An Image of Africa

"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" is the published and amended version of the second Chancellor's Lecture given by Nigerian writer and academic Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February 1975.

The text is considered to be part of the postcolonial critical movement, which advocates to Europeans the consideration of the viewpoints of non-European nations, as well as peoples coping with the effects of colonialism.

[1] Conrad has frequently been defended on the basis of the historical context in which he lived, or on the grounds that his writing is nonetheless "beautiful".

His essay "A Bloody Racist: About Achebe's View of Conrad" defends Heart of Darkness as an anti-imperialist novel, suggesting that "part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial prejudice.

[4] Building on Watts and Said, Nidesh Lawtoo argued that "underneath the first layer of straightforward opposition [...] we find an underlying mimetic continuity between Conrad's colonial image of Africa [in Heart of Darkness] and Achebe's postcolonial representation" in Things Fall Apart.