Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called "heart of Africa". Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. This setting provides the frame for Marlow's story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between what Conrad calls "the greatest town on earth", London, and Africa as places of darkness.
Heart of Darkness
Zimbabwean scholar Rino Zhuwarara broadly agreed with Achebe, though considered it important to be "sensitised to how peoples of other nations perceive Africa". In 2003, Botswanan scholar Peter Mwikisa concluded the book was "the great lost opportunity to depict dialogue between Africa and Europe". In 1983, the British academic, Cedric Watts, criticized Achebe's apparent assertion that only black people may accurately analyse and assess the novella. Stan Galloway writes, in a comparison of "Heart of Darkness" with " Jungle Tales of Tarzan", "The inhabitants [of both works], whether antagonists or compatriots, were clearly imaginary and meant to represent a particular fictive cipher and not a particular African people".