Heart Of Darkness Dehumanized Analysis

Donald Trump, president of the United States of America, recently asked a the crude question, "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come [to America]?" It was written the BBC article, “Trump 'in crude Oval Office outburst about migrants'”, that the countries he was referring to were “Haiti, El Salvador and African countries” (Trump, 2018) While Trump’s statement is bold, it reflects the popular opinion that Westerners have had of Africa for centuries—that Africans are inferior to Westerners. In addition, calling Africa a “shithole” is not far from the truth; the continent has been ravaged by Europeans since the 15th century, leaving it in a state of disarray. Africa needs to be saved from foreign powers that have dehumanized

Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, observed Africans saying, “they were nothing earthly now,” (Conrad, 1899) that Africans could not be called human or animal because of how starved and disease ridden they were. In addition, Conrad used the term “savages” (Conrad, 1899), a word that means animal-like, primitive, and ferocious, to describe Africans; thus, presenting Africans as frightening beasts to his European readers. Similarly, European made maps of Africa throughout history illustrated Africans as barbarians. One of the most popular early maps of Africa was created by Dutch cartographer Willem Blaeu in 1644, and contained images of Africans on edges of the map (Delaney, 2007). Those drawings showed solid black men and women against a white background, wearing little to no clothing . The artist exaggerated the blackness of African skin to make Africans seem even more distant from those with white skin. With the lack of clothing illustrated on the map, Africans were made to seem highly sexual and uncivilized (Delaney, 2007). A German-made map from 1710 contains drawings of Africans riding crocodiles, and laying amongst elephants and tigers—making it look like Africans live with and like wild animals (Delaney, 2007). However, Africans did not lack clothes,

Beginning in the 16th century, not long after Africanus’ publication and the publication of the early maps of Africa, the transatlantic slave trade enslaved “between 10 million and 12 million” Africans (Lewis, 2018). The book King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild tells of European exploration of Africa and the horrors it caused. Within the prologue of Hochschild’s book there are letters that the king of the Kingdom of Kongo—later known as the Congo Free State—wrote to the invading Portuguese, begging them to stop capturing the people of the Kongo (Hochschild, 1998a). Europeans justified the capturing of 12 million people because according to European text, Africans were not as civilized, not as clean, not as religious, not as ordered as Europeans. When, in reality, the uncivilized ones are the Europeans, slaughtering 10 million people, and enslaving 20