Guest blogger: Catherine Anyango – your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others

Do I think Heart of Darkness is racist? Are Conrad's Congolese crude stereotypes without language or culture? I don't think it's the 'go to' book for well rounded portraits of late 19th-century Africans. Conrad was documenting a truly horrific time and because racism is involved it's definitely there. But racism is about superiority, and Conrad was too aware of the subtleties of human nature to assert that whites were inherently superior to blacks. Most of his black characters are one dimensional, as are most of his white characters. The only character with any real dimension is Marlow, a thinly veiled self portrait, so really what we could accuse him of narcissism.

One of the main criticisms of the book is the way that Conrad describes the 'natives' - criminals, enemies, rebels, savages, niggers … On the surface these are negative, a close reading reveals that he uses the words to draw attention to their hollowness, and undermine the regime that has made them acceptable: They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from over the sea. The word nigger appears 10 times. Heart of Darkness was published (in its entirety) in 1902, and in the same year Kipling published his Just So Stories, in which the Ethiopian says to the Leopard: 'Oh, plain black's best for a nigger.' Neither usage can be branded entirely racist because the word was more common then, but I use Kipling as an example because while he was a total imperialist, Conrad was not.

Conrad acknowledged that 'brute force' alone had allowed for the conquest of the Congo, and in that saw no proof of superiority, stressing that "your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others." His distaste for Empire is evident in his descriptions of Europe, the 'whited sepulchre'. The European characters are drawn with irony, and without redeeming features – at best bumbling idiots, at worst sinister and cruel. When he describes a 'nigger' being beaten, it is with a compassion that makes it hard to consider the word pejorative:

A nigger was being beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly. I saw him, later on, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking very sick and trying to recover himself: afterwards he arose and went out – and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again ... The beaten nigger groaned somewhere. 'What a row the brute makes!' said the indefatigable man with the mustaches, appearing near us. 'Serve him right. Transgression – punishment – bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That's the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations for the future.

Marlow's constant sarcasm towards his fellow officers underlines his distaste and disbelief in them and what they represent, something in which he is implicit  –  "after all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings" – but increasingly rejects. Identifying himself with a concept that becomes more and more distasteful to him is key to his transformation. At one point, looking at the shrunken heads lined up outside Kurtz's house, he cuts short a description of how the local tribe adore Kurtz:

The camps of these people surrounded the place, and the chiefs came every day to see him. They would crawl… 'I don't want to know anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr Kurtz,' I shouted. Curious, this feeling that came over me that such details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr Kurtz's windows. After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist – obviously – in the sunshine.

I think Conrad, through Marlow, is trying to make a clear distinction between barbarism and the larger question of the 'subtle horrors' of the occupation. He is questioning the morality of the chain of events that has led to a situation so perverse (the crawling of the tribe towards Kurtz) that he cannot look it in the eye. While savagery has a 'right to exist in the sunshine', clearly the insidious effects of the Belgian occupation do not.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity– like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend.

This passage is often cited in the racist debate – the 'suspicion of their not being inhuman'. To me, this reads as an extremely honest reaction to something that one has come to with preconceptions. And any rejection in it I think comes from the attraction he feels to it. It is the Freudian Uncanny – something thing we reject for being too close to us and at the same time too far. Julia Kristeva describes it in almost the same terms as Conrad: "Not me. Not that. But not nothing, neither … a reality that, if I acknowledge, crushes me."

A reaction like this isn't racist – it's human. It's not a rejection of something owing to inferiority, but to difference, and a strange attraction to that difference, a cognitive dissonance. We don't always automatically accept the unfamiliar, but that doesn't mean we never will. Yes, Marlow is at times contemptible. But Conrad makes him this way in order to highlight the fact that while, by the end, he is not quite looking at the world through Bono's sunglasses, he is definitely a changed man. He is offering us a portrait without cliches of a man dealing with the time in which he lives, and through this, criticising the time itself.  It would be sad to dismiss the book on racist terms, because it deals with the complexities of our prejudices towards people. Our attitudes which are not always as clean cut or as pleasant as we would like to believe.

Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness as a reaction to what he saw in the Congo. Had he been racist, I doubt we'd still be reading the book, because it would have been a different story, the way Swallows and Amazons is different to Lord of the Flies. What it is instead is a psychological portrait of a deeply flawed and increasingly troubled protagonist, who is struggling to reconcile what he thinks he knows with a certainty that it is wrong. If the protagonist starts out racist and has an epiphany, does it mean his racism is embedded or is it just lack of knowledge? You know you were all watching when Viv Boardman had her homophobic views turned around on Celebrity Wife Swap when she got to know Rhona Cameron's partner, Suran.

Conrad wouldn't even have had that sort of depth of interaction with the Congolese, but still, he makes a choice. He does not sacrifice Marlow as a believable character by making him want to hug every black man he sees the moment he steps foot on African soil. Doing this would have done the events of the time a disservice. By presenting Marlow as a realistic Victorian with unformed views, and avoiding fantasy, he gives the events and horror an extra ring of truth, a weight and authority. Along with the Casement Report, Heart of Darkness exposed the true nature of the Belgian occupation to the rest of the world. Thirty years later the ridiculous Tintin in the Congo was commissioned to show the occupation as a great and benign civilising force. Conrad could have written the same kind of book, but instead chose to expose the regime for what it was, with no heroes or salvation and not a lot of drama - just the ongoing, grinding, misery of it.

OR! he was a total racist, and is now turning in his grave because a savage from the depths of Africa has adapted his book.

Heart of Darkness is The Observer's Graphic Novel of the Month. It can be purchased from the SelfMadeHero store today.