What "Darkness" Was Actually Doing

By Suhail Ahamad Darjee

May 19, 2026

Category: Historical Archives

Tags: postcolonial literature, heart of darkness, colonial curriculum, victorian adventure novels, chinua achebe, literary history, decolonizing the curriculum, haggard kipling conrad, africa in literature, imperial gothic

In 1885, H. Rider Haggard published King Solomon's Mines and in doing so established something that would prove far more durable than his plot. His narrator, Allan Quatermain, leads two English companions through southern Africa toward a legendary diamond mine, and the landscape they cross is rendered consistently as inert, feminised, and waiting. Haggard describes Quatermain's party climbing what the novel calls "Sheba's Breasts" — two hills shaped, in the English imagination, like a woman's body — before penetrating the interior to claim its riches. The word "darkness" attaches itself to this interior like a second skin. Not the dark of night, not the dark of uncertainty. A specific, moral darkness. The kind that needs light brought to it.

This was not Haggard's invention. The metaphor already had a career by 1885, running through travelogues, missionary dispatches, and parliamentary speeches. What the adventure novelists did was give it a grammar. They turned a loose set of imperial assumptions into a story form — with heroes, obstacles, and resolutions — that readers could inhabit, carry home, and return to. And that story form is still being handed to secondary school students across the UK, the US, and across the former colonial world itself, often with very little examination of what it was engineered to do.

That is the thing worth sitting with. Not whether these books are racist — that argument is largely settled — but how the language worked, technically, and what it costs us to go on teaching it as if the technology were neutral.

Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of History, published in 1837, that Africa was "the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night." This is not a throwaway line. It is a structural claim: Africa exists outside time. Outside history. The continent is not behind Europe — that would imply it could catch up — but rather categorically elsewhere, in a different ontological register. Before Haggard had written a word of fiction, the philosophical scaffolding was already standing. The novelists moved in and furnished it.

Patrick Brantlinger, whose 1988 study Rule of Darkness remains the closest map we have of this territory, showed how Africa grew "dark" precisely as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists arrived to study it. The light they brought was filtered through an ideology that required the darkness to be there. Each new report from the interior — each travelogue by David Livingstone, each dispatch from Henry Morton Stanley — described something that needed civilizing. The description justified the presence. The presence generated more description. By the time Conrad sat down to write Heart of Darkness in 1899, the image of Africa as primeval, pre-linguistic, and essentially empty of history was not a controversial claim. It was the furniture of the educated English imagination.

Conrad's Marlow says, early in the novella, that Africa was once a "blank space" on the map he had dreamed over as a boy. Then explorers went in, and "it had become a place of darkness." Chinua Achebe, in his 1975 lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — published in the Massachusetts Review in 1977 under the title "An Image of Africa" — noticed what this sentence was actually doing. The blank space was not blank. It was full of people. The darkness was not darkness. It was the projection of a culture that could not see what it had not already decided to see.

Achebe's argument, which transformed postcolonial literary criticism, was precise rather than merely political. He was not saying Conrad was a bad person. He was saying that Conrad was doing something specific with language — denying Africans speech, reducing them to grunts and "violent babble," making them the backdrop against which a European psychological drama could unfold. Africa, in Heart of Darkness, is not a place. It is a mirror tilted to show Europeans their own potential for savagery. That is its only permitted function. The people who live there have no interiority, no language with weight, no history that the novel acknowledges. This is not incidental to the text's famous ambiguity. It is the condition of that ambiguity's possibility.

Haggard's Quatermain, near the end of King Solomon's Mines, watches a young African woman named Foulata die — and decides that her death is, essentially, a relief. He reflects that "no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement between Captain Good and herself a desirable occurrence." A character is then given a line that the novel presents as her own wisdom: "Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?" The language of racial hierarchy is placed in the mouth of the person it demeans, and the novel treats this as closure rather than horror. Quatermain is not troubled. The reader is not meant to be troubled.

This is worth pausing over. The racial logic of the novel is not argued; it is assumed, and then dramatized as nature. The African character voices her own subordination. The English adventurers leave with the diamonds. The darkness stays dark.

Kipling took the same architecture and made it explicitly evangelical. "The White Man's Burden," published in February 1899 — the same year as Heart of Darkness- described colonised peoples as "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." The phrase is remarkable for its structure: "half-devil" suggests moral corruption requiring suppression; "half-child" suggests developmental incompleteness requiring instruction. The two halves together produce a being who cannot govern itself and whose governance by others is therefore not domination but duty. The language does not argue for this. It assumes it as the poem's premise. The colonized person is never a witness to their own condition. They are only ever an object of the white man's burden — described, classified, managed, and saved.

What strikes me, reading these texts now, is not the crudeness of the ideology but the sophistication of the form. The adventure genre is not a blunt instrument. It creates identification. The reader follows Quatermain through the dark interior, inhabits his perspective, shares his fear and his triumph. By the time the diamonds are in the bag and the party is headed home, the reader has spent two hundred pages inside a consciousness for which Africa's inhabitants are either useful allies (the "good native" who recognizes English superiority and assists it) or obstacles to be overcome. The form does its work not by stating the ideology but by making it the water the reader swims in for the duration of the book.

The curriculum question is not simple. I want to be clear about that, because the conversation often collapses too quickly into two bad options: teach the books uncritically, or remove them. Neither option engages seriously with what is actually at stake.

Heart of Darkness remains a set text for Edexcel A-Level English Literature in England. A Collins Classroom Classics edition — designed specifically for school use, affordable, pitched explicitly at students preparing for 2025 examinations — was published in 2021. King Solomon's Mines and Kipling's verse appear with regularity on undergraduate syllabi across former British colonial territories, taught by Cambridge Assessment International Education, a study published in Curriculum Perspectives concluded in 2019, whose syllabi show a consistent and marked underrepresentation of women writers from the Global South and near-total exclusion of authors from the Middle East and North Africa. The British literary canon, in other words, does not merely persist in British schools. It persists in the schools of countries that Britain colonized, taught to students whose grandparents lived under the system these texts were helping to narrate.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o had understood this, or something like it, since at least 1968, when he co-authored the petition later published as "On the Abolition of the English Department" that called for the University of Nairobi to centre African literature rather than use English texts as the default reference point against which everything else was measured. His argument was not that English literature had nothing to offer. It was that the assumption embedded in the curriculum that the English tradition was the tradition, from which you could view other literatures as departures, was itself a colonial claim, dressed up as aesthetic judgment.

That claim has not been dislodged. It has been modestly amended. A novel here. A postcolonial criticism unit there. The occasional Achebe essay paired with Heart of Darkness so that the two can be weighed against each other — which is a good thing, but which also has the quiet effect of making Achebe the responder and Conrad the text. The original and the critique. The literature and its commentary.

There is a counterargument I find genuinely compelling, and I don't want to skip past it.

These novels are not monolithic. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines includes African characters who function, within their limits, as individuals with dignity — Ignosi, the displaced king, is written with real complexity, more than a simple foil. Conrad's whole narrative strategy involves a frame that distances the reader from Marlow's claims, a technique that some scholars read as deliberate critique rather than unwitting exposure. Kipling, who is the easiest to condemn, wrote work elsewhere- Kim, for instance — that showed a genuine and uncomfortable fascination with the hybrid, the border-crosser, the child who does not stay in his assigned category. These texts are doing more than one thing at once.

But here is the difficulty: "more than one thing at once" does not undo what the dominant thing was. A novel can treat one African character with depth and still render Africa itself as a place without history. A narrator can be unreliable and still deny language to the people he describes. The critique of empire can coexist with the aestheticisation of imperial violence in the same text, and when that text is put in front of a fifteen-year-old without the tools to pull it apart, the aesthetic experience is doing its work whether or not the critical apparatus is also available.

The question is not whether these are rich texts. They are. The question is what we are actually teaching when we teach them — and who, specifically, is in the room.

In 2023, Cambridge University Press published Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, edited by Ato Quayson of Stanford and Ankhi Mukherjee of Oxford, which proposed something more structural than adding diverse authors to existing syllabi: a rethinking of the organizing logic of literary education, from the premise upward. The book is open access. It is being read. Its proposals are not yet being implemented at scale.

The "darkness" that Haggard, Conrad, and Kipling inscribed into the literary imagination of the English-speaking world was not a description. It was a technology — a way of making a continent legible to an empire that needed it to be legible in precisely that way, at precisely that moment, to justify precisely what it was doing there. The technology worked. It shaped how educated people understood Africa for several generations. It is still in the syllabus.

That is not a coincidence. It is a choice, made every year, by people who have the authority to make different ones.

SOURCES

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Cornell University Press, 1988. (Foundational text; source of "genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent," including the central thesis that Africa grew dark as Victorian knowledge-makers flooded it with light.)
Brantlinger, Patrick. "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, 1985, pp. 166–203. (Original journal article on which the book chapter is based; key quotation about darkness and imperialist ideology.)
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Massachusetts Review, vol. 18, no. 4, Winter 1977, pp. 782–94. (Source of Achebe's central argument, the "thoroughgoing racist" claim, and the critique of Africa as mere setting for European psychology.)
Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon's Mines. 1885. (Direct source of Quatermain/Foulata passage, "can the sun mate with the darkness," and "Sheba's Breasts" landscape description; quoted/paraphrased from Encyclopedia.com and Cambridge Core scholarly analysis.)
Zamani Alavijeh, H. "Racial Ideologies and Imperial Discourses: A New Historicist Reading of Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden.'" Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 3, 2024, pp. 7–13. (Source for Kipling's "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child" and structural analysis of imperial ideology in the poem.)
Quayson, Ato, and Ankhi Mukherjee, eds. Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum. Cambridge University Press, 2023. (Open access; source of the 2023 publication date and broader argument about curriculum reform.)
Collins Classroom Classics. Heart of Darkness: A-Level Set Text Student Edition. HarperCollins, 2021. Edexcel AS and A Level English Literature. ISBN 978-0-00-846542-1. (Confirms Heart of Darkness remains an active Edexcel A-Level set text, with exams listed through 2025.)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba. "On the Abolition of the English Department." 1968/published 1972. (Source of Ngũgĩ's argument about centering African literature; quoted via Project MUSE analysis and ngugiwathiongo.com biography.)
Briguglio, Marie, and Suzanne Abela. "The Colonial Legacy in Cambridge Assessment Literature Syllabi." Curriculum Perspectives, 2019. Springer Nature Link. (Source of findings on underrepresentation of Global South women authors and exclusion of MENA authors from CAIE syllabi.)
Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. 1837. Trans. J. Sibree. (Source of the "land of childhood" and "dark mantle of Night" passage on Africa; cited via Springer chapter on H.M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent.)