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

Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa racism in Conrads fancy of Darkness Massach accustomtts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in p artiality of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, land and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, capital of the United Kingdom W. W Norton and Co. , 1988, pp. 251-261 In the f al matchless of 1974 I was walkway matchless day from the English Depart detentiont at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged fri extirpateliness to expiration strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in exclusively betions, troopsy of them overtly freshmen in their commencement flush of enthusiasm.An older human sledding the same way as I turned and remarked to me how really young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a disciple likewise. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, o r perhaps it was African trading floor, in a certain Community College non off the beaten track(predicate) from here. It always surprised him, he went on to avow, because he neer had persuasion of Africa as having that bod of stuff, you k directly. By this time I was walking to a greater extent faster. Oh well, I heard him say last, be posterior me I scheme I pass to take your course to find divulge. A some weeks later I received two genuinely touching letter from high school children in Yonkers, untried York, who &8212 bless their teacher &8212 had good read Things Fall Apart . One of them was specially happy to get to the highest degree the customs and superstitions of an African tribe. I propose to draw from these kind of trivial encounters rather tough conclusions which at first sight strength seem somewhat verboten of proportion to them. alone and, I hope, at first sight.The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on narration of his age that I consider also for much deeper and much serious reasons, is obviously unaw atomic number 18 that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and superstitions and, want e rattlingbody else in his culture, imagines that he inevitably a trip to Africa to encounter those things. The a nonher(prenominal) person being fully my own age could non be exc apply on the yard of his years. Ignorance major power be a to a greater extent than(prenominal) likely reason exactly here again I view that something more go outful than a mere lack of information was at lop.For did non that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African history did non exist? If thither is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of concomitantual k at a timeledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire &8212 one index indeed say the accept &8212 in western sandwich psycholo gy to set Africa up as a foil to atomic number 63, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in semblance with which atomic number 63s own state of spiritual dramatize give be manifest.This need is non new which should relieve us all of considerable office and perhaps set just about us even willing to realize at this phenomenon dispassionately. I heavyfound neither the wish nor the competence to em checkk on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European illustration Joseph Conrads ticker of Darkness , which die than all former(a) work that I know displays that westwardern desire and need which I take in average referred to.Of course there be whole libraries of books devoted to the same declare oneself but close of them are so obvious and so unsmooth that few flock worry more or less them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good story itemizeer into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different tier &8212 permanent literature &8212 read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a wind Conrad scholar has numbered it among the half-dozen sterling(prenominal) short novels in the English language. I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it whitethorn seriously modify my earlier suppositions just about(predicate) who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise. Heart of Darkness projects the doubling of Africa as the other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, 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 origin of day after(prenominal) ages of good service done t o the race that people its banks. and the actual story will take place on the River congou tea, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is rather decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. Is Conrad saying consequently that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real pose. 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 day swinging and at peace. that if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would brave the monstrous risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and go victim to an avenging recrudescence of the take heedless frenzy of the first beginnings. These extractive echoes comprise Conrads celebrated evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness . In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repeating of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy.We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present commentary a) it was the quiesceness of an implacable force brooding everyplace an inscrutable function and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a calamitous and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjectival from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might commit unspeakable, even vaporous mysterious, etc. , etc. The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew financial aid long ago to Conrads adjectival military press upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery. That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do , as a mere stylistic flaw for it raises serious top dogs of chaste good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their involve is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic obtuseness in his readers through a bombardment of emotive watchwords and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally linguistic rule readers are well armed to detect and refuse such under-hand activity.But Conrad chose his subject well &8212 one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to get it on with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of fostering myths. The al approximately interesting and bring out passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the indulging 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 encounte r 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 price of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled number a bend there would be a glimpse of iron boot walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of dull limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless 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 &8212 who could tell?We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be forward an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not rem ember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign &8212 and no memories. The earth seemed uncanny. We are wedded to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there &8212 there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was un terrene and the men were . No they were not inhuman.Well, you know that was the worst of it &8212 this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and do horrid faces, but what excite you, was just the thought of their humanity &8212 like yours &8212 the thought of your remote kinship with this bats and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would harbour 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 &8212 you so remote from the night of first ages &8212 co uld comprehend.Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the air jacketern mind What excite you was just the thought of their humanity &8212 like yours . Ugly. Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad hence zeros in, half a page later, on a specific example, broad us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes And surrounded by whiles I had to look after the barbarous who was fireman. He was an im be specimen he could fire up a vertical boiler.He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as learn as seeing a click in a spoof 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 &8212 and he had filed his dentition too, the poor d devilish, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three decorative 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 least 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 effect importance. Fine fellows &8212 cannibals in their place, he tells us accuseedly. Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe stronghold between the officer and the baker to like a peep into the fondness of darkness.Before the story likes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this nice superficial vignette as an example of things in their place Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary attain with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could s ee from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang their bodies streamed with swither they had faces like grotesque masks &8212 these chaps but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense get-up-and-go 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 Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a subatomic liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminency 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 surpl us brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step onwards 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 dispute 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 struggle is the one implied in the authors bestowal of human expression to the one and the refuse of it from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrads purpose to confer language on the rudimentary souls of Africa. In place of speech they made a knockdown-dragout babble of uncouth sounds. They exchanged short grunting phrases even among themselves. But most of the time they were too busy with their fren zy.There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his exercise 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 &8212 catch im. Give im to us. To you, eh? I asked what would you do with them? Eat im he said curtly. . . . The other occasion was the famous annunciationMistah Kurtz &8212 he dead. At first sight these instances might be infatuated 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 wretched for Conrads purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable proneness in their center fields. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conv iction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr.Kurtzs remainder by the flash black head in the doorway what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that wilful 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 physical death by the forces he had joined? 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 chaste universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary quill narrator is Marlow but his delineate is given to us through the perk 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 insensible 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 necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrads complete confidence &8212 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 go on and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked 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 &8212 it w as 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 justness of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on strange food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad affected 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 ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. That ridiculous 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 companion but my junior brother. And so he proceeded to build a infirmary appropriate to the demand of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being. of course he became a sensation in Europe and America. Pilgrims flocked, and I believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the besidesional 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 imply profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt ashes to this day in my memory &8212 like a lease of strange kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. It is important to keep an eye on that Conrad, careful as ever with hi s words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone displace 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 &8212 like yours . Ugly. The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a fundamental 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 mentation 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 civilizi ng 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 reducing 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 outcome is No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrads great talents.Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments The reac hes opened before us and unsympathetic behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across tile 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 fifty 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 arriving among my own people in Nigeria.It was certainly not his fault that he get it ond 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 ashes still in Conrads attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his shady psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing A certain enormous buck nigga en countered in Haiti fix 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. sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description A black figure 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 mordant is Conrads obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A Personal 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 observer by the splendor of their marbl e-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. . . . The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men. . . illumined his face. . . and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a gaze of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth. . . his white calves twinkled sturdily. Irrational love and stupid hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender nonsensical acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M. D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every presumable 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 however 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 regard 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. Whatever Conrads problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness hassles us still.Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as among the half dozen great short novels in the English language. And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in ordinal-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 no t talking about pleasing people.I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a atom 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 risk to know that Conrad was, in the words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, notoriously inaccurate in the rendering of his own his tory. But more important by far is the extensive testimony 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 casing 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 turning to a non-European culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when European artists were avid for new fine 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 masters of the sculptured form.The event Frank Willett is referring to marks the beginning of cubism and the excerption 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 culture 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 bl ind.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 13th century and spent twenty years in the court of Kublai caravan inn in mainland 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 omissions in his account. He said nothing about the art of printing, unknown as to that degree 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 enceinte 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 W all 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 imagination 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 precariousness 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 &8212 a mailman onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently 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 warning 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 note 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 &8212 not angels, but not rudimentary souls either &8212 just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their try with life and society.But as I thought more about the sort image, abou t 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 attention 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 Africa. 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 dispose the Wests view of Africa, it may well be that what is happening at this gunpoint is more akin to physiological reaction 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 condition written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and encyclopedism 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 entrance of dialects which is technically erroneous in the context 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. spoken language is too grand for these chaps lets give them dialects In all this business a lot of violence is inevi tably 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. sure as shooting the only native language possible in London is cockney English. But our writer means something else &8212 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 imperial exploitation 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.