Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe's essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Achebe - a highly distinguished Nigerian novelist and university teacher - looked with fresh eyes at a novel that was set in Africa, but in which Africans appear only as onlookers or as indistinguishable "savages". Dismissing the prevailing portrayal of Joseph Conrad as a liberal hero whose anti-imperialist views...