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A Picture of Africa26
a picture of africa: frenzy,
counternarrative, mimesis
Nidesh Lawtoo
The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and
incomprehensible frenzy.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Drums beat violently, and men leaped up and down in a
frenzy.
—Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
What is the difference between a picture of Africa and an image
of Africa? Are the two the same, as their referent implies, or not quite,
as their medium suggests? These are tricky questions when asked in
the context of modernist and postcolonial studies. They immediately
conjure two gures who have written two of the most inuential and
exemplary narratives about Africa; two untimely artists who always
tend to be considered as opponents, perhaps even rivals, certainly as
antipodes: Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe. Given the amount of
controversy these gures have generated over the decades it would
be difcult to nd a more polarized, loaded and, above all, explosive
relation on the question of narrative representations of Africa than
the one emerging from the confrontation between Conrad's late-
nineteenth-century image of Africa in Heart of Darkness and Achebe's
mid-twentieth-century picture of Africa in Things Fall Apart. This essay
will attempt to move beyond this all-too-human polarization to offer
a clearer image of the impersonal but no less human mimetic forces
that gave form to Achebe's picture of Africa.
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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 59, number 1, Spring 2013. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
Lawtoo 27
In order to do so, I begin with the mirror-like dimension of the
two epigraphs that preface this essay. The uncanny mimetic redou-
bling of images of "frenzy" in colonial and postcolonial narratives in
these quotations indicates that even with respect to the notion at the
very heart of the race quarrel, the opposition between Conrad's and
Achebe's literary pictures of Africa may not always be as clear-cut as
it initially appears to be. This continuity has been recognized before,
most notably by Edward Said, who, in his last interview on Conrad,
suggested that "Things Fall Apart is unintelligible without Heart of
Darkness" ("Interview" 288). In this essay, I explore this suggestion
and show that underneath the rst layer of straightforward opposi-
tion and narrative inversion we nd an underlying mimetic continuity
between Conrad's colonial image of Africa and Achebe's postcolonial
representation.
Given the loaded terms of the race debate, a focus on Achebe's
novelistic reproduction of the Conradian notion of frenzy in Things Fall
Apart may initially appear as a provocation meant to generate even
more animosity, polemics, and accusations across the postcolonial
fence. I thus want to make clear that in what follows my aim is not
to add more re to what is already an incendiary debate. Nor do I
intend to utter battle cries for either side, perpetuating what Edward
Said calls a "rhetoric and politics of blame" (Culture 19). Instead, I
suggest that in our globalized, hybrid, and plural world, taking sides
may no longer be the most productive way to approach such burning
issues. I thus propose a more nuanced and, hopefully, more balanced
approach to the race quarrel that considers both the inversions and
continuities between Conrad's and Achebe's pictures of Africa. The
goal, then, is not to mimetically reproduce ad hominem accusations
but, rather, to better understand the complex textual, contextual,
and theoretical logic that informs such virulent accusations in the rst
place. Above all, my hope is that such an approach will help unmask
the theoretical implications of this exemplary mimetic quarrel for our
contemporary, postcolonial, and transnational times.
In what follows, then, I suggest that Achebe may not only be
considered as Conrad's erce rival and opponent, but also as Conrad's
postcolonial counterpart, perhaps even as his anthropological and
theoretical supplement. As Said recognizes in Culture and Imperial-
ism, "in some of his novels [Achebe] rewrites—painstakingly and with
originality—Conrad" (91). This rewriting, as we shall see, is especially
visible when it comes to the notion that triggered the race debate in
the rst place. In fact, a specic focus on Achebe's narrative use of
images of frenzy in Things Fall Apart reveals that the Nigerian novelist
offers us precious anthropological insights into the social functions of
those rituals that had already caught Conrad's attention in Heart of
A Picture of Africa28
Darkness, mimetic rituals that Conrad's European perspective could
not fully account for. In the rst part of the essay I will show that
Achebe is not only a critic who directly challenges the racist impli-
cations of Conrad's colonial image of Africa, but also a writer who
indirectly pursues and renes Conrad's anthropological investigation
into African rituals that generate a notorious state of frenzy.
In the second part, I shift from an anthropological focus on com-
munal rituals that affect, by mimetic contagion, as René Girard would
say, the precolonial body politic (anthropological mimesis) to more
general formal considerations about the narrative meaning of such
rituals as they are reproduced in the general economy of Achebe's
postcolonial counternarrative (narrative mimesis). As we will see,
images of Africa that depict African people dancing enthusiastically
to the rhythm of the drums circulate freely from colonial narratives
to postcolonial counternarratives, and the meaning of these images,
as well as their narrative evaluations, changes radically in the process
of circulation. If recent critics have argued that Conrad's horror of
mimesis is predicated on disruptive forms of social frenzy (bad mi-
mesis), I shall hereby demonstrate that the the "darkness" and the
"horror" at the "heart" (74) of Things Fall Apart are not generated
by mimetic frenzy as such. On the contrary, the horror, for Achebe,
stems from the dissolution of forms of communal mimesis that are
at the center of precolonial African rituals and are responsible for
holding the Igbo community together (good mimesis).
In the concluding part of the essay, I move beyond "good" and
"bad" representations of mimesis in order to unmask the paradoxi-
cal logic that is responsible for the emergence of images of frenzy
at the heart of a narrative that explicitly sets forth to counter such
images. Drawing on Edward Said's insights into the "crossing over"
(34) between colonial and postcolonial narratives in Culture and Im-
perialism, as well as on Michel Foucault's account of "subjection" (97)
in Power/Knowledge, I will show that Achebe's narrative relation to
Conrad—while not being one of "colonial mimicry" (Bhabha 86)—is
nonetheless based on a paradoxical form of mimetic repetition with
a difference that is both subversive of and complicit with, colonial
power. I shall call this discursive form of mimesis "postcolonial mi-
mesis."
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If similarities exist between colonial mimicry and postcolo-
nial mimesis in terms of the ambivalences and menaces they entail,
important differences remain, if only because postcolonial mimesis
is rooted in the perspective of the postcolonial author who, far from
submitting to colonial power, uses the language of the dominant
to actively reframe colonial narratives in a mimetic way. Whether
Achebe's counternarratives are really the opposite, or not quite, is
what we now turn to nd out.
Lawtoo 29
The Quarrel Revisited
Since the publication of his inuential lecture on Conrad in 1977,
Achebe has been routinely considered Conrad's most formidable critic
in matters of race, and Conrad scholars, while often disagreeing with
Achebe's evaluation of Heart of Darkness, have tended to accept the
Nigerian novelist as Conrad's antipode par excellence, and quite rightly
so. In fact, in "An Image of Africa," Achebe points out with passion
and insight what had escaped Western critics before: namely, that
Heart of Darkness is a fundamentally racist text, not only because it
deprives African people of a narrative perspective, but also because
it represents them as irrational, backward creatures, jumping up
and down the shore, in a delirious state of frenzy that strips them of
reason, self-control, and of their humanity as such.
It is important to stress that, for Achebe, the Conradian no-
tion of frenzy is not a signier among others, but functions as one
of the main targets and leitmotifs of his critique. Using this notion
as leverage for his debunking critical operation, he considers that,
for Conrad, it functions as a marker of a radical difference between
Europeans and Africans that deprives the latter of essential human
attributes, such as reason, language, and culture, ultimately relegat-
ing the subaltern subject to madness, bodily instincts, and the bush.
Consequently, Achebe insists on Conrad's "fake-ritualistic repetition"
of images of "frenzy" ("Image" 338). Placing what he calls, mimick-
ing Conrad, "the mindless frenzy of the rst beginnings" (338) at the
center of his argument, he shows that Conrad's masterpiece functions
as a self-reecting mirror that reveals more about European "myths,"
disavowals, and projections than about Africa itself. In short, Achebe
operates a dialectical inversion of perspective that denounces the
racist implications inherent in Conrad's image of African subjects
"clapping their hands and stamping their feet" (340), "too busy with
their frenzy" (341). This, at least, is the ofcial story that emerges if
we limit ourselves to Achebe's critical evaluation of Heart of Darkness.
If we now briey recall Conrad's side of the story that deals with
enthusiastic outbreaks of ritual frenzy we notice that his narrative
perspective is more ambivalent than Achebe suggests. While clearly
problematic and diminishing, what is at stake in subjects dancing
collectively to the sound of drums clapping their hands, stamping
their feet, and rolling their eyes (35) is not only an expression of
barbarism and savagery; nor can it be only dismissed as a ritual
phenomenon characteristic of "prehistoric" (35) people (though this
image invokes both these things). As I have argued in "A Picture of
Europe," Conrad's account of frenzy in Heart of Darkness is also one of
the rst novelistic attempts to represent a mysterious anthropological
phenomenon that is found across different cultures, is widespread