The white man's anxiety

i do agree with Achebe that Europe and its people were at once as primitive as the africans and Conrad's work dismisses or leaves out any mention of this past, almost as though Europe has always been forward and civilised. I also completely agree with the point that when we talk about Africa and its rituals, superstitions and customs, Conrad, like many of us, speak of it as though such customs are exclusive to a place like Africa, failing to see that any community, even a "civilised" one has its own set of customs that may always be deemed as odd by an outsider. Hence, defining Africa and speaking of its culture without considering that we speak about this culture from our own specific locations and cultures and assumptions, which are equally limiting and alien, is what i think Achebe criticises Conrad for.

there is also this question of progression. how is the progress of an empire defined? Does not a community progress if it chooses not to follow the temlpates of modernism, and instead secure its culture and customs? Conrad's text favours this sort of progression, where language, race, speaking, body behaviour are the marks of a civilised and rational being. And somehow like Achebe says, Conrad has this anxiety to be able to describe and put in words everything that he encounters, but alot of which transcend the ability to be described. We see this in Forster's novel too where India constantly escapes being pinned down and being known. But India's and Africa's progression does not lie it their knowability but on the contrary, in their evasiveness. So they are not an "antithesis" to Europe, nor like Achebe says are they reflections of Europe's past. On the contrary i feel they stand very distinctly, uncomparably from Europe, and this is the white man's anxiety.
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