Images of Africa in the Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness portrays an image of dark Africa and inhuman. Not only does he describe the real, physical continent of Africa as "so desperate and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so merciless to human weakness" (Conrad 94), as if the continent could neither generate nor sustain any real life human. , but it also manages to portray Africans as if they were not worthy of the respect commonly owed to the white man. At one point the main character, Marlow, describes one of the paths he follows: "I can't say I saw any roads or any maintenance, except the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet hole in his forehead, above which I absolutely stumbled three miles further on, may be considered a permanent improvement" (48). Conrad's description of Africa and Africans served to misinform the Western world and remained unchallenged for many years. In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his first and most acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart. This work, commonly recognized as the world's best-known African novel, describes an image of Africa that humanizes both the continent and the people. Achebe once said: "Reading Heart of Darkness... I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes, you realize that someone has to write a different story " (Gikandi 8-9); Achebe openly admits that he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrific characterization of Africans in many European works, particularly Heart of Darkness. In many ways, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric description...... middle of paper ......t of Darkness.Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Heart of Darkness: an authoritative text, backgrounds and sources, critical essays. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. 251-262.---. Things fall apart. Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959. Boahen, A. Adu. African perspectives on colonialism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin Books, 1989. “Doctrines of Colonialism.” The Tibetan government in exile. May 3, 2000. http://www.tibet.com/Humanrights/Unpo/chap2.html>. Gikandi, Simon. "Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature". Classics in Context: Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996