Colonialism and Beyond Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness

Colonialism and Beyond Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness

My entire education has taken place in the United States of America. It has consisted of public school, college, and graduate school. I only had one teacher during my public school career who wasn't white. I had a female African-American English teacher when I was in Junior High School. The student body of my junior high school was over ninety-percent black, yet our faculty was entirely white with the exception of two black teachers. So, during my entire elementary and high school careers I never saw a person of color in the front of the class.

I vividly remember that the only time black people (or non-whites) were discussed was in history class, moreover, when we got to the chapter that dealt with slavery. I had to make a big adjustment in high school because my high school was well over ninety-percent white (just the opposite of my jr. high school.) Fredrick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and the Nat Turner rebellion was pretty much the extent of people of color within the curriculum.

I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts and during my junior year of high school something unexpected happened. College students from Smith College, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts did an academic intervention by providing tutoring and actually sitting in on our ("minority student's) classes. This tutorial program became the Smith-Amherst Tutorial Project which enabled me to spend two summers following my junior and senior years of high school at Smith College, taking college-level classes. These classes were taught by professors from Umass and Smith College who were kind enough to give up part of their summer for ...

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...end of a journey we do not end quite where we thought we would have.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1963. 251-62.

---. No Longer at Ease. New York: Dell, 1960.

---. Things Fall Apart. New York: Dell, 1958.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 1963.

Nelson, Emmanuel. "Chinua Achebe." Postcolonial African Writers. Ed. Pusha Parekh. Westport: Greenwood, 1998.

Taylor, Willene. "A Search for Values in Things Fall Apart." Understanding Things Fall Apart. Ed. Solomon Iyasere. New York: Whitson, 1998.

Turnbull, Colin. The Lonely African. Garden City: Simon and Schuster, 1962.

Watt, Ian. "Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth Century Thought." Joseph's Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 77-89.