An image of Africa: racism in Conrad's Heart of darkness (1st edition.)

Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe's essay on Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'.

Achebe - a highly distinguished Nigerian novelist and university teacher - looked with fresh eyes at a novel that was set in Africa, but in which Africans appear only as onlookers or as indistinguishable 'savages'.

Dismissing the prevailing portrayal of Joseph Conrad as a liberal hero whose anti-imperialist views insulated him from significant criticism, Achebe re-cast the Polish author as a 'bloody racist' in an analysis so cogent it changed the way in which his discipline looked not only at Conrad, but also at all works with settings indicative of racial conflict.