Creating a New Light on African Society

“The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms,” states Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. This African novel tells the early narrative about European colonization of Africa told from the point of view of the colonized people. It recounts the life of Okonkwo, and describes the arrival of the white missionaries to his Igbo village and how their arrival impacted African life and society and the end of the nineteenth century. Accounts told by European colonizers who traveled to Africa made it seem like a dark mysterious jungle, where the people were wild savages. Achebe’s novel counters this illustration of African societies and people as they are expressed in Western literature through the actions of his characters, and his use of descriptions and details throughout the novel.

Early western literature about Africa portrayed the continent as a poor and brutal place that needed to be tamed. Well known examples of this type of literature are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and ‘The White Man’s Burden’ written by Rudyard Kipling. Both written during the time of Imperialism, they describe the Whites justification of expansion was to teach the people in Africa and other colonized places humanity, believing the Black skinned people were anything but human. “Take up the White Man’s Burden/Send forth the best ye breed […]/Your new-caught, sullen peoples/Half devil and half child,” (Kipling). In this poem, Kipling presents what is called a "Euro-centric" view of the world, where people view society from a European point of view. This view nominates the idea that white people have the right to rule over, and encourage Western cultural development of people from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This quote portrays the feelings of White men towards Blacks very well in that it shows that White people thought they were the best due to the color of their skin and that having dark skin made you less than human.

These people were treated as animals and beasts that lived in “A God-forsaken wilderness,” (Conrad) and they were described as such in Conrad’s narrative,

“Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path […]. Black rags were worn round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to a fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking[…]. They passed me within six inches, without a lance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages,” (Conrad).

The main character in Conrad’s novel, Marlow, travels to Africa and witnesses the treatment of black laborers and goes on to say that he had already known the “devils” of violence, greed, and