more than racism

Early on, Max noted that the "essentializing of Africa and Africans in HOD renders them into mere inanimate objects". Achebe suggests that this tendency in HoD is at least partly due to Conrad's own "irrational hate" and "bloody" racism, since "even after due allowances have been made for all the influenes of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility, there remains... a residue of antipathy".

This is to suggest that what irks Achebe is not that Conrad was a racist, his objectification of Africans seems out of proportion to "normal" standards of racism: it obsessively repudiates and belittles the claim to kinship between European/African. I'd like to complicate this notion by suggesting that Conrad actually tacitly accepts the claim, but the implications are grave since Colonialism is justified by the difference between the European and Native. This logic reveals itself in the Master/Slave dialectic: the moment of struggle is followed by a period of continual violence that entrenches the difference between the two beings (C.f Levine and fanon).

By removing this difference, colonialism is revealed as merely a system of greed, at its heart a desire to possess the other as an object. One senses this in what appears to be Kurtz's boundless rapacity.

I suspect there’s a sense of being implicated in a wrong that nonetheless seems to have preceded you, and promises to outlast you: faced with this, what remains except an intolerable guilt and shame?

Perhaps this is why Conrad leaves them only as an indistinct and threatening shadow at the edge of the narrative rather than being more explicit. Kinship is only affirmed in an extreme moment, that of mortality and death, and in a sense that recognition is a kind of death, in that one loses one's bearings, loses one's basis for understanding the self.