An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’

Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa Racism in Conrads nerve center of Darkness Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in He artistic creation of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London W. W Norton and Co. , 1988, pp. 251-261 In the pivot of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fair autumn morning much(prenominal) as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all mastermindions, cosmosy of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm.An grey-headeder man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? Afri endure literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fel commencement who taught the same social function, or whitethornhap it was A fri tin terminate history, in a certain Community College non far from here. It al ways surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had theme of Africa as having that good-hearted of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. Oh well, I heard him say finally, laughingstock me I guess I yield to take your rails to find out. A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who bless their teacher had just read Things Fall Apart . One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe. I propose to perish from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conclusions which at first sight force make up ones mindm somewhat out of proportion to them. But exactly, I hope, at first sight.The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age except I believe overly for much thicker and much stark reasons, is obviously unaware that the feel ing sentence of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is across-the-board of odd customs and superstitions and, same everybody else in his culture, imagines that he needs a mooring to Africa to encounter those things. The other person being fully my own age could non be excused on the grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason but here again I believe that something more pull up stakesful than a mere lack of information was at work.For did non that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African history did non exist? If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire one might indeed say the need in westward psychology to set Africa up as a foil to atomic number 63, as a coiffe of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in resemblance with which Europes own state of spiritual grace lead be manifest.This need is not new which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us thus far ordaining to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the favorable and biological sciences but more simply in the elan of a novelist responding to one famous apply of European fiction Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness , which ruin than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to.Of course there are full-length libraries of agrees devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them instantly. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a variant class permanent literature read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious acad emics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading(a) Conrad scholar has numbered it among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English quarrel. I provide return to this critical purview in due course because it whitethorn ill modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise. Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as the other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of cultivation, a place where mans vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully at the decline of day subsequently ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks. But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and make whoopies no old-age pension. We are told that Going up that r iver was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the realistic testify. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too has been one of the dark places of the earth. It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would conduct the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings. These call downive echoes comprise Conrads famed induction of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness . In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two different sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy.We c an inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition a) it was the stillness of an implacable phalanx brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled on slowly on the edge of a faint and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, level(p) plain mysterious, etc. , etc. The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrads adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery. That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as umpteen Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw for it raises serious capitulums of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their equal is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of roguery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity.But Conrad chose his here and now well one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of soothe myths. The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the indulgence of my reader to quote almost a whole page from about the middle of the stop/when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But perfectly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of bash w alls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and electrostatic foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us who could tell?We were arch off from the comprehension of our surroundings we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be beforehand an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a theatre and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were . No they were not inhuman.Well, yo u know that was the blister of it this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the approximation of their humanity like yours the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would meet to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a essence in it which you you so remote from the night of first ages could comprehend.Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity like yours . Ugly. Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page later, on a specific example, giving us one of his exalted descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen he could fire up a vertical boiler.He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity and he had filed his teeth too, the poor d unrighteous, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three cosmetic scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at to the lowest degree the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance. Fine fellows cannibals in their place, he tells us pointedly. Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe stronghold between the policeman and the baker to like a peek into the heart of darkness.Before the story likes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this nice scant(p) vignette as an example of things in their place Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the washcloth of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, render their bodies streamed with perspiration they had faces like grotesque masks these chaps but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and hue as the surf along their coast.They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. Towards the end of the story Conra d lavishes a whole page quite haply on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent . She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature, for two reasons. First, she is in her place and so can win Conrads special brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning . She took both my hands in hers and murmured, I had heard you were coming. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.The diff erence in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subfile ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the authors bestowal of human expression to the one and the with retentiveness of it from the other. It is intelligibly not part of Conrads purpose to confer language on the rudimentary souls of Africa. In place of speech they made a violent babble of unhandy sounds. They exchanged short grunting phrases even among themselves. But most of the time they were too busy with their frenzy.There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and confers speech, even English speech, on the savages. The first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them Catch im, he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth ensure im. Give im to us. To you, eh? I asked what would you do with them? Eat im he said curtly. . . . The other o ccasion was the famous announcementMistah Kurtz he dead. At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad.In reality they constitute some of his best assaults. In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrads purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the reticent brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr.Kurtzs death by the insolent black head in the doorway what better or more appropriate finis could be pen to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land than the proclamation of his phys ical death by the forces he had fall in? It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrads but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism.Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrads intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.It would not have been beyond Conrads power to make that provision if he had thought it necess ary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrads complete confidence a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their two careers. Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply take aback by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever.Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments as these 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. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the eventual(prenominal) question of equality between white people and black people. That extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a comment which has often been quoted Schweitzer says The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother. And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being. Naturally he became a sensation in Europe and America. Pilgrims flocked, and I believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the prodigious miracle in Lamberene, on the edge of the primeval forest. Conrads liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzers, though. He would not use the word brother however qualified the farthest he would go was kinship.When Marlows African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart he gives his white master one final disquieting look. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt frame to this day in my memory like a involve of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. It is important to note that Conrad, circumspect as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, he thought of their humanity like yours . Ugly. The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness.They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europes civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus bring down Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrads great talents.Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across cover water to bar the way for our return. Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often penetrating and full of insight. But all that has been more than fully discussed in the last cardinal years. His obvious racism has, however, not been addressed. And it is high time it was Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were a rriving among my own people in Nigeria.It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrads attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days.Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Somemultiplication his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description A black envision stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms. . . . as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms But so unrelenting is Conrads obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A ad hominem Record what amounts to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti.At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his first Englishman in Europe. He calls him my unforgettable Englishman and describes him in the following manner (his) calves exposed to the public gaze . . . dazzled the beholder by the splendor of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. . . . The light of a headlong, exalted triumph with the world of men. . . illumined his face. . . and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a contemplate of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth. . . his white calves twinkled sturdily. Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst e ngender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed orbit of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M. D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad.And and not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrads antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyers mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must see the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria. some(prenominal) Conrads problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still.Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language. And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities. There are two probable grounds on which what I have aid so far may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people.I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question. Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, did sail down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms. How could I stand up more than fifty years after his death and purport to contradict him?My answer is that as a sensible man I will not accept just any travelers tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself. I will not trust the evidence even off mans very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrads. And we also pass to know that Conrad was, in the words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, notoriously inaccurate in the rendering of his own history. But more important by far is the abundant witness about Conrads savages which we could gather if we were so inclined from other sources and which might lead us to think that these people must have had other occupations besides erging into the evil forest or materializing out of it simply to plague Marlow and his dispirited band. For as it happened, soon after Conrad had written his book an event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art historian, describes it Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant individual act of bend to a non-European culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when European artists were avid for new artistic experiences, but it was only about 1904-5 that African art began to make its distinctive impact.One piece is still identifiable it is a mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was speechless and stunned when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze. . . The revolution of twentieth century art was under way The mask in question was made by other savages living just north of Conrads River Congo. They have a name too the Fang people, and are without a doubt among the worlds greatest get the hang of the sculptured form.The event Frank Willett is referring to marks the beginning of cubism and the infusion of new life into European art, which had run completely out of strength. The point of all this is to suggest that Conrads picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the ravages of King Leopolds lnternational Association for the Civilization of Central Africa. Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves. But even those not blinkered, like Conrad with xenophobia, can be astonishing blind.Let me digress a little here. One of the greatest and most intrepid travelers of all time, Marco Polo, journeyed to the Far East from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent twenty years in the court of Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in his book entitled Description of the World his impressions of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. But there were at least two extraordinary carelessnesss in his account. He said nothing about the art of printing, unknown as yet in Europe but in full flower in China.He either did not notice it at all or if he did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly have for it. Whatever the reason, Europe had to wait another hundred years for Gutenberg. But even more spectacular was Marco Polos omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly 4,000 miles long and already more than 1,000 years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may not have seen it but the Great Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is visible from the moon Indeed travelers can be blind. As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book.It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western predilection and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousn ess of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling There go I but for the grace of God.Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. therefore Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the mans jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that precedent and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo he darkness found him out. In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive n ote in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people not angels, but not rudimentary souls either just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society.But as I thought more about the stereotype image, about its grip and pervasiveness, about the willful tenacity with which the West holds it to its heart when I thought of the Wests television and cinema and newspapers, about books read in its schools and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews about the need to send help to the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was possible. And there was, in any case, something totally wrong in offering bribes to the West in return for its good opinion of Afric a. Ultimately the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward.Although I have used the word willful a few times here to characterize the Wests view of Africa, it may well be that what is happening at this stage is more akin to reflex action than calculated malice. Which does not make the situation more but less hopeful. The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken.It was a wide-ranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenomenon in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the article speaks unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language. I believe that the introduction of dialects which is technically erroneous in the mount is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India.And this is quite comparable to Conrads withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps lets give them dialects In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress. Look at the phrase native language in the Science Monitor excerpt. certainly the only native language possible in London is Cockney English. But our writer means something else something appropriate to the sounds Indians and Africans makeAlthough the work of redressing which needs to be done may appear too daunting, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and condemned the evil of im perial ontogeny but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad.