“An Image of Africa” by Chiua Achebe has the purpose of confronting Joseph Conrad’s racist stereotypes towards the African people. Africans tend to be described as uncivilized and savage like, desperate for Western influences in Conrad’s descriptions. “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.” The descriptions perhaps get even more offensive when Conrad describes the actual African people. “But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us-who could tell?” Words like prehistoric and descriptions that insinuate savage like characteristics and behaviors pertains to a famous stereotype that Conrad thinks of these African people as a culture to be animalistic and prehistoric simply because they lack traditional western customs, which is certainly not true. Achebe confronts this issue rather well he writes “He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stomping their feet, but they have at least the merit of being in their place. He then goes on to criticize “Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering Europe enters at its peril.” This same objection to putting down African culture can relate to Apocalypse Now in terms of how the opposite culture is viewed. Throughout the movie a truthful and personal image of the Vietnamese people is never portrayed. They are either seen as being attacked or blown up, or not seen at all as the invisible enemy known as “Charlie.” It is similar since the culture of the Vietnamese people is either seen as desperately hopeless or sneaky and dark with no real identity. Overall both depictions fail to represent two separate cultures accurately from the viewpoint of westerners (Viet Cong to the American soldiers and Africans to Europeans.)
You could not have said it better. There are so many parallels in the way that Africa and Vietnam are portrayed. And neither one of them is depicted as what they are. They are only described as what the western viewpoint perceives them to be, not what they actually are, because to do that would be frightening.
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