Placed under the rubric of Post-colonial works, The Heart of Darkness and Onitsha are two important novellas sharing common features such as implying the collapse of European/ Victorian ideology, colonialism or emperialism in another word. They are both written by non-native English speakers which actually shows the distance in their works while evaluating colonialism in Africa mainly by Britain and also Belgium in Darkness. Marlow and Fintan as the main characters of these two books, see the events without prejudiece as much as they could and as a member of the colonial family both character suffer to some extent which help them to lighten their darkness or strenghten their self without being selfish. Even these two works try to explain the power over the colonies which are exploited and turned into slaves, we also see that this slavery issue is an inevitable thing if there is a greed and cruelty, which is easy to encounter even in the life of white people who are the under the command of one another.
In both books, we can face the noticable hypocricy of the colonial ideology about civilazing people. Initially we see explorers or missioners starting that colonial epoch then turned out to be a business and greed world forgetting about that so called “enlightenment mission”. For example, in The Heart of Darkness by Conrad, there are many black skulls under the window of Mistah Kurzt, which shows what happens if a colored rebels. In Onitsha, there are many slaves working under the sunshine all chained to one another in their own country. Both these examples shows that there is no ideology like civilazing practised in these African soil. They are all fancies to justify White people.
If we look deeper, we can realize that there is a fragmented slavery issue; one under the other or these white people going to Africa for Money or any other thing just becomes the slaves of their dead souls thanks to the greed they have all over their veins. For example, in Onitsha, the father of Fintan was just kicked out of both his profession and also his dreams about finding a mysterious land with all its treasure in Africa by other white people when they see him as a handicap before their plans about colored people and that may also be due to the wife of his trying to help black people, pitying on them and trying to make the wealthy whites realize about their mistreatment to the slaves, which actually did not work. In Conrad’s book, Mr. Kurzt is a famous-seem person who was actually decided to be left out of the plan again and there are some secret organizations behind him. For example his being death was not actually reacted in a gloomy atmosphere in the book by the other characters, which actually is the larger then life symbol of the death of emperialism throughout Europe. That issue was also referred in Onitsha.
After talking about the content, there comes style and the point of view through which the stories comprises itself. These features are mostly affected by the characteristics of the writers who are neither African nor White Anglosaxon. They structure their framework through their alter ego which is quite far from prejudiece and these are Fintan, a naive kid in Onitsha and Marlow in the Heart of Darkness; a man open-minded and brave enough to go to Africa and seek anything which can lighten his “darkness” or we face here the langua without a parole which also refers to the darkness of europe. That idea can be understood from the following example that if you are exposed to some light so strong that can have the ability to make you blind. Even if they both call colored people as savage, that is really no way be called as racist in my opinion because they seem they are making the most of their opportunity to explain the situation of both European and African people. They also talk about the deficiencies of European people. For example, Marlow has a totally sensible insight that can justify a hungery man if he eats human flesh, which can even be explained by religion even if I am a muslim. As it is allowed to even eat pork if we are left one breath for death, of course the quantity must be small enough just to survive, but these contemplations can show how invaluable these works are while understanding the “other”.