Achebe once said, Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Apart because of the horrible characterization of Africans in many European works, especially Heart of Darkness . Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric depiction of Africa and Native African lifestyle portrayed in Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness . Throughout Heart of Darkness Conrad uses images of darkness to represent Africa.
Darkness is everything that is unknown, primitive, evil, and impenetrable.
To Conrad, Africa is the very representation of darkness. By traveling farther and farther down the Congo, Marlow and his crew get closer and closer to the epicenter of this foreboding darkness, to the black heart of evil. Because of Africa s physical immensity and thick jungles, it appeared to be a land of the unknown where the silence . . . This portrayal of Africa as both a romantic frontier and a foreboding wilderness continues to dominate in the minds of Westerners even today. Conrad depicts Africa as a land where the prehistoric has been preserved.