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Ignorance In Chinua Achebe's An Image Of Africa

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INTRODUCTION

THE PHYSICAL/LITERAL ASPECTS OF HEART OF DARKNESS (Amanda Bayi)

The book offers a harsh picture of colonial enterprise. Darkness in this novel is regarded also as madness as Kurtz is mentally unstable because he is not close to his zone of reason and moral compass.

Marlow encounters scenes of torture, near-slavery and cruelty as he was traveling from the Outer Station to the Central Station and up the river to the Inner Station. He sees his helmsman as a piece of machine, since the Africans in this book are considered as objects. Marlow gains a lot of information by over hearing other people’s conversations and also by watching the world around him and seeing what is happening. An example is when he was having a conversation with the brick maker, and by him doing that he …show more content…

The Europeans ignorant ideals of what Africa is and how the people of Africa are. Their ignorant thinking of Africans supposed barbarism and savagery, their superiority complex that lead them into thinking that they would be better suited to rule over these unruly, undeserving and unequipped to handle the rich resources that Africa had to offer.
This ignorant mind set is ever so present in Kurtz. This point is made ever so clear in Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Hear of Darkness”. In it Achebe points out:
“Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much of Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness … that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilising mission of Africa.”
In this statement Achebe’s is referring to Kurtz. Kurtz like all other Europeans believed that he came to Africa to civilize the African people. However what Kurtz didn’t know was that he too would become just as uncivilised as he thought the African people were. Essentially ‘’Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of Mr Kurtz (Achebe;

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