Browsing by Author "BOUCHOUARE Zahia"

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    The Visions of Africa and Africans in Timothy Holmes’ David Livingstone Letters and Documents 1841-1872 And Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
    (Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi-Ouzou, 2015) BOUCHOUARE Zahia
    The study of David Livingstone Letters and Documents 1841-1872 and Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness has led to the following results. Livingstone carried the govemment afar the impérial idea while Conrad evaluated its implémentation. Livingstone’s idea or vision of Africa was looked at from three main perspectives, geographical, spiritual and anthropological. Similarly, w lead Conrad’s from the same perspectives. The linkages that we established between the two writers in relation to their view of Africa were not of the order of similarities but also of différences. These différences of ideology were explained in terms of the gap between theory and practice. What Livingstone called “mission civilizatrice” that aimed at bringing light of Christianity and civilisation to Africans is regarded as Eldorado Exploring Expédition by Joseph Conrad carrying buccaneer motives. These expédition leaders were products of the nineteenth century Europe when science and material dominated religion and moral values. Conrad managed to give the reader the resuit and implémentation of ideas and théories launched and developed by nineteenth century famous persons like David Livingstone. The Myth of the Dark Continent is one of the important issues that led to colonialism. Geographically speaking, the African continent was viewed, respecting the myth, as a “Dark” one which needed light spatially and spiritually. In other words, Africa needed a European intervention to clear up the territories and build up stations in order to establish order in the continent and its inhabitants. The latter was described as “children” and “savages” that required to European patemalism and conversion into Christianity to elevate their status. This is not the case with Conrad. Indeed, for him, penetrating the African continent and going up the Congo River was like “travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” (Conrad, 1990:183). It is inhabitedby “créatures” still walking “ail four” and also by cannibals that were capable of restreint despite days of hunger facing the white man’s endless appetite to get and possess more. Despite his ambiguous position to colonialism, Conrad wanted to say that any European intervention or colonialism is done by “robbery and violence”. The colonisation launched in Africa by David Livingstone came to disastrous results not only on the colonised but on the coloniser as well. It is a way to say that colonisation is economically bénéficiai but morally destructive.