"::No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it  this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity  like yours  the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. (Achebe quoting HoD) 

 :::Yes, indeed, a cheerleader for race relations!  Who are you people?  The obtuseness apparent in the comments on this discussion page, it is truly phenomenal!  I feel as if I've slipped into the 19th century here.  Shall we all blather on about ""unreasoning"" ""buck niggers"", as per Conrad, to ""cheerleader for race relations""?  The ""prehistory"" that is the Negro, is that right?   

 :::It was a rhetorical flourish in which Achebe called C a racist; Achebe believed that Conrad's was the ""dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination"", the norm, but no less morally reprehensible for its normalcy, and no less damaging to living Africans.  The point wasn't that Conrad was a bad guy, merely that the fruits of his labors showed signs of decay; that that sort of creepy stupidity and ethnic hostility impairs the text aesthetically.  

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