By Rasna Warah
 |
|
Chinua
Achebe
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It was while
re-reading Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness” that I realised that not much has changed since Conrad published his
book in 1950.
There
is a coffee table book titled Black Ladies that is on display in the window of
a leading Nairobi bookshop.
The
book is a collection of photos of African women in various states of nudity by
the German photographer, Uwe Ommer.
It
appears to be a harmless piece of erotica but is actually a voyeuristic display
of African women’s body parts.
It
pretends to showcase black beauty but ends up doing exactly what Joseph Conrad
did in his novel, Heart of Darkness: dehumanising Africans.
Ommer
has also published Do It Yourself, a pictorial that carries on its cover a
photograph of a naked African girl posing in front of a mirror.
The
blurb states that the book was inspired by a babysitter who the photographer
caught taking pictures of herself in front of the bathroom mirror. One wonders,
did the photographer, upon seeing his babysitter in the bathroom, proceed to
photograph her without her clothes on? And what might his children be thinking
seeing an image of their naked babysitter on the cover of their father’s book?
Shockingly,
the book’s preface is written by none other than the Senegalese poet,
Africanist and former president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, who praises Ommer for
showing that black can be beautiful. Really?
For
Ommer and others like him, African women are nothing but body parts: boobs,
bums, legs and lips.
They
exist for the visual and physical pleasure of white males, even if it is at the
expense of their own dignity. The wrinkly old white men in Kenya’s coastal
towns who have African “girlfriends” young enough to be their grandchildren
display the same perversion and racism.
I
thought of Black Ladies and Conrad’s controversial book when I heard that
Chinua Achebe, often referred to as the father of modern African literature,
had died.
It
was while re-reading Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness” that I realised that not much has changed since Conrad
published his book in 1950.
The
racist, misogynistic voyeurism displayed by Conrad is also exhibited by Ommer
in Black Ladies.
Achebe
was criticised for reading racism in a novel that merely described the
experiences of a traveller on the River Congo.
Africa,
his critics argued, was just a backdrop for the story the author was telling.
The Nigerian writer never recanted his position.
He
said that the “feet stamping, bodies swaying, eyes rolling” Africans portrayed
in Heart of Darkness were devoid of all humanity – they were “trapped in
primordial barbarity” that had no faith or feeling.
In
his essay, Achebe wrote that Conrad was not alone in his voyeuristic, racist
portrayal of Africans.
“It
is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely
brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can
certainly use closer psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep
anxieties about the precariousness of its civilisation and to have a need for
constant reassurance by comparison to Africa.”
His
novel, Things Fall Apart, which has been translated into more than fifty
languages, is a portrait of a man who commits suicide because he cannot
tolerate the self-hatred he is forced to adopt to please his colonial masters.
One
reviewer stated that one of the greatest qualities of this classic is “the
vigour of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that
treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland.”
Achebe’s
sad treatise on his homeland, The Trouble with Nigeria, is an indictment of how
once-colonised people end up enslaving their own.
Europeans’
oppression of Africans was partly founded on a proselytising, “civilising”
mission; but African leaders cannot even use that excuse, he argued. He was
particularly contemptuous of the avaricious, corrupt and self-centred African
elite who he blamed for holding back the continent’s progress.
Achebe
will be remembered as the writer who paved the way for other African writers to
tell their stories in their own voices. Through his stories we see Africa as it
is; not as foreigners would like to see it. He may be gone, but his writings
will continue to inspire present and future generations.
(rasna.warah@gmail.com)
Source:
Daily Nation, Kenya.
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