English Literature Comparison - Essay Example

Despite this, it required native speakers to begin putting some of the fallacies to rest. The purpose of the following essay is to compare the portrayal of Africa, its people and its religion with the portrayal of the white man in two novels, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness published in 1902 and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart published in 1959, as a means of illustrating how even a sympathetic treatment of the continent by a white man is insufficient to contradict traditional Western beliefs.

The Western conception of Africa has always been shaped largely by the novelists and travel writers who have journeyed there. Not until relatively recently have any novels been published by native peoples who understood the more intricate natures of the societies that have called the continent home for centuries and adapted to its cycles. Until Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley in the mid-1800s, no white man had ever reached the interior of Africa, making it very apt for the adoption of its label as an unknown entity.

Although these explorations did little to further Western understanding of the people or the land, they did instigate plenty of speculation and conjecture, which became the stuff upon which misunderstandings to last centuries were founded. In many ways, the blank spaces found on Joseph Conrad’s map of Africa as a child have been duplicated within the minds of the average Westerner regarding many things to do with Africa and its people. As a result of this almost exclusively one-sided depiction, Africa has traditionally gained a reputation as being a land of possibility for Western enrichment through the exploitation of its resources – agriculture, gold, even people.

The West’s understanding of African people holds that they are mostly child-like in their primitive understandings, only