Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/dh_ueu9qi/beta.frontlineclub.com/wp-content/themes/frontline3.6/functions.php:1) in /home/dh_ueu9qi/beta.frontlineclub.com/wp-includes/feed-rss2-comments.php on line 8
http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/how_not_to_write_about_africa/ Championing Independent Journalism Mon, 03 Sep 2012 11:30:40 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/how_not_to_write_about_africa/#comment-1174 Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:15:39 +0000 http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/dev/?p=3832#comment-1174 What saves Conrad, for me, is that he’s responding to Henry Morton Stanley, very explicitly and very self-consciousnly. Marlowe finding Kurtz is a replay of Stanley finding Livingstone (down to the fears about having gone native that result in the ludicrously and necessarily urbane “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”) and the entire “dark continent” thing was first popularized by the good “Bula Matari” himself. Conrad may not be sure what to make of Africa (and he wrote some reprehensible things in his journals), but he does have the self-awareness to realize his own subjective blindness, and so he makes the “darkness” of the continent into a symbol for that subjectivity. Or something. Anyway, as you say, it’s the complete lack of self-awareness of the Jean Cochran’s of the world that makes one want to lapse into hyperbole; at least Conrad *realized* he didn’t know what he was talking about.

]]>