Race and racial thinking: Africa and its others in Heart of Darkness and other stories

It is my contention that colonial racism was at its most dangerous not merely in the stigma attached to skin pigmentation but in its calculated plan to exclude other races, to destroy cultures that are considered potentially dangerous to colonial interests. Colonial racism translated itself into tribalism which not only introduced a new hierarchy but also became for the Africans a way by which ascend to power. The paper argues that while colonial political logic was deemed administrative in most countries, this was not the case for the Democratic Republic of Congo where it was militaristic. This partially explains why, in less than two decades, Congo saw the blood, of at least eight million natives, flowing silently. To revisit the country s popular history, absent in most history books, this paper considers the colonial library that wrote about the popular history of Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908 focusing on two main figures: Joseph Conrad and William Sheppard, who, despite representing Congo from two contrasting viewpoints, offer a space from which reading racism and rethinking history in the view that history can also be unmade and re-written for a better future.