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Images, especially created images, are very effective “cultural devices to subject minorities of a society to the prevailing social norm.” In other words, as Abdul JanMohamed notes, they are metaphors signifying the “manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native.” In this context, the image of Africa Langston Hughes embodies in his works reveals his viewpoint on the world and life. Furthermore, it is also a door through which we can approach the role and ultimate goal of Hughes. Particularly, his African experience around the Congo River for about five months was a greatly important event in uplifting his understanding of the reality of African Americans and their identity. And it is a kind of “rite of passage” to establish his own identity as an African American poet.
The lessons Hughes learned while he stayed in Africa as a mess boy of a freighter can be summarized as follows. First, his earlier romantic view of Africa was turned into a realistic one after seeing the “rape of Africa” by the European colonialist countries. Second, he came to know the reality of colonialism and the international dimension of the Afro-American tragedy. Africans and Afro-Americans are, he thinks, common victims of political oppression and economic exploitation in a world dominated by the West. Third, he experienced the reverse dilemma of “double consciousness” through a chain of unexpected experiences in Africa where he was thought a white person, not a black. Such a situation gave him a chance to reconsider his identity. Fourth, he met a Mulato boy by accident and used the ‘tragic Mulato’ theme later as a symbol to challenge the hypocrisy of American democracy.
Considering these lessons, Hughes's African experience was a turning point in his literary career. After that, he came to put himself more tactically between the African and the American aspect of the “double consciousness” and attempted to integrate these two aspects into a single vision of the poet. And based on such a vision, he continuously made efforts to overcome the “manichean allegory” which includes “oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and other, subject and object.” In a sense, this was a watershed which made him different from other contemporary writers such as Vachel Lindsay and Countee Cullen.