The Darkness Of The Heart Essay

1805 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The history of apartheid

Apartheid: The Darkness of the Heart

It goes by many names, and is as old as history itself. It has found justification within the “holy” texts of written languages, and in the traditions, of cultures lost to time. The hierarchy of the animal kingdom shows the status of each species, and its “proper” place in the order of things. Man stands at the very top, but there is not a lot of space up at the very pinnacle. In the minds of these “scientific-minded” humans there must be a proper ranking of the races. This is the point where the slope turns extremely slippery, and all kinds of avalanches can get started-often the ones on top wind up buried at the bottom of the heap of history.
Not surprisingly, the hierarchy of humans is usually decided by technology and tyranny. Foot soldiers carrying stone axes or bronze-tipped spears are out maneuvered by mounted men equipped with chariots, steel swords and catapults capable of throwing nasty surprises for long distances. When gun powder and mechanized transport were developed, it blew all else out of the water, or ditch, literally. However, the world’s most advanced civilizations have risen and fallen due to the very same blunder. NO peoples want to be subservient to another - EVER. The tighter and harsher the grip becomes, the more the population will slip through the ruler’s fingers. The Age of Empires imploded for this very reason. Those that fail to remember history’s lessons are doomed to repeat them. South Africa’s apartheid government obviously missed this lecture.
South Africa’s ecosystems support an astounding diversity of animal, bird, and marine life. The mild climate, fertile soil, and the fact it lies along the lucrative sea trading route between Europe and Asia...

... middle of paper ...

...sident, but his legacy is secure ("Nelson Mandela Biography”).
Racism is never bound by culture, language, or even continents. It is an evil that spans the globe. The history of South Africa is of a culturally divided and fragmented society. The architects of apartheid took advantage of this splintered social order to create an institutionalized separation, dehumanization and enslavement of a people through laws and customs. However, freedom can be achieved when one voice has the courage to stand up against thousands, and inspires others to stand up for what is right and just. The ending of apartheid in South Africa allows people everywhere to never again accept a different definition of freedom depending on a classification imposed by another. South Africa has forged a bright future from the chains of the darkness of the heart – the darkness known as apartheid.

Show More
Related

  • A Savage Legacy Summary

    1108 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this program, it centers on a pattern of segregation and genocide evident in King Leopold’s Belgian Congo rampages, the terrorism of Jim Crow, South Africa apartheid rule, and less recognizable examples that persist in today’s global community. Slavery caused Blacks to suffer, and allowed

    Read More

  • The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Essay

    613 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, John Singer earned the confidence of many of the characters, such as Jake Blout, Biff Brannon, Mick Kelly, and Dr. Copeland. In relation to the title of the book, all the main characters are lonely in some way, including John Singer. Singer is a handicapped with his disability to speak as well as hear but on the other hand, he has an open heart and is not deaf to people’s problems. His loneliness is as a result of the fact that he does not have any real friend, except Spiros Antonapoulos, another disabled man who listened attentively to their problems and did nothing but give to them. Singer was the confidant of many characters and earned the hearts of the reader as well as those of the characters.

    Read More

  • The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Analysis

    1934 Words  | 4 Pages

    Doctor Copeland and Jake Blount are as we have seen doomed to isolation because of

    Read More

  • Prejudice And Racism In The 1800's

    525 Words  | 2 Pages

    The 18th century marked the onset or foundation of this epidemic, this disease which is ingrained in all of us. Slavery became endemic in many parts of the world, especially in Africa. It can be presumed that this movement to subdue this unknown kind to its own akin began the whole notion of racism and constructed these two parallel structures that discriminated purely on the basis of race, sex, class, color and national origin. The memory of having been capital -Africans who were bought and sold and traded lingers on in the present. The 19th century had shown development which further fueled this divide, where scientists subscribed to the belief that human population can be divided into races. With racism came the dismissal of one’s culture, tradition, beliefs, individuality, identity, their experience and beliefs. The slavery of blacks is a term that’s blotted with irreplaceable brutal history. Many

    Read More

  • Essay On Tell Tale Heart

    582 Words  | 2 Pages

    Have you ever felt the urge to know how it feels to be insane. Have you wonder how it would feel to be rid of something that haunted you for eight days. Have you felt the thrill of getting rid of it by ending it. I might be a little crazy but, I strongly believe that tell tale heart is appropriate for the 8th grade standard. “What is the Tell Tale Heart?”, you my ask. Tell Tale Heart is a horror genre story that is about a man who suffers from a mental disease, and he lives with a old man that never harmed him or wronged him. What made him kill him was because of the old man’s eye. “It was like a vulture’s eye” (pg.89) so he stalked him in his sleep every night for seven days just to see the old man’s eye open. His verge to insanity he was not stable. He was already ill, but instead of seeking for help he states that it sharpened his senses. He stated that he was trustworthy (no end mark; reread this run-on

    Read More

  • The Tell Tale Heart Guilt Essay

    737 Words  | 2 Pages

    All of us have done something that we weren’t necessarily supposed to do. What many of us have realized was that sometimes the guilt that follows afterward hurts more than the actual action. We find it easy to break rules and be rebellious, but, in the end, we succumb to the following guilt, and confess. “The Tell-Tale Heart” explores a situation where a man makes the decision to kill someone, but ends up going insane following the act. Edgar Allan Poe uses plot, characterization, and irony to convey the theme of the effects of guilt.

    Read More

  • The Tell Tale Heart Opinion Essay

    1957 Words  | 4 Pages

    I chose the three short stories to write about based on my views of each. I picked three completely different stories to read and write about, so I can at the end, form my opinion.

    Read More

  • Apartheid DBQ Essay

    1633 Words  | 4 Pages

    There are people in the world who see the actions of Apartheid, the results within the actions of the people while apartheid’s control, and overall their existence as a rare point in history. This idea is not only false but there are also several other governments and actions of the people that have had respectively similar actions. By having a social class system in South Africa where whites are on top and Blacks on the bottom shouldn’t sound unfamiliar; America had a similar racial discrimination from the 50’s all the way to the 80’s, with some arguing that the situation in Africa was worse off for their people than in America. In south Africa the African people that were deemed “lower class citizens” just as Germany’s treatment of Jews during

    Read More

  • John Locke's Belief That People Are Born with Rights

    1159 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...f South African language and culture, acknowledgement of the racial oppression in South Africa, past and present, that it was wrong and positive action is required to make it right, and finally that all South Africans are legitimate and enjoy full moral equality (“About – DA”). In order for all this to be possible, the state must ensure it does not compromise the freedom of the individual (“About – DA”).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Boy

    633 Words  | 2 Pages

    My father existed under the illusion, formed as much by a strange innate pride as by a blindness to everything but his own will, that someday all white people would disappear from South Africa and black people would revert to their old ways. To prepare for this eventuality, he ruled the house strictly according to tribal law, tolerating no deviance, particularly from his children. At the same time that he was force-feeding us tribalism we were learning other ways of life, modern ways, from mingling with children whose parents had shed their tribal cloth and embraced Western culture. (31-32)

    Read More

  • The Tell Tale Heart Conflict Essay

    514 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the story The Tell-Tale Heart, there are two different conflicts: killing a man and controlling his sanity. The narrator specifically, writes this is first person to help create the suspense by the increase of his sanity so the reader is excited and has surprise ending which sets the climax. The surprise ending helps emphasise the second conflict of his sanity, which supports the theme.

    Read More

  • Obsession In The Tell Tale Heart Essay

    1260 Words  | 3 Pages

    Obsession is the state of being obsessed with someone or something. Mad is you’re mentally ill and insane. In my opinion, obsession and mad are completely to different situations. Obsession doesn’t necessarily equal madness, because it depends on the situation. Edgar Allan Poe is known for his short stories and are told by narrators who are reliable but, “The Tell-Tale Heart” the unnamed narrator is insane and has a mental disease and there are many reasons why he is insane with evidence to prove it. He claims that he is not mad but he is very nervous. Even though he tries to convince that he is very careful on murdering the old man. A reliable narrator would not be pressed to justify his act, but only to tell it simply and without embellishment. We can clearly see that the narrator is an obsessed man of active senses, the narrator is not mad, we say he’s extremely a clever man is suffers from a mental disease. A mad person cannot think and argue like the narrator. So we cannot say he’s mad or he’s obsessed in killing, we know that the narrator is unreliable just by reading the first sentence. The narrator obsessions are: the old man’s evil eye, and the old man heartbeat.

    Read More

  • Long-term Effects of European Colonization on Africa

    1281 Words  | 3 Pages

    The End of Apartheid - HistoryWiz South Africa. (n.d.). HistoryWiz: for students, teachers and lovers of history. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.historywiz.org/end.htm

    Read More

  • South African Apartheid

    1513 Words  | 4 Pages

    South Africa really began to suffer when apartheid was written into the law. Apartheid was first introduced in the 1948 election that the Afrikaner National Party won. The plan was to take the already existing segregation and expand it (Wright, 60). Apartheid was a system that segregated South Africa’s population racially and considered non-whites inferior (“History of South Africa in the apartheid era”). Apartheid was designed to make it legal for Europeans to dominate economics and politics (“History of South Africa in the apartheid era”).

    Read More

  • Theme Of Apartheid In J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

    995 Words  | 2 Pages

    Old South Africa is best described by Mark Uhlig, “The seeds of such violent conflict in South Africa were sown more than 300 years ago, with the first meetings of white settlers and indigenous black tribes in an unequal relationship that was destined one day to become unsustainable” (116).

    Read More

More about The Darkness Of The Heart Essay

Open Document