Notes on an image of Africa

Notas sobre una imagen de África

An image of Africa is the article resulting from a lecture given by Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1975. At that time Achebe was already a known novelist and his novel Everything falls apart was considered one of the emblematic literary works emerged of postcolonial Africa. Why not invite, then, a good African novelist to talk about one of the great writers of the English language, but about the novel of the late nineteenth century, the Polish Joseph Conrad? A lecture by one novelist about another, both consecrated in their own way, could be great, especially if Achebe recognized the ancestry and the western tutelage about narrative forms that barely stood out in the post-colony horizon. that recognition could be expected by those who assume the modern canon as a global reference, but it never came. Instead of praising Conrad and showing, perhaps, his place of influence in the emerging African novelist Achebe treated him with disdain and whipped up his racism and the leading role of his best-known and decisive novel, The Heart of Darkness, in reproduction of the most insidious stereotypes about Africans and, by extension, about Afro-descendants: wild, primitive, lazy, violent, lascivious, almost animal-although with a disturbing human closeness.

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