As Padmini Mongia pointed out in 2001, even though Achebe later revised his essay to replace "bloody" with "thoroughgoing," "the former phrase has become an almost-as-entrenched quotation as Conrad's own 'the horror, the horror.'" But maybe that needed to happen in order to ignite and sustain a critical reappraisal of this particular author. The word "bloody" gets under your skin because it's doubly significant: A swear word in British English, it also alludes to the millions of deaths for which African colonialism is culpable.
Maybe it all would have been written even if Achebe had called Conrad something other than "a bloody racist" - it's hardly the only attack he levels at him - but I don't think so. The result, 45 years later, is a massive and fascinating body of criticism evaluating Conrad from angles that nobody ever thought about before Achebe spoke up. Other scholars rushed to Conrad's defense, emphasizing his anti-colonialism, his philosophical complexity and his sheer virtuosity. These writers pointed to Conrad's imperialist tendencies, his apparent inability to see Africans as equal to Europeans and his use of the n-word.
Spurred by Achebe's brash assault, some critics started arguing that Conrad's works should perhaps not be read at all. "A bloody racist." When African novelist Chinua Achebe summed up Joseph Conrad this way in 1975, it was like a bomb going off in the literary canon.
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