An Image of Africa

As a work of colonial literature, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is inextricable from West African postcolonial discourse. However, like other postcolonial authors, Chinua Achebe seeks to decentralize Conrad’s—and by extension Europe’s—perspective and advance the perspective of the (formerly) colonized people who form a mere backdrop to what is largely a European drama. Postcolonial theory originally emerged in the wake of the dismantling of the European colonial empires; it acted as a response to colonial discourse that dehumanized, denigrated, and excluded the perspectives of colonized people around the world. This postcolonial lens highlights how Achebe’s essay responds to historical realities of European imperialism and its lingering cultural impacts. 

During Conrad’s era, Africa was viewed through an imperial gaze as a “dark continent” devoid of history or humanity. For example, what attracted the narrator and protagonist of Heart of Darkness, Marlow, to travel to the Congo was seeing the region depicted as a blank space on an atlas in his youth. Because the region has not yet been “discovered” (from a European perspective), it is treated as a primordial, savage region, lacking in culture. This view of Africa is not only damaging; it is fundamentally dehumanizing. This dehumanization is part and parcel of the colonial project: It is easier to subjugate and exploit people who are viewed as less than human. 

In response to this phenomenon, the postcolonial context in “An Image of Africa” emphasizes the essay’s dual purpose; not only does it critique Conrad’s narrative, but it also challenges the Western literary canon’s reflexive marginalization of African voices. Re-examining canonical texts is essential to postcolonial efforts to question whose stories are told, how they are told, and by whom. Achebe seeks to reclaim African subjectivity and assert a need for authentic African representation—a need addressed by his own novels as well as those from other postcolonial authors.