Colonial Nostalgia and Memory in Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

The representation of pre-colonial and colonial African life in fiction raises persistent questions about whose vision of Africa is authorised and what purposes that vision serves, and a comparison of Elechi Amadi's The Concubine and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness illuminates the vast difference between African self-representation and European colonial projection. This study examined how both texts construct the African world and African subjects in relation to the categories of primitivism, civility, and the supernatural. A postcolonial critical methodology drawing on Chinua Achebe's critique of Conrad, Edward Said's Orientalism, and Igbo literary scholarship was applied. Amadi's novel depicts an Ikwerre community in pre-colonial South South Nigeria as a fully realised social world with complex legal, spiritual, and domestic structures, while Conrad's novella uses the Congo as a symbolic backdrop for a European philosophical meditation on civilisation and darkness. The analysis revealed that Conrad's Africa is entirely de-populated of interior African perspectives, while Amadi's novel refuses the categories of the exotic or the primitive entirely. Both texts, read together, demonstrate the political stakes of representation and the difference between an African insider's novelistic vision and a European outsider's symbolic appropriation. The study concludes that this pairing is essential for any critical engagement with the representation of Africa in world literature and recommends it as a core text combination for African literature courses at universities in the South South geopolitical zone.

Keywords: colonial representation, Amadi, Conrad, Africa in fiction, postcolonial critique