Heart of Darkness

Achebe is clearly objects to the way that Conrad portrays Africans in Heart of Darkness. Achebe points out various instances in which Africans are describe as inhuman and sharing a kinship with Africans is detestable to the characters in Heart of darkness.  One my favorite things about Achebe is his lack of complacency, he knows what he believes in and he is not swayed by popular opinion. "The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster the world. And the question is whether a novel celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I would not call that man an artist, for example, who composes an eloquent instigation to one people to fall upon another and destroy them." Achebe provides insight on the western custom to view a different culture as primitive and to dehumanize that culture in the process. In Apocalypse Now we see a similar interaction between westerners who are traveling deep into the land and culture of another people. In Apocalypse Now soldiers are traveling in a river and have no real interactions with the Vietnamese, even the ones that they are fighting alongside. They could not even distinguish with Vietnamese were the enemy and which were not.In both the westerners see the natives as savage. In the film, the soldiers would kill civilians as if they were not humans. There is a separation between the two. They do not think of the Vietnamese as human but rather targets or obstacles that need to be put down.