an inferior race which is also represented in Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness. The Europeans justified their actions by thinking they were ameliorating the native people. In Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, he stripped the inferior title and gave Africans a chance to represent the real Africa. As a result of this, Europe only knew about Africans from a white man’s perspective, and Achebe changed the way people looked at Africans through a fictional book, that accurately represented life in Africa. Because most African tribes relied on oral tradition to pass down their cultural knowledge, Europeans assumed Africans were unable to read or write; therefore, the white men took advantage of this difference to tell the story of Africa from their perspective only. The white man in this case, Joseph …show more content…
All their meager breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily up-hill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” (Conrad chapter 1). People who were unable to physically visit Africa, could only get a glimpse of the country from texts like these. So, all anyone ever knew about Africans was that they were “violent”, “wild”, “savages”. These inhuman characteristics created the African stereotype in the eyes of the world. The white man convinced their conscious that these Africans were nothing more than an animal, which gave them the ability to steal the land of a whole nation. While the people of Africa only were left with the