llet’s Africa Since 1875 it is stated that Europeans with that carapace of arrogance and assurance, that moral lan, that immense conviction of the rightness of their actions that every expansionist people needs to fuel their dynamism. Moreover, this sense of intense self-assurance received what seemed to be scientific justification as a result of the development of contemporary idea about race. Black men and brown men were “lesser breeds” over whom it was natural for white men to hold dominion (45). The whites don’t understand the culture therefore do not find it valuable. Another example of this is in Heart of Darkness when Marlow speaks of the fireman on the steamboat. “He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge”(Conrad 106). The fireman has been removed from his own culture and left no space or time for his own culture. Marlow patronizes the culture left behind as he talks of his traditions as “clapping his hands and stamping his feet”. He considers the fireman’s culture to have no value. African Culture is also discussed having no value in Hallet’s book. To late nineteenth-century observers Africa seemed the most “barbarous” and “uncivilized” of the continents. “Barbarous” and “uncivilized” were imprecise and emotive epithets, which contemporary modern Europeans applied to many alien cultures whose mores they did not attempt to understand (Hallet 40). Unfortunately, the human race has demonstrated its cruelty and inhumanity throughout time. This has been especially horrific in dealings between races. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness illustrates the preponderance of European racism and its attended brutality in Africa. By looking at the Africans as a group rather...
