I: Introduction:        
      Through the nuanced and extensive characterization of Oil on Water’s predominantly African cast Helon Habila reinstates the agency of his characters in a way often refused by (neo-)colonial discourses. Discussing agency in literature involves the question of figures in stories displaying the capacity to act, or more specifically, to act voluntarily, deliberately and in accordance with some intrinsic motivation. This means pursuing goals and making use of their voice. Associated with the notion of individuality and freedom by enlightenment-era Western philosophers like John Locke, who conceptualized free action as the ability to do or to forego doing something based on one’s own will[1], agency requires the ability to reason. Accordingly, then denial of both individuality and reason are frequent avenues of undermining it. Another related notion, that is important in regards to Habila’s construction of agency in Oil on Water, is that agency always exists in relation to, or negotiation between freedom and necessity: the agent is situated within a temporal and material context in accordance with the constraints and allowances of which individuals can make rational and normative decisions, weighing “alternative possible trajectories of action” (Emirbayer / Mishe, 10), based on a history of previous experience[2]. That aspect of agency stands at the core of this essay’s perspective on conflict. Focussing the analysis of both primary texts on personal motivation, individuality and choice, informed by environmental constraints, violence in the following is regarded as ‘cyclical’ when its manifestation, or its effects further contribute to its causes, thus supporting its repeated emergence. While both texts depict self-perpetrating cycles of violence, Conrad’s image of such a cycle is one of natural inevitability, while Habila’s revolves around systemic and environmental pressures limiting the options of agents.

     This essay compares Oil on Water’s strategy of constructing its African characters with those deployed by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, reading Habila’s strategy of bestowing agency as directly contrary to the rhetoric of Conrad’s novel, stressing, what the colonial classic omits. In doing so, Helon Habila does not only write back directly to Conrad, as will be discussed in the final section, but more broadly dispels two prominent strategies in (neo-)colonial discourses, of denying the colonized people’s agency. In the first case, agency is denied through ascribing ‘primitiveness’ or ‘savagery’, defusing the uncomfortable personhood of the subjugated other by questioning their capacity to act in accordance with reason or make informed decisions. Ascribing to the local population of the colonies a similar capacity to act and judge, as modern Western discourse might do to children, the violence of the colonizer is justified in terms of a disciplinary measure and any resistance can be discredited through framing as blind, irrational violence, thus adding further fuel to the colonial rhetoric of ‘savages’ and ‘civilizing-missions’. The brand of racism which allows Marlow, the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to feel horror and disgust over the atrocities committed against the inhabitants of the Congo, while still justifying them as a sort of natural inevitability within his manicheist Eurocentrism, is a prime example of this infantilizing attitude within colonial discourse. Section two of this essay provides a number of examples for how and to what end the language of Marlow’s narration obfuscates or undermines the capacity of African characters to rationally act or pursue personal goals.         

            The second, more neo-colonial mode of apologetic, which Habila’s novel responds to, seems to grant the people their agency, only to either bracket it at another point, or defer to them the responsibility for their own situation. It is a rhetoric still practiced by contemporary supporters of the oil-trade[3]. It is made explicit in Habila’s novel by the one character acting as a personified avatar of Western economic control in Nigeria, Mr. Floode, claiming: “The people don’t understand what they are doing to themselves” (Habila 103). When agency is granted to the colonized, then it is done so as an opportunity for shifting blame. The lack of actual upward mobility for the colonized subjects under the imposed system is blamed on suppositions of immaturity or innate selfishness and greed, informed by a Manicheism similar to the basis of Marlow’s outlook. While the capacity of the subjects to act is in this case acknowledged, the rationality of their actions is immediately put into question and the capacity to assess potential consequences denied. As evidenced by Rufus’s response to Floode, the narrative of Oil on Water stresses another dimension of (neo-)colonial oppression, which sentiments like Floode’s ignore: the severe limitations, which a destabilized economy and ecology present on the colonized people’s options. Habila paints the picture of a system in which such limitations create a cycle of violence and exploitation perpetuating themselves despite the agency of both their perpetrators and victims. The third section goes deeper into the characters and narrative of Habila’s novel to qualify this notion with textual proof.

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II – Heart of Darkness – The Absence of the Active Colonized Subject:           
     Presenting us, through the proxy of the story’s primary narrator, with an image of Africa as recounted by Marlow, everything in the novel is tinted by the hazy, colonial lens of his descriptions. In keeping with the idea that “Marlow’s tale will be not centred on, but surrounded by, its meaning” (Watt 321), the most telling aspect of his characterization of African people is predicated on what Marlow omits: While the people of the Congo-region are present throughout the narrative, they rarely get to speak and they usually are not spoken of in individual terms, Marlow rather chooses to describe them as “bundles of acute angels” (Conrad 17), or a “black and incomprehensible frenzy” (Conrad 35). Chinua Achebe points to such descriptions as endemic for Conrad’s larger project of constructing the Africa of his narratives “as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (Achebe 308). Its inhabitants are consequently viewed in opposition to the European individual and denied traditionally assumed constituents of personhood such as the agency and the rationality from Locke’s account. Coming across a clearing near a mine, where a number of enslaved people have retreated to die, his initial description deals in ‘shapes’ and in postures, rather than giving descriptions of the people: “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat, between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair.” (Conrad 17). This trend continues throughout the rest of the scene, the dehumanizing register of Marlow’s description becoming more obvious the longer he goes on:

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     Near the same tree, two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees,             stared at nothing in an intolerable and appalling fashion. His brother phantom rested its forehead as if overcome with a great             weariness and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or pestilence.      While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees and went off on all fourth towards the river and           drink. (Conrad 17-18)

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     Especially when immediately followed by descriptions of “a white man in […] an unexpected elegance of get-up” (Conrad 18) complaining about the groans of an injured company-agent, who is referred to either as “sick man” or “sick person” (Conrad 19), the Manicheist dichotomy at the heart of Marlow world-view comes to the fore. Having to qualify kinship-relations like brotherhood with the image of the ‘phantom’ and the pronoun ‘it’ or characterizing enslaved people as “helpers” (Conrad 17) earlier on the same page lend further credence to Achebe’s observation, that “for Conrad, things being in their place is of utmost importance” (Achebe 310). For Marlow to be able to voice his horror at the methods employed by the Belgian colonizers while leaving the overall colonial believe-system intact requires for its hierarchies to appear natural. Within this system, then, the other cannot be seen to act or exist in a social context beyond the realm of Marlow’s assumptions. Since his compassion rests on the notion that the colonized people are unable to help themselves, even the fact of an African man wearing a neckcloth is so disconcerting to him, that the deliberate action behind it is put into question. Marlow’s questions of “Why? Where did he get it? […] Was there a any idea at all connected to it?” (Conrad 17) point towards the books overall attitude towards African agency: Another scene pointed out by Achebe later in the narrative continues both the trends of dissolving the individual in collective and body-focussed terminology and the attitude of disregard towards the capacity for purposeful action:

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     “But suddenly as we struggled around a bend, there would be […] a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of

     hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage.

     The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us,

     praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell?” (Conrad 35-36)

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While the revellers on the shore are described in terms of bodies, limbs and motion, no consideration is giving to the purposeful nature of what might be a religious rite, another sort of cultural function or simply a celebration. They emit ‘bursts of yells’ rather than deliberate, individual voices. When Marlow tries to envision what the people at shore might be doing, all he comes up with makes him and his boat the object of their attention. Among the collectivizing terms at use, that of the ‘prehistoric man’ also points to another dimensions of Marlow’s assault on the African individual: collectively situating the people ‘before history’ refuses them any sense of their own historicity, both denying the personal history of the individuum and framing Africans as ‘pre-human’ in Darwinian terms, in opposition to Europe as the locus of ‘developed’ society.

      Marlow’s astonishment at one of the French sailors referring to the denizens of the village they were shelling as “enemies” can be read as incredulity towards the idea of African people posing any actual threat the European colonizers, if viewed side by side with the passage two pages further: Coming across a chain-gang before stopping to observe the dying mine-workers, he admits that they “were no criminals”, only to qualify the statement with the addition that they were “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation” (Conrad 17). Passivity seems one of the key-features[4] in Marlow description of the native people he meets. Throughout his journey, the only few instances of black characters being proactive are only allowed to happen under European approval and instruction: Some members of Marlow’s crew are treated to a few more lines of description, only, however, after insisting they are “in their place” (Conrad 35). Calling his fireman an “improved specimen”, who “was useful because he had been instructed” (Conrad 37), Marlow’s racist ideas about agency, rationality and intelligence are hardly anywhere more apparent than in the descriptions of his ship-mates. Every deviation from his instructions seems also to be swiftly punished by the narrative, as the Helmsman, after becoming subject to a similar description, finds his unceremonious end through the tip of a spear as soon as he leaves his post to help in the defence of the steamer against the ambush ordered by Kurtz. This ambush and Kurtz’s relation to the ‘lake-tribe’ shall serve to conclude this section, as it bares mention, that the only group of characters native to the Congo, who pose a serious threat to Marlow’s journey, do so as the agents of a white man. Even then Marlow appears unable to take the tools by which they become active seriously, struggling to even recognize an arrow, seemingly troubled to identify anything less ‘advanced’ than a rifle. In the broadest sense, Conrad’s protagonist understands the system of colonial violence as cyclical, in that reactions to the colonizer’s aggression constitute the motivation for further aggression, but his cycle is upheld by a perceived natural inevitability. Implying a complete binary opposition between local people and the colonizers in Conrad’s story, conflict inevitably manifests, but can only do so in two constellations: Either with a figure like Kurz in the background as an instructor, or as a purely reactionary act, described in a register of the instinctual, as will be further evidenced in the passage examined in section four.

 

III – Oil on Water - Conscious Actors and Cyclical Violence:     
      Where Conrad’s text denies African characters historicity, Oil on Water, with its reporter-protagonist, thrives off telling the personal and collective histories of its expansive cast of characters. The people local to the area the story is set in are both the predominant voices throughout the book and also the ones who forward the narrative. A construction of character-agency radically different from Heart of Darkness becomes apparent in the decision to place somebody local to the area and personally entangled in the ill effects of petro-culture in the position of autodiegetic narrator. Rufus himself being connected to the oil-trade through its effect on his home-town, his father and his sister, points the audience towards petro-culture as shaping the system of personal and collective histories, which in turn shape characters’ decisions. His case also makes apparent the entanglement of the personal and the collective trauma: Rufus’ father’s wish for him to learn a trade in Port Harcourt is motivated by the oil-industry moving on from their small town (Habila 67), taking the remaining jobs with it. Rufus initial remark of “No, it was not a pipeline accident, as I told the white man, I wrote in my published piece” (Habila 3-4) implies, that his desire to make the voice of ordinary small-town people heard in the discourse surrounding the oil-industry, is another factor motivating his devoted search for some notion of ‘truth’ in his coverage of the unfolding conflict. His line of work is then also what brings him into contact with Zaq. Hearing the back-story of his companion and mentor, from his own mouth as well as through other characters, further grounds Rufus’ perspective in the turbulent history of a Nigeria thoroughly destabilized by political turmoil and Western industrial intervention (Habila 117-124). The events and characters of the narrative are not situated in a vacuum. They exist within circumstances, which lend context to their actions – this also becomes apparent in Rufus first description of the militants, one of the major factions within the story’s conflict:

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When they invited the press to view hostages or to give lengthy interviews about their reasons for fighting the government, they did so in a village or on a deserted island far from their camp. What was certain, though, was that they never strayed too far from the pipelines and oil rigs, which they constantly threatened to blow up, thereby ensuring for themselves a steady livelihood. (Habila 7)

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The militants are established as agents capable of delivering threats and operating in accordance with an agenda, which they make known. While their actual reasons for following it are ambiguous, we are presented with a range of possible motivations, rather than with the lack of one. Further insight into their motivations can also be gained from what is said about them on an individual level: Rufus’ personal knowledge of the reasons at least one person, his sister’s ex-husband John, had for wanting to join them, once more draws attention to the socioeconomical framework, as a factor that at the same time informs characters actions and limits their possibilities: “He had become very political, hanging out in backstreets with other unemployed youths to play cards and drink all day, always complaining about the government. He had been full of anger before he left, the kind of anger that often pushes one to blaspheme, or to rob a bank or to join the militants” (Habila 95).    

     John’s trajectory seems not an isolated on, as the motif of young, black people struggling to find well-paying work despite their trade-school or college degrees, is a common one throughout Oil on Water. Rufus’ sister Boma constitutes one of several examples, struggling to stay afloat when she loses her apartment during an unpaid internship. Details like this or Salomon having to put on a fake accent (Habila 201) when working for the Floodes points toward the presence of a system that, while never manifesting such outright racism as present in Conrad’s Belgian Congo, is ripe with structures and attitudes, that disadvantage the black citizens of Nigeria. Within this neo-colonial superstructure, their decisions are more often than not informed by either the struggle to protect their homes and livelihoods or the desire to seize the rare opportunities for upward social mobility. As becomes apparent later in the narrative, when Rufus learns of Salomon’s fate, getting entangled in the event setting in motion the narrative of the book, the kidnapping of Isabel Floode, depends for most parties on a mixture of personal and systemic reasons. While suspicions of Salomon’s involvement in Isabel’s kidnapping turn out to be justified, the accounts of the events both characters deliver to Rufus paint a more nuanced picture of the story’s driving conflict: Economic necessity plays its part both in bringing Salomon and his fiancé Koko into a position of dependency on their employment[1] with the Floodes and motivating Salomon’s co-conspirators, chief among them Jamabo, the mastermind behind the operation: “Jamabo said as a police officer he had seen many cases of kidnapping and it is like plucking money off a money tree – that’s how he put it” (Habila 220).      

      In figures like Jamabo and his success in convincing Salomon of his scheme, the ability to speculate possible trajectories of action based on environmental constrains and previous experience can be seen at play. Salomon himself then makes further use of his agency when deciding to act against the system he is drawn into through his social circle, and arguably against his own self-interest, as he helps Isabel escape from the militant camp. This entire narrative strand also further refutes Mr. Floode’s claim[6] that “the people don’t know what they do to themselves” (Habila 103), showing that participating in the system of corruption is motivated precisely by knowledge on how it operates, and participation in one form or another seems the only opportunity to get on top of it. It should also be noted, that the audience is only privy to such background information due to Rufus practice of listening to local voices in every community and encampment his journey leads through. 

       This impartial, journalistic practice of including different discursive voices is also what allows conflict and violence in the narrative to be constructed as cyclical. Clear roles of active aggressor and passive victim are continuously deferred, casting all factions as either involved in mutual escalation or as casualties between the lines of the conflict, acting in order to keep the warring factions at bay on all fronts. Several of Rufus’ interactions paint a picture of the militants existing as a continuum of splinter-groups[7], who all claim to be ‘for the land and for the people’ (Habila 165, 232), but, at least in the Professor’s case, often seem to operate more like organized criminal enterprises, than freedom fighters. The Professor, most prominent and ambiguous among them, most starkly represents the militants’ ideological contradictions, presenting himself as an environmentalist, but not hesitating, to risk further environmental damage in his attacks. While his treatment of Jamabo and his co-conspirators speaks to the image of him as a violent criminal, his interaction with Rufus implies, that he clearly differentiates his gang from the “criminal elements looting and killing under the guise of freedom fighting” (Habila 232) and views his methods as fully justified. “Write only the truth”, he instructs Rufus, “Tell them about the flares you see at night and the oil on the water. And tell them about the soldiers forcing us to escalate the violence every day” (Habila 232).

       The soldiers, all the while, constitute an equally ambiguous presence in the story. As the executive force of a government compromised by the interests of big oil, their stated mission is to combat the militants threatening the depots and pipelines. The Major, however, as leader of the military present in the story, does not fully represent state-power, since it is revealed, that his exile in the mangrove-swamps is punishment for an act of vigilante-justice in reaction to the corrupt legal system failing to punish his daughter’s rapist (Habila 62). He too is aware of the injustices of the status quo, but sees the fault for the escalating conflict with the militants, also framing himself as speaking ‘for the people’ as he says: “This country is tired of people like you” (Habila 59). His violence thus becomes part of a cycle which is based in the neo-colonial framework, but perpetrated by local people suffering under that framework, against others sharing a similar position. In different ways, their violence also contributes alongside the effects of the oil-industry to keep the socio-political situation in the country at the constant instability required to uphold the exploitative system. The agents perpetrating the violence in the novel are consequently hard to distinguish from its victims, most of them ordinary people by all accounts, pulled into their respective life-paths by necessity. They can also be said to display a more apparent and well-grounded sense of agency than even many of the colonizers in Conrad’s story, where some denizens of the company-stations or the French crew of the warship are neither endowed with complex motivations for their actions, nor situated in such a fine web of personal and systemic circumstances.

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IV – Two tales of a village – Agency and writing back:     
       To close off this essay, a comparison is in order between specific instances of conflict in Oil on Water and Heart of Darkness. The most telling passages in this regard from the former text are those, which directly write back to the latter, focusing on the casualties between the fronts of (neo-)colonial conflict. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow recounts the end his predecessor met “in a scuffle with the native” (Conrad 9), which broke out about an unspecified bargain concerning two chickens. The ‘scuffle’ itself, it is revealed shortly after, was a rather one-sided affair. Feeling wronged in the bargain in some way, the Danish steam-boat captain goes ashore and starts attacking the village-chief: “he wacked the old nigger mercilessly while a big crowd of his people watched him, thunderstruck, till some man – I was told the chief’s son – in desperation at hearing the old chap yell made a tentative jab with a spear at the white man” (Conrad 9). While this scene paradoxically is one of the few occasions on which Marlow refers to the natives as ‘people’, the word-choice of the ‘tentative jab’ seems deliberate, robbing the act of any connotations of deliberate resistance, especially in the context of the following few lines: “The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaping black, rotting, all askew with the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough, the people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them” (Conrad 9). Here, the second possible construction of conflict in Heart of Darkness becomes apparent, based in the idea repeated throughout the story by both Marlow and Kurtz: Denying the colonized the rationality to comprehend the colonizers and their acts, in Marlow’s understanding the angry Dane must have seemed to them like an approaching natural disaster. Resistance can thus only be an instinctive reaction, motivated by nothing but ‘mad terror’, keeping with the idea that the arrival of the colonizer, or maybe the symbolic presence of his bones, suffices for an entire village to be abandoned.

     Oil on Water all the while does not only take up the motif of the abandoned village, but repeats it throughout the narrative in a cyclical manner. One of the first scenes Rufus happens upon beares some striking similarities to Conrad’s village: “The village looked as if a deadly epidemic had swept through it”, Habila even lets Rufus encounter the source of conflict form Conrad’s narrative: “Behind one of the houses we found a pen with about ten chickens inside, all dead and decomposing, the maggots trafficking beneath their feathers” (Habila 9). While Marlow can only speculate about the chickens of his narrative having fallen victim to the “cause of progress” (Conrad 9), Oil on Water utilizes the birds as a reoccurring symbol of threatened agrarian livelihoods (Habila 67, 94, 224), illustrating two complexes of necessity, which inevitably draw village after village into new iteration of the same cycle of violence. “Dem left because of too much fighting” (Habila 8), Tamuno answers as Rufus questions where the villagers have gone. The “abandoned oil drilling paraphernalia” (Habila 8) found both in this first village and its immediate replica on the following page, where both the stench of oil and of death waft from a former communal well, foreshadows the other possible explanation for the village’s abandonment: environmental pollution. Throughout the rest of the novel, Rufus gets to experience both avenues of decline on a number of examples, consisting both of personal experience and testimonies from various other characters. One thread connecting all these accounts is that, conversely to Marlow’s image of the sudden, cataclysmic escape in blind, uncontrolled terror, these declines tend to be more gradual and always feature choice before a background of limited options: The story of Chief Malabo (Habila 42-45) illustrates the helplessness of the villagers against the demands of big oil-companies coveting their land. The decision to not sell only encourages further harassment. Trying to ward off the prospectors through armed boat-patrols is taken as an excuse to escalate violence. Within the neo-colonial legal apparatus, the chief’s choice to endure his imprisonment and not cave to the oil-company’s demands leads to his demise and the theft of his land can ultimately not be warded off. However, as Dr. Dagogo-Mark’s tale (Habila 151-153) shows, the other option of caving to the oil-companies demands might bring short-term prosperity to some villages, but ultimately only means a more drawn-out decline through the adverse environmental effects of the oil-production itself. The villagers’ agency restored through the possibility of at least getting to pick their means of destruction, this aspect of Oil on Water’s oppressive cycles also serves to refute the claim voiced by Mr. Floode, that it must be either greed or stupidity, which is keeping Nigerians from achieving prosperity. As can also be seen in the example of the survivors from Malabo’s village, now led by Chief Ibiram, the oil-industry and the structures it brings with it have a directly opposite effect: Through claiming land an polluting fishing grounds (Habila 18, 28), people are robbed of traditional options for securing their livelihoods, while what awaits them, should they decide to move from their village-communities to the city, is a system of racial bias towards a small, predominantly white upper class, which denies them opportunities for success despite attaining higher education. Consequently, resistance movements like the militants become ideologically attractive on one hand, but, as Rufus initially remarks, also become a way of making a living, which is dependent on the continued existence of the oil industry.         

     The resulting constant struggle between them and the military forces then serves to further destabilize the circumstances in which the average population exists. Throughout the book we see communities like Chief Ibiram’s be terrorized by both sides of the conflict (Habila 13, 37, 205) and by the story’s end it is still unclear, if their community will succeed in finding a new home near Port Harcourt. Comparing the eruption of violence and the tale of the abandoned village in both texts it seems that, while Marlow understands colonial conflict as a monolithic manicheist construct of the ‘civilized’ agent wielding violence against the passive ‘savages’ as a tool of control, the darkness and horror at the heart of Oil on Water is predicated upon the agency of the colonized. Habila’s novel paints neo-colonial exploitation as a system, which limits the options of the colonized agent in such a way that the only ones left are contributing to or being swept up in the circle of violence. The agents it produces are consequently complex and often internally conflicted in their goals and motivations, but always proactive, even if what calls them to action is bare necessity.

 

 

 

Notes
[1] In his Essay concerning Human Understanding he e.g. defines ‘Liberty’ as “ the power a Man has to do or forbear doing any particular Action, according as its doing or forbearance has the actual preference in the Mind, which is the same thing as to say, according as he himself wills it” (Locke 2008, 146).

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[2] This is a key aspect of agency as described in Emirbayer and Mishe’s account of the sociological model of the ‘Chordal Triad of Agency’, which bases the concept on the three constitutive elements of “iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation” (Emirbayer / Mishe 9) 

        

[3] According to The Guardian’s Niger delta oil spills: the real cost of crude, big oil-companies like Shell still routinely shift blame for spills and damaged pipeline onto the local population without admitting to their own destabilizing influence on the very communities they blame. (Noah/Timberlake 2013)

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[4] About the one often-cited example for an active African character, Kurtz’s mistress, it should be noted that both Chinua Acsebe (311) and Jeremy Hawthorn (356) contend, that her agency is only possible as a contrastive point to Conrad’s image of European femininity and thus expressed in terms of physicality and sexuality, keeping with the theme, that if African characters are granted agency, it comes at the cost of judgements towards their moral character.

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[5] This is evidenced both in Koko needing funds to complete nursing-school and asking Salomon to help her get a job with his employer (Habila 217) and Isabel’s comment about Salomon pointing towards him having to fain a certain way of speaking, to fit James Floode’s racist and patronizing view of Nigerian people. This, which can also be argued to more implicitly manifest itself in acts like him telling Rufus how he “argues rather well” (Habila 104, 201)  

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[6] A claim which is couched in deindividualizing terms not entirely unlike Marlow’s, with Flooded even referring to the people of Nigeria as a collectivizing “you people” (Habila 103)

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[7] See for example the group around Hensaw (Habila 162-165) or some of the people held at the Professor’s camp (Habila 213).

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Sources:

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 Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.  Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. Norton. 2016. 306-319.

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. Norton  2016.

 

Emirbayer, Mustafa and Ann Mische. “What is Agency?.” American Journal of Sociology و103, 4. (January 1998): 962-1023.

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Habila, Helon. Oil on Water. W.W. Norton. 2010.

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Hawthorn, Jeremy. “The Women of Heart of Darkness.” Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition, Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. Norton. 2016, 353-361.

Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Oxford World’s Classics. ed. Pauline Phemister. 2008.

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Payner-Frank, Noah and Jaqui Timberlake. Niger delta oil spills: the real cost of crude. Perf: John Vidal. The Guardian. October 7th 2013, Web. Last accessed: 23.09.2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/video/2013/oct/07/niger-delta nigeria-oil-spill-cost-crude-video

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Watt, Ian. “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness.”  Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. Norton. 2016, 320-332.

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