“Mistah Conrad--he dead.”

Achebe’s essay on the Western Romantic imagination that is still pervasive and continued today paraded Conrad as a “bloody racist” to prove his point. Picking on the misogynistic representation of the Africans in terms of language (the lack of it too) and culture, Achebe argues that Conrad is perpetuating the racism through the ineffective “cordon sanitaire” of Marlow in HOD.

What is problematic about Achebe’s An Image of Africa is that he polemises the readership of HOD to the faction of Conrad scholars and supporters, and those of his view that Conrad is a misogynist. Are we supposed then to take up sides too? If we were to take Roland Barthes’ view in The Death of the Author, that we have to replace the author as “the only person in literature” with us, the readers, then we have to kill off Conrad, even Achebe, in this matter as we decide for ourselves what to make of HOD.

I agree with Achebe that Conrad might have been viewing Africa through tainted lenses, but can I fault him for being a historical being conditioned by the society that he had existed in? My own reading of HOD is that Marlow’s narrative to the rest of his company travelling on the Thames is more concerned with the moral degradation of the colonizer as he becomes absorbed into the world of the colonized as a god or superior being. The misogyny, sidelined as they are, paints Marlow as the racist, and not Conrad. Barring any other texts in Conrad’s canon or personal information, I believe that HOD by itself does not serve as incriminating evidence of Conrad’s racism.

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