It was while re-reading Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that I realised that not much has changed since Conrad published his book in 1950.
There is a coffee table book titled Black Ladies that is on display in the window of a leading Nairobi bookshop.
The book is a collection of photos of African women in various states of nudity by the German photographer, Uwe Ommer.
It appears to be a harmless piece of erotica but is actually a voyeuristic display of African women’s body parts.
It pretends to showcase black beauty but ends up doing exactly what Joseph Conrad did in his novel, Heart of Darkness: dehumanising Africans.
Ommer has also published Do It Yourself, a pictorial that carries on its cover a photograph of a naked African girl posing in front of a mirror.
The blurb states that the book was inspired by a babysitter who the photographer caught taking pictures of herself in front of the bathroom mirror. One wonders, did the photographer, upon seeing his babysitter in the bathroom, proceed to photograph her without her clothes on? And what might his children be thinking seeing an image of their naked babysitter on the cover of their father’s book?
Shockingly, the book’s preface is written by none other than the Senegalese poet, Africanist and former president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, who praises Ommer for showing that black can be beautiful. Really?
For Ommer and others like him, African women are nothing but body parts: boobs, bums, legs and lips.
They exist for the visual and physical pleasure of white males, even if it is at the expense of their own dignity. The wrinkly old white men in Kenya’s coastal towns who have African “girlfriends” young enough to be their grandchildren display the same perversion and racism.
I thought of Black Ladies and Conrad’s controversial book when I heard that Chinua Achebe, often referred to as the father of modern African literature, had died.
It was while re-reading Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that I realised that not much has changed since Conrad published his book in 1950.
The racist, misogynistic voyeurism displayed by Conrad is also exhibited by Ommer in Black Ladies.
Achebe was criticised for reading racism in a novel that merely described the experiences of a traveller on the River Congo.
Africa, his critics argued, was just a backdrop for the story the author was telling. The Nigerian writer never recanted his position.
He said that the “feet stamping, bodies swaying, eyes rolling” Africans portrayed in Heart of Darkness were devoid of all humanity – they were “trapped in primordial barbarity” that had no faith or feeling.
In his essay, Achebe wrote that Conrad was not alone in his voyeuristic, racist portrayal of Africans.
“It is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use closer psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilisation and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison to Africa.”
His novel, Things Fall Apart, which has been translated into more than fifty languages, is a portrait of a man who commits suicide because he cannot tolerate the self-hatred he is forced to adopt to please his colonial masters.
One reviewer stated that one of the greatest qualities of this classic is “the vigour of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland.”
Achebe’s sad treatise on his homeland, The Trouble with Nigeria, is an indictment of how once-colonised people end up enslaving their own.
Europeans’ oppression of Africans was partly founded on a proselytising, “civilising” mission; but African leaders cannot even use that excuse, he argued. He was particularly contemptuous of the avaricious, corrupt and self-centred African elite who he blamed for holding back the continent’s progress.
Achebe will be remembered as the writer who paved the way for other African writers to tell their stories in their own voices. Through his stories we see Africa as it is; not as foreigners would like to see it. He may be gone, but his writings will continue to inspire present and future generations.
(rasna.warah@gmail.com)
Source: Daily Nation, Kenya.
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