Heart of Darkness

Author: Joseph Conrad.  Year of Publication: 1899.

Heart of Darkness chronicles the tale of Marlow, the narrator of the story, who recalls for a few seamen a time of his life when, as a young man, he went to the Belgian Congo to captain a riverboat for the company in charge of trade in the colony.

Yes, a colony, the infamous colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo Free State. To understand this book, you must understand the background which Conrad did not have to explain to his contemporary audience.

Africa resisted colonization until the last decades of the 1800s, mainly because its interior was full of people to resist and exotic diseases that killed Europeans in less than a year. While European countries gained a toehold on coastal cities, they could not penetrate the continent with success until two things happened: military technology advanced to produce automatic weapons, guns that did not need reloading but could deliver a spray of bullets to mow down advancing Africans armed with only clubs, spears, and arrows; medical advancements that discovered drugs like quinine that could provide protection against disease.

Outnumbered 2 to 1, 3 to 1, maybe even 10 to 1, European armies were able to defeat native armies and establish colonial control.

Europe foresaw what they could do. By this time, they had colonized the western hemisphere and experienced the numerous revolutions that freed the continents of North and South America, not to mention several islands in the Caribbean, from their control. I refer not only to the U.S. revolution, but the Haitian revolution and the many revolutions driven by Simon Bolivar.

They had established hegemony in Asia including the domination of China. As land is limited upon the Earth, only one great opportunity was left: Africa. Technology delivered it into their hands and the scramble was on.

That is what it was known as--the Scramble for Africa. It culminated in the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where the European powers split the continent among themselves to avoid warfare over territory and boundaries.

Unlike the British, French, German, Portuguese, and other European governments, which ruled their colonies through the auspices of their officials, the Congo Free State, that part of Africa given to Belgium, was taken by its King, Leopold II, as his personal fiefdom and colony.

Originally, the King scoured the territory for ivory as the quickest way to score profits. That is the period in which Marlow takes up a job, goes to the Congo, works his way upriver, and later recounts his experiences.

But by the time his readers were devouring his words, Leopold had established rubber plantations as a better way to maximize his wealth aggrandizement from the colony. His rapacity and brutal treatment of Africans were infamous across Europe. Fail to meet production goals and hands were cut off. There are photographs surviving from this time in which piles of hands can be seen. Rebel and worse treatments were handed out.

Even given the very low standard of morality regarding the people of Africa that all Europe held at the time, Leopold's cruelty was so aberrant that heavy pressure from the other European powers forced the Belgium government to wrest control of the colony away from Leopold in 1908.

Now let us come back to the novella. It is short, only 38,700 words by the best estimates. That is enough.

The atmosphere is bleak. At the outset, the sky and water are described as one sheet of steel gray, so like one another that the observers cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Dusk is falling as they wait for the tide to turn and run out. (This is a time of sails, not motors, and timing the tide for departure from port was essential.)

Themes of death and darkness are established as the words go on. Even in a city supposedly full of bright opportunities, Marlow describes it as a whitened sepulchre, that is a dark tomb that is painted over to distract the eye from its contents.

Everything that happens comes to a meaningless or purposelessness. On the journey to Africa, we find a French warship firing off cannons into the land. Why? We do not know. But battleship bombardments fail in effectiveness even in our day, so we can appreciate the continuing gloom of uselessness of effort that Conrad describes.

This is a psychological story, driven by the author looking deep into our souls, through his narrator, to see what is there.

Marlow begins the inquiry early when, before taking his listeners to Africa, he asks whether the experience of exploring a new land, such as penetrating into Africa, is any different whenever it happens? He asks if the Romans, invading Britain, did not have the same experience? Weren't the peoples of the island just the same, just as primitive, just as savage, and wouldn't they have resisted the Romans the same as the Congolese resisted their invaders? Abandon their river homes, flee inland, wear down the invading force?

He arrives in the Congo. He encounters three individuals of interest, the third of whom I will describe last although Marlow finds him first.

The manager: the man placed in charge of managing all the stations and bringing out the ivory. He is a man without feeling, a man who only looks after the profit, who sees the natives as a pool of labor not quite human, to be exploited as one would put an ox to a yoke to plow a field.

The scenes of death that are described are stunning. The grove of trees, where Marlow goes to escape the heat and finds natives, beaten or worked beyond the capacity of the human body to recover, lay dying. The clink of chains that bind together a group of men, fastened around their necks, as they are driven up the road with heavy burdens that they carry. The savage beating of a man, who accidentally set a fire that burned up a hut full of cheap goods for trade (calico and bolts of cloth), and the abandonment of that man to let him lie and die.

But we have not yet approached the heart, the residing place of darkness that Conrad is taking us to.

The second person is Kurtz, the man with high connections, the man who didn't have to go to Africa but did. He was slated for greatness, at the moment only an agent in the wood, but soon to take over the manager's position before going back to Europe to rise high in the Company.

Everyone knew of Kurtz, some admired his work with the natives but most scorned it.

Kurtz, who came to the colony with the high motive of civilizing the savages. (Now today, we would find that attitude objectionable, but at the time, it was seen as altruistic and noble.)

But dark rumors about Kurtz disturbed Marlow and tension is built as the story moves on: is he true to this ideal or what is he really doing?

Spoiler Alert! Stop reading now if you intend to read the book.





We find that Kurtz has been participating in unspeakable rites with the natives in the dark of night. He has not traded for ivory although he has sent down the river more ivory than all the other agents combined. No, he does not trade; he goes raiding for it. In other words, he steals it.

In those dark, midnight rituals, we find that Kurtz, who has a charismatic personality that finds expression in his voice, is allowing ... encouraging ... compelling the natives to pay him homage as a god.

In Kurtz, we find the heart of darkness and the message of Conrad. European colonizers, so superior in their smugness of civilization, are no better than these African people. The wilderness does that. Stripped of the structure of civilized society, those customs and laws built up over centuries, put into the wild, one must look into one's soul to find what is there ... if anything.

In the emptiness of Kurtz, who had nothing to resist becoming savage in his own way, Conrad accuses his society: Everything you imagine them to be--you are no better.

Postscript: While this is the accepted meaning of the novel, I have to wonder if Conrad himself understood it. The third character, which I have saved to the last, is the accountant. He dresses every day in a starched white collar, dazzling white linen shirt, snow white pants. It is not easy maintaining this standard. As Marlow recounts his tale decades in the future (so he has had time to evaluate each personality and decide upon it), this is the only one he admires. Reason? because the man maintained his standards. He was able to preserve his principles despite the degenerating influence of the environment.

BUT! the text also tells us that he was only able to do so by coercing a native woman into the necessary laundry practices. She was unwilling, but he made her do it. I hope you join me in recoiling at that. I would rather dress in rags than forcing anyone into labor that they do not want to do.

Second postscript: I took up this book because a colleague mentioned it. In the disturbing suicide of Anthony Boudain, it comes out that this was one of his favorite books. I leave this comment right here. Make of this fact what you will.