Writing Back

In his essay "An Image of Africa," Achebe charged that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was deeply racist: it used Africa as mere scenery for a European breakdown and denied Africans full humanity. The piece was a thunderclap. It helped launch postcolonial literary criticism — a whole way of reading that asks who gets to tell the story, and who is only described.

Achebe was not alone. Flora Nwapa put Igbo women at the center of fiction, and Buchi Emecheta wrote unsparing novels about motherhood, marriage, and migration. Their shared point was simple and sharp: writing that strips any people of their humanity is failed writing, no matter how polished the prose.