African Ethnicity Seen Through European Eyes in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness

The purpose of this essay is to identify the ways through which Africa is regarded by the Europeans. In order to succeed, it will be based on Joseph Conrads novella, Heart of Darkness. According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, ethnicity may be interpreted as an ethnic quality or affiliation, as well as a particular ethnic affiliation or group. In the abovementioned novella, the group is represented by the African people. In order to better understand this work, the reader must know what Africa really meant at the time Heart of Darkness appeared. As Brian Spittle states
Heart of Darkness was serialized after the reconquest of Sudan and the final Boer War, with its volume publication occurring just after the bitter and traumatic campaign against the Boers had been concluded. National consciousness of Britains place in Africa was high, and intensified by the knowledge that the country was in competition there with other western European powers. (Spittle 64)

Conrad creates a sort of comparison between the known that is the European white men living in Africa, whom he calls pilgrims and the natives. It is the former, the known, Europeans, who become alien to civilized behavior, while the latter, the unknown element, are accepted on their own terms, within the bounds of their own civilization (Spittler 66). One of Conrads characters who acts as his spokesman tells us that when you realize the dark-skinned people are human beings you see the injustice and cruel folly of what before appeared just and wise (Raskin 121). It is exactly this cruel folly that the pilgrims exhibit by shooting at the Africans at almost every opportunity on the journey up-river, a trait that is prefigured when they are waiting for the essential, because practical, rivets. (Spittle 67) Another contrast is created by Conrad between the white men and the very worst characters the British imagination could encompass: the cannibals. Despite being very hungry (p. 69) they are not rapacious, although their culture may have allowed them to be, and Europeans would have expected it of them (Spittle 68).

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The author is impressed by the things he sees around him as he takes a trip along the African continent. The black people he saw around him were nothing like human beings, they had lost all their characteristics of the human race.
Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair. (Conrad

44). Despite the popular belief that they are dangerous and must be disciplined, usually through the ways of fire, he knows they are not like that. They are stunned by the superiority white people seem to have over them, which makes them submit to the Europeans, but in a desperate way, thinking they are the gods who have come to punish them.
They were dying slowly it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, - nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. (Conrad 44).

Another way to look at the African people is that of the images used by Conrad. According to Brian Spittle,
The image of bones is recurrent one in the novel. The young man to whom Marlow gives a biscuit is described as black bones (Conrad 44), a paradox, since all bones are white, whatever the colour of the skin covering them that focuses attention on the thinness of the maltreated African, who looks like bones without flesh. (Spittle 80)

Clement Abiaziem Okafor states that there is another theme in the novella, that of inhuman treatment the Europeans mete out to the colonized Africans. According to him,
In Heart of Darkness the Europeans the Africans as beasts of burden whose sole value is the physical work they can perform. Consequently the European taskmasters abandon the African labourers to die by the roadside when they are too frail to toil any more on such back-breaking tasks as railroad construction.

(Okafor 19) The idea of the novella, Conrad told to his publisher in 1899, was the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa (Raskin 113). As a consequence, it tries to give a more appropriate image of the African reality, different from that given by the imperialists. People know only what they are told, which is why Joseph Conrads work [] remains profoundly true there is no exaggeration in his picture; it is cruelly exact (Raskin 114).

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WORKS CITED
1. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995

2. Okafor, Clement Abiaziem. "Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe: Two Antipodal Portraits of Africa." Journal of Black Studies 19 (1988): 17-28.

3. Raskin, Jonah. "Imperialism: Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1967): 113-31.

4. Spittles, Brian. Joseph Conrad. Text and Context. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992

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