A Pile of Bones

In writing an anti-imperialist novella, or a story about the oppression of a race, how else could an author depict the atrocities committed onto the subjugated race if not by portraying the worst of extremes in the roles of the bully and bullied to provoke thought? Achebe’s point that Conrad is a ‘bloody racist’ becomes irrelevant since I think the question should perhaps be ‘how racist are the readers’?

We see the failure of technology as we “travel back to the earliest beginnings of the world”. The colonizers’ enter Africa with steamships, weapons and their progressive ideologies but cannot escape Africa’s call to return to animalism. Kurtz the epitome of the white colonizer who is supposed to be on top of the food chain is reduced to crawling in the jungle. Kurtz’s regression into animalism suggests that the cycle of evolution has come full circle and that the natives are the fittest in the game of survival and all intruders have to beat a retreat.

The measuring of Marlow’s crania was surreal. The isolated head leads us to the display of impaled skulls outside Kurtz’s house. The clinical manner in which it was conducted was very perfunctory. Like the accountant, director and wool knitting lady, Conrad portrays everyone as part of a circus act, each performing their respective “monkey tricks”. Identities are superfluous since “what does [it] matter if the trick is well done”? This makes the job of superimposing identity-less accountants and wool knitting ladies onto these skulls rather easy. Europeans, Africans and animals ultimately return to a state of bones. Race, gender, power politics are rendered meaningless. . .

(266 words)