Anthony Fothergill's "Cannibalising Traditions: Representation and Critique in Heart of Darkness"

"... 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, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage." 

Fothergill's essay sets out to explain how during the 19th century, the combination of literary and scientific observations about the African "Other" established, and later reinforced, biased assumptions about the African natives, that not only affected Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but other literary works published around the same time.

Key Points in Fothergill's Essay:

• Due to establishment of travel and missionary writing in the media, Europeans were engrained with a biased impression of Africa and its inhabitants. Fothergill states, "anybody going to Africa for the first time had in a sense already been there; carried, consciously or not, cultural luggage containing well-established assumptions, and expectations, and imaginative constructions of 'the African'" (pg 446). Therefore, those traveling to Africa viewed Africa with a biased lens that in turn would affect their opinions and experiences regarding the continent.

• Fothergill also claims that representations and assumptions regarding the Africans were shaped by the scientific, religious, and social atmosphere during the time. Modern science was used in an attempt to understand these "primitive" people. Fothergill says that, "the perceived cultural implications of Darwin's theory of evolution and by archeological discoveries made in the wake of colonial expansion" eventually "reinforced even as it modified the terms of earlier literary representations" (pg 447). Also in regards to the culture of 19th century Europe, World Exhibitions presented stereotypical understandings of different races. Religion was also used to explain the African "Other," as the story of Ham in the bible was used to explain the characteristics and inferiority of the African people.

• Fothergill then moves on to explain how Heart of Darkness fits into the "contradictory cultural field"of the time because "it embodies a radically ambivalent tendency in representing the Other" (pg 449). Marlow's narrative is quite contradictory, because although at times it embraces the stereotypical representations of "savages," it also has the tendency to question as to why these people are seen as savages and the "enemy." Fothergill states, "[Conrad's] representation of the African offers a self-conscious critique of Europeans representations, even to the point of questioning the very basis of such Otherness." Fothergill uses two key scenes that exemplify Marlow's confusion regarding the natives, on pages 33-35, as well on page 36.