Heart of Darkness III

The extent to which Conrad removes agency from the Africans is so complete that it must have been a conscious decision rather than a subconscious act of racism; the details that Chinua Achebe saw that generated her paper were so overwhelmingly obvious in some places that it is hyperbolic, and therefore sarcastic - therefore, Conrad was not a racist, for he consciously chose a point of view that is more extreme than any racism in real life. His use of metonymy and synecdoche to represent the blacks is so complete that it must have been deliberate. At one point, for instance, Marlow narrates that "the bush began to howl" (121); it might have made more sense, logically, to say "the Africans began to howl," but Marlow goes so far out of his way to take agency away from the Africans themselves that it would seem impossible that Conrad did not intentionally exaggerate Marlow's racism and detachment from the Africans. At other points, Marlow refers to components of a body to mean an African, such as "human limbs [. . .] of bronze color" (121). Marlow almost never speaks of the Africans directly, instead referring to them by something related - for instance, a part of their body or environment. This is so consistent and so deliberate that it must have been a conscious choice by Conrad - were it simply underlying racism in his opinion, then he would not go so far from a conventional way of speaking in order to take away the Africans' agency; such an effort could not be subconscious. Therefore, either Conrad deliberately chose to remove the Africans' agency because he genuinely believes the Africans to be less aware of what they are doing than animals, who would have agency, and is therefore a highly extreme racist, even for the late 1800s, calling blacks not merely animals, but less than animals; or he made a conscious decision to do so to exaggerate the general viewpoint of the people of the time in a criticism. Therefore, it is unlikely that the evidence Chinua Achebe presents to indicate his racism (e.g. the use of black parts of the body to represent black people) is anything other than the author using hyperbole upon the viewpoint of the time.