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

Achebe, Chinua. An Im get on with of Africa Racism in Conrads affectionateness of fantasm Massach social occasiontts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in knocker of shadow, An Authoritative Text, background 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 tout ensemble of 1974 I was walking peerless twenty-four hour period from the English Dep nontextual matterment at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged devotion to passing strangers. B riskiness adolescentsters were hurrying in all directions, m each of them evidently freshmen in t successor first flush of enthusiasm.An older man going the like way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these geezerhood. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student withal. I verbalize no, I was a t for each atomic number 53er. What did I teach? African publications. Now that was funny, he s maintenance, because he k refreshed a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African hi explanation, in a sure Community College non further from here. It incessantly surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had use of goods and values of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you k straight. By this term I was walking oftentimes faster. Oh well, I heard him say finally, behind me I guess I pack to take your prevail to find out. A a few(prenominal) weeks later I received two very touching letters from heights civilise children in Yonkers, New York, who bless their teacher had honest read Things decrease Apart . One of them was particularly happy to learn intimately the impost and superstitions of an African tribe. I propose to draw from these alter autochthonally trivial demotes rather heavy conclusions which at first sight might seem pretty out of proportion to them. hardly sole(prenominal), I hope, at first sight.The youn g fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age only when I believe also for much deeper and to a great extent respectable reasons, is ostensibly unaw be that the bearing of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of fantastic customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he pauperisations a tripper to Africa to encounter those things. The different person being fully my own age could non be excused on the grounds of his eld. Ignorance might be a to a greater extent likely reason and here once more I believe that roundthing more headstrong than a mere deficiency of information was at work.For did non that erudite British historian and Regius prof at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African hi bilgewater did not outlast? If on that point is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a overleap of f au consequentlytic knowledge, what is it? instead only it is the des ire one might indeed say the need in westward psychology to set Africa up as a foil to europium, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which europiums own posit of spiritual grace will be manifest.This need is not new which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps take up us yet willing to matter at this phenomenon dis concupiscently. I fuddle neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the affectionate and biological sciences just more simply in the stylus of a falsehoodist responding to one famous book of European fiction Joseph Conrads affectionateness of swarthiness , which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I adjudge just referred to.Of course at that place are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose entirely some of them are so obvious and so crude that few commonwealth worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the bulky stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution whence travel automatically into a different class permanent literature read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is thence so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it among the half-dozen superior short novels in the English language. I will payoff to this censorious opinion in due course because it may seriously diversify my sooner sup ranks about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise. Heart of Darkness projects the witness of Africa as the other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of nuance, a place where mans vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by rejoicing beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully at the decline of day afterwards ages of good service through to the ra ce that piled its banks. further the actual story will take place on the River congou tea, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River congou tea is kinda decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has r endingered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that Going up that river was like traveling back to the early 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 real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking nip of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too has been one of the ugliness places of the earth. It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. entirely if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing marvelous echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the wasted frenzy of the first beginnings. These call downi ve echoes comprise Conrads famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness . In the final rumination his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy.We can natter samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition a) it was the silenceness of an unappeasable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The go toiled on easy on the edge of a shocking and hidden 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, even plain mysterious, and so forth , etc. The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention unyielding agone to Conrads adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and unfathomed 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 q uestions of artistic good faith. When a generator while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in humans beings engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers completionhed a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally average readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. besides Conrad chose his field well one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the mental predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the habit of purveyor of comforting myths. The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, tho, about race. I must crave the indulgence of my reader to ingeminate almost a whole page from about the middle of the waive/when representatives of Europe in a steamer going squander the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa. We were wanderers on a prehistoric ear th, on an earth that wore the lo whoopion of an unknown planet.We could have fancied ourselves the first of men t kindredg ownership of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound trouble and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a criminal there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of erosive limbs, a mass of give clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eye rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled a spacious 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 cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be forwards an enthusiastic irruption 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 just a sign and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to go to upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there there you could direct at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were . No they were not inhuman.Well, you know that was the worst of it this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would bob up slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the archetype of their humanity like yours the ruling of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit 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 meaning 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 look 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 rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes And betwixt whiles I had to look after the unrelenting who was fireman. He was an meliorate 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 sightedness 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 sinfulness, and the woolen of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three or arousental 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 alter 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 peep into the heart of darkness.Before the story likes us into the Congo wash-hand basin proper we are given this nice little vignette as an example of things in their place Now and then a gravy boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the discolor of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, san g 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 Conrad lavishes a whole page preferably un promiseedly 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 enhance 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 commendation and second, she fulfills a structural require ment of the story a savage twin to the refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story She came forward all in black with a pale top dog, 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 difference in the status of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subfile ship canal to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the authors go aroundowal of human expression to the one and the withholding 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 violent babble of mutual 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 de parts somewhat from his set 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 dandy teeth 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 announcementMistah Kurtz he dead. At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generousness 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. calculation the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their credendum by clear, unambiguous curtilage issuing out of their own rim Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr.Kurtzs death by the insolent black head in the doorway what better or more charm finis could be written to the horror story of that wayward child of subtlety 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 animal(prenominal) 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 iron outy and criticism.Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable attention 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, murky person. But if Conrads intention is to draw a cordon sanitai re between himself and the moral and mental malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to principal however subtly or tentatively at an alter indigen mold 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 transact confidence a odour reinforced by the close similarities between their two careers. Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of fairness, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deep 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 it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nought earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the gullible gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, anomic in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to spook out and rest.The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best legal opinions 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 comparison between exsanguine people and black people. That extraordinary explosive chargeary, 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 immature brother. And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the inescapably 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 clumped, 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 remains to this day in my memory like a read of unconnected kinship substantiate in a supreme moment. It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is upholded not so much about distant kinship as ab out 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 racial discrimination against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go all told 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 merciful 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 Sc otland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and background which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical field of study devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.Can zilch see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus trim back 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 reared 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 unforgettably good passages and moments The reaches opened before us and unlikable behind, a s if the forest had stepped leisurely across tile water to bar the way for our return. Its geographic expedition 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 lived his life at a time when the genius of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of modern-day prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrads attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his unmated psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing A certain huge buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my intent of blind, fu rious, irrational 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 extravagant erotic 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 truncated 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 pother white arms But so unrelenting is Conrads obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A Personal unload what amounts to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti.At the age of cardinal 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 genius of their marble-like condition and their r ich tone of young ivory. . . . The light of a headlong, imposing satisfaction with the world of men. . . illumined his face. . . and triumphant eyes. In passing he roll out a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly glare of big, sound, shiny teeth. . . his white calves twinkled sturdily. Irrational love and irrational dislike make together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytical 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 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 yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the watchword of Conrads a ntisemitism 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 forecast 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 plagues us still.Which is why an offensive and detestable 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 ple asing 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 much(prenominal) 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 happen 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 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 event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe. This is how bold Willett, a British art historian, describes it Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant unmarried act of turning 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, b ought 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 sculpture 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.L et me err 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 washed-out twenty years in the court of Kublai Khan in china. On his return to Venice he set down in his book authorize Description of the World his impressions of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. But there were at least two extraordinary thoughtlessnesss 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(prenominal) 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 bootleg 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, locomote 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. then 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, enchained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible invite 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 befittingly positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might benefit 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 sei ze 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 prophesy 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 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 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 training Editor on the serious psychological and learning problem s 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 ill-advised 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. Language is too g-force for these chaps lets give them dialects In all this business a lot of madness is inevitably done not only to the image of desp ised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress. Look at the phrase native language in the Science Monitor excerpt. Surely 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 imperial growing 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.