“The literature of Africa is fed by three great rivers: the invisible, the visible and the oral” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not Child)

Generalisations. Stereotypes. Theories. This piece is definitely not late. It is not tired either, though it could have been both, if, after Joseph Conrad’s description of Africa as a single mass,^[1] over a century ago, the generalisations had stopped. But they did not. The continent is still, in many corners of the world, treated as a single republic, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of spite. Yet the bother is not the unpretentious ignorance of grouping a continent into one, it is but the contempt behind it: the settled, centuries-old conviction that Africa and its people are deserving of reduction.           

A few months ago, at a 2025 rally, Trump referred to Somalia and other African nations as “disasters”, “filthy,” and “disgusting”; grouping an entire continent, once again, in a single negative breath. This is no breaking news; there have been similar stereotypes over time. In 2023, Romanian diplomat Dragos Viorel Tigau, sparked outrage when, as a Black monkey appeared at the window of a conference room, ahead of a diplomatic meeting in Nairobi, he remarked, “the African group has joined us”.^[2]  James Watson, in a 2007 interview with The Sunday Times,² expressed doubt that African intelligence could ever match that of the West.³ That a man celebrated for unlocking the architecture of human life, could, in the same breath, rank some of that life as lesser was not something out of a contradiction^[3], but a continuity of the same tradition that gave Conrad his literary confidence. Years ago, Mahatma Gandhi, the celebrated face of Indian anti-colonialism, described Black South Africans in terms so degrading they bear no repetition here.^[4] Gandhi’s remarks show that the contempt of the African person was never a reserve of the White supremacist; it was that which could travel across races and even among those who experienced the weight of colonial subjugation. History bears witness to stereotypes against Black people which were deeply embedded in Arab kingdoms and persist to this day across North Africa and West Asia.^[5] The adjectives have always been ready, and the contempt has always found a voice. 

Mamdani in Citizen and Subject, introduces Jan Smuts^[6], who, delivering the Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford in 1929, described the African as, ‘a child type, with a child psychology and outlook’, being careful to note that Smuts was no outlier, but one who spoke from within an “honourable” Western tradition.^[7] The significance being in not what language depicts about Africans but what it assumes about Europeans. To declare another a child is to declare oneself the adult. And so white supremacy through Smuts, was not merely contempt for Blackness but an architecture of self-elevation requiring the diminishment of others as its foundation. Makau Mutua names this structure precisely in his ‘Savages-Victims-Saviours’ human rights framework^[8],  the West cast as a benevolent saviour, Africa as the perpetual victim, and her leaders as savages requiring correction.              

While Joseph Conrad spent the length of his book generalising and erasing a people and its continent, Binyavanga Wainaina, in his essay, ‘How to Write About Africa’, spent four pages returning the favour, in satire, on the generalisations of Africa. Whereas Chinua Achebe challenged these generalities in a lecture, Humphrey Sipalla excavated the architectural root that made Conrad confident. Each, in their own decade and form, chipped away at the same structure Conrad deployed with poise because the structure, as Trump keeps reminding us, is still standing.

Achebe, through his 1975  lecture, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness‘ (a critical argument that echoes through literary scholarship) noted that Africa is not simple, that the impulse to simplify it, generalise it, stereotype its people, flattens a continent of profound complexity. He warns that Africans must reclaim their own narratives, rather than be cast as “others” in stories told about them. Conrad, decades before that warning, had done precisely the opposite: defined Africa as a single form, a shapeless darkness, a continent devoid of voice, history, and humanity, existing only as a backdrop for European dread. Achebe answers back, naming this violence plainly: a racist text masquerading as a critique of imperialism. Achebe’s critique is, at its core, an ethical and aesthetic condemnation, describing Conrad’s book as lacking in art and moral vision. What Western criticism celebrated as insight, Achebe exposes as prejudice elevated to art. Conrad frames tragedy as disorder, describing it as that unsettling moment when the African steps outside the role the Western imagination has assigned them. The conquered, in Conrad’s world, must remain conquered. He captures this with chilling clarity: “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”.^[9] The horror here is the absence of bondage, the sight of something that should be shackled, moving freely. For Conrad, that freedom is the monstrosity. Achebe’s anger becomes crystal: Conrad’s literary confidence, this audacity to define, in totality, a people, a culture, a continent of voices in the crudest form.      

I have no quarrel to add to that pile. What I want to trace instead is a quieter, sharper irony, captured the moment Conrad stops being the critic and becomes the subject of an African literary scholar: anatomised, satirised, and ultimately dethroned in Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2005 essay, ‘How to Write About Africa.’ Wainaina, in his writing, does not attack Conrad by name. He does not need to. Through satire, he inhabits the very voice that flattened Africa, exposing it by performing it to absurdity. He inherits Achebe’s anger but trades the courtroom for the stage. Where Achebe argues, Wainaina performs, and impeccably so. It is a delicious irony, then, that Conrad (and many others), who rendered Africa ‘voiceless, shapeless, and primordial’, finds himself rendered as a type, a blueprint, a cautionary specimen in Wainaina’s essay. Wainaina targets the clichés of the Western African narrative: naked refugee children, darkness, delinquents, dead bodies… “or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies”. He frames the satire as a learnable tradition, a repeatable one, exposing the literary erasure of Africa. Achebe told us Conrad was wrong. Wainaina shows us how easy it is to be wrong in exactly the same way, and how many writers, consciously or not, have followed the instructions to the letter.

Wainaina gives us the writer who treats an entire continent as a single, undifferentiated country, which necessitates that African characters remain starving, exotic, and above all, marginal. Conrad is the unnamed in Wainaina’s essay: the essay’s deep grammar, its unspoken forerunner, the original instruction, endlessly followed.

But how did a literary construct fossilize into fact? How did one man’s darkly imaginative rendering of a continent he barely knew get repeated and endorsed across generations, until Africa-as-darkness stopped being Conrad’s opinion and became the world’s default setting? Humphrey Sipalla is instructive here.^[10] In 2022, in his book chapter, ‘Illegitimate Contradictions: The Construction of Centralisation, Exclusion and Marginalisation in the Kenyan State’, Sipalla analyses both Ali Mazrui and Mahmood Mamdani to argue that the finesse of late colonialism rested on two pillars: a wealth of accumulated knowledge of how to colonise, and a formalised discipline of execution. It is in the former, the accumulated knowledge, that Conrad’s work finds its most honest classification. Published in the thick of colonialism, and in the wake of the Berlin Conference, Heart of Darkness was not a retrospective prejudice or an isolated literary misstep; it was a document produced from within the colonial project, as part of a long tradition of knowing how to narrate conquest, how to render the colonised as deserving of their condition, how to make subjugation legible and even beautiful to the Western reader. 

Sipalla’s account of Kenyan colonial legislation; the ordinances, the decrees from 1897, each one a calculated blow,^[11] illuminates something important about Conrad’s text. The colonial state did not arrive to fill a void. It arrived, as Sipalla notes, intent on displacing what already existed. Conrad’s novel did the same work in prose. Where the ordinance dispossessed Africans of land and labour, the literature dispossessed them of complexity, humanity, and voice. The pen and the kipande were instruments of the same science. One made subjugation legal. The other made it legible. And it is from this thinking that Heart of Darkness becomes deliberate - not a misreading of Africa, but the colonial project’s most elegant sentence.            

Sipalla’s disquiet points beyond the laws and the literature, toward the more unsettling question of why the imposed story outlived the imposer. Wainaina offers not an answer but a counter-move; making the story visible, and in doing so, making it harder for the story to persist unquestioned. Where Achebe delivered the protest, naming Conrad and delivering a verdict the literary world could not ignore, Sipalla worked beneath it, excavating the colonial infrastructure that made Conrad possible. But it’s Wainaina who finally completes what both men began, becoming Conrad, momentarily, long enough to show us the seams. He does not ask to reject Conrad. He makes it simply impossible to read him, or those who inherited his gaze, or any human ideology that ranks human worth by race.

Carolyn W. Gatonye is a Pan-Africanist and legal researcher whose work interrogates the intersections of law and governance, with a particular interest in regional integration, protest cultures and human rights.

Endnotes