Tainted love. For writers of colonial fiction, Africa held a dark erotic attraction, even if the message underlying their work was that Europeans have no place there. By Jason Cowley

Tropic Moon Georges Simenon (translated by Marc Romano) New York Review Books, 133pp, £6.99

The two most celebrated novels about European colonialism in Africa were written, appropriately enough, by a European, Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1902), and by an African, Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, 1958). These writers were both witness to traumatic change in Africa, they travelled extensively and, to some extent, were displaced figures, Conrad as a Ukrainian-Pole in England, and Achebe as an Igbo in a Hausa- and Yoruba-dominated Nigeria and then, later, as a Nigerian in America, where he still lives. There the similarities end. In a lecture delivered in 1975, Achebe denounced Conrad as an unadulterated "racist". Heart of Darkness, he said, "projects the image of Africa as the 'other world', the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality".




The story he tells of Africa is necessarily partial, circumscribed by the old racial and class hierarchies: it is Marlow, not Kurtz, who speaks repeatedly of the heart of darkness and of the irrationality and metaphysical horror of Africa. It is Marlow who portrays the black Africans he encounters in a pejorative and monolithic way. "A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod on the heels of the donkey," he writes early in the book, establishing an idiom. It could be Ron Atkinson speaking.

We are told by Marlow that Kurtz's gift, before his turn towards barbarism, was language: "his ability to talk, his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness". We have to take his word on this, because we hear little from Kurtz himself and read none of his supposedly elegant prose. And the miraculous gift of expression is never extended to the Africans in the book: they can speak all right, but they are never articulate or coherent.

The effects are similar in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's astounding Journey to the End of the Night (1932), perhaps the greatest work of literary nihilism, and one of the finest novels of the past century, a novel even more problematic than Heart of Darkness in what it reveals of educated European colonial attitudes to Africa. The narrator of the novel is a French doctor called Ferdinand Bardamu. He is scabrous, cynical, enraged, yet often very witty. He is the precursor of Michel Houellebecq's dissolute and fatigued last men. His story is told in an urgent vernacular, a hybrid of the lyric and the gutter. The engine of his disgust is an irrational misanthropy. Wounded on the Western Front, Ferdinand travels to what is now Cameroon in search of a new start. He has none of Marlow's youthful wonder. He knows where he is going and what he will find there: "We were heading for Africa, the real, grandiose Africa of impenetrable forests; fetid swamps, inviolate wildernesses, where black tyrants wallowed in sloth and cruelty on the banks of never-ending rivers."

If Kurtz is an enlightenment rationalist exhausted and then destroyed by his experience of Africa, Ferdinand is representative of the post-Christian new man who emerged from the trenches of the Western Front, the grand renunciator who believes in nothing, least of all in the possibility of progress. He survives his African experience - "Whole trees bristling with live clamour mutilated erections, horror" - precisely because, unlike Kurtz and indeed Marlow, he has no ideals to lose: the chaos and disorder of Africa merely affirm his own nihilism.






When Timar arrives in Gabon he has a young man's optimism, but soon, like the other settlers, he is listless. The tropical heat oppresses him. The days are long and heavy. His head is often "thick with drink before lunch". The "blacks" out on the streets of Libreville or in the bush move as one: homogenous, indistinguishable, nameless, without identity.


Timar begins to see that the Africans are less an undifferentiated mass - "the blacks" - than sovereign selves, with needs and longings similar to his own. As this is Simenon, things are further complicated by sex. Resting in a remote village on the way back to Libreville, Timar meets a young "native" woman. She is an orientalist's fantasy: "She was naked except for a bunch of dried grass that covered her sex. Timar had never seen breasts like hers before . . ." Later, she visits the hut where he is to spend the night. Simenon closes the door on what happens next, but a sense of mutual erotic need is established in a few terse paragraphs. Timar is changed further by the experience and, on his arrival in Libreville, he refuses to be complicit in an attempt by Adele to evade arrest for the murder of the servant through framing an innocent man, the obligatory local black. Timar desires Adele intensely, feels a kind of inchoate love for her, and she for him, but he also loathes the corruption and injustice of the whole rotten French-administered set-up in Gabon, and he must act to prevent injustice.

In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo, the proud Igbo leader from the village of Umuofia who rebels against the arrival of missionaries and British bureaucrats in his ancestral village, hangs himself from a tree, in one last act of defiance and despair. It is as if he knows what awaits his people and continent, and he cannot bear it. In Journey to the End of the Night, Ferdinand leaves Africa as he found it - in a fury of exasperation and contempt. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, sick and withered at the end of his life, crawls alone into the bush. "I am lying here waiting for death," he tells Marlow. The man who once had "immense plans" has lived too long and seen too much. His conclusion? "Exterminate all the brutes."

As for the Africa-returned Marlow, once more settled in London, he tells his aunt, who is worrying about his health, that it is not "my strength that needed nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing". And, in Tropic Moon, Timar eventually leaves Africa, fever-stricken and defeated, without hope or aspiration. He, like Marlow, cannot even begin to imag-ine what is happening in the land he left behind. "Africa doesn't exist," he mutters to himself, at the very end of the book. "Africa - it doesn't exist. Africa . . ."


"Tropic Moon is a dark masterpiece," John Banville wrote recently in the Guardian, "darker even than Heart of Darkness." That a stylist as fastidious as the Booker-garlanded Banville should use an adjective so complacent when commenting on a novel set in Africa is merely further confirmation of Achebe's pessimism. So must Conrad always remain our first point of reference when considering representations of Africa in the novel? Of course not, because, in the end, the best stories, memoirs and essays about Africa - the truest and most empathetic - are written by Africans, from an African perspective, if not necessarily for an African readership.


Jason Cowley is a contributing editor of the New Statesman