In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the work of a racist. Achebe objected to a story that used Africa as a setting for ‘the break-up of one petty European mind’, and depicted Africans as nameless savages.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £7.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Patrick Marnham, a former literary editor of The Spectator, has written biographies of Georges Simenon, Jean Moulin and Diego Rivera.
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