Although words such as the word n ​​and relatively vulgar descriptions are used throughout the novel, this does not mean that they are there simply to belittle Africans. A leader of the racist side of this campaign is Chinua Achebe who firmly believes that Joseph Conrad's purpose for this novel was to express his racist views. On the other hand, there is Caryl Phillips who interviewed Achebe and questioned his ideas. In an interview between the two, Achebe said: “'Conrad didn't like black people. Great artists manage to be bigger than their times. In Conrad's case it can actually be shown that there were people at the same time, and before him, who were not racist towards the African'” (Phillips 5). In this statement, Achebe is suggesting that Conrad had no right to write that way because there were people at the time who were not racist, so why should he be? This, however, is false because Conrad did not write this novel being racist, but instead being part of his time. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the general consensus of the European population should have, as we now believe, been negative opinions of others other than themselves. While we now view them as negative, that is not how it was viewed in that time period. For example, the narrator says, “Going up that river was like traveling back to the dawn of the world, when vegetation rebelled on the earth and great trees reigned” (Conrad 41). Clearly, Europeans had a completely different view of the world outside their country. It's not their fault and Conrad was part of this society. He simply wrote with the views and understandings of the surrounding world that his culture had