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Some critics do not see Heart of Darkness as a novel aboutAfrica at all. Until Achebe's essay, critics generally seemed to collude, perhaps unwittingly,in preventing African voices from emerging in their reading of Heart ofDarkness. It is not an attack on colonialism andimperialism themselves. The novel is a delineation of the virtues thatEuropeans need to cultivate in order to justify extending their civilizationand culture to other parts of the world. Its central concern, I contend, is tosound apocalyptic warnings about what might happen to European imperialistambitions if its agents did not uphold certain virtues which Conrad consideredessential to the enterprise. Reading the novella from such a postcolonialperspective, I argue, enables us to see that in Heart of Darkness justice and humanitarian concerns for the victims of Europe's colonialexpansion overseas are incidental themes.
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I offer a reading of the novella that seeks to recuperate theAfrican voices that are silenced in both dominant critical approaches to it aswell as in the novella itself. My aim inthis paper is to extend interrogation of dominant readings of Heart ofDarkness beyond Achebe's recognition that racism underpins Conrad's imageof Africa. Chinua Achebe, for instance, in an essay I shall return toin due course, inaugurating what Robert Kimbrough (xv) regards as a newmoment in Conrad criticism, argues that Conrad's image of Africa, appropriateduncritically from Victorian England, nullifies the novella's liberal andhumanitarian pretensions and compromises its artistic merit.
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However in recent years the novel has comeincreasingly under interrogation from the very people whose silence the authorassumed and upon which the novel possibly depended for much of its moral andartistic integrity. It was as if, theAfricans, like the women were "out of it - should be out of it"(49). Indeed among allthe various themes it has pleased the critics to read in the novella, thesubjectivity of the Africans is conspicuously absent. When Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness first appeared exactly a centuryago, it was unlikely that the author, the publishers or the critics whoshowered it with accolades envisaged an African readership. Conrad's imageof Africa: Recovering African voices in Heart of Darkness