Depiction of African Culture in The Heart of Darkness

Benita Parry (2005, p.380) suggests in The Moment and Afterlife of Heart of Darkness, that Heart of Darkness is one of the, ‘most interpreted books in English Fiction […] and a key text in both modernism and colonial fiction’. Published in Blackwood’s magazine in 1899, and in book form in 1902, the key to this novella begins within its ambiguous title: Heart of Darkness – resonating with a core of darkness, the corrupt dark heart of man or a dark place implying unknown or exotic, an ‘Otherness’. I intend to study the interpretations of post-colonial attitudes and implications of white Empire-building to prove that Heart of Darkness represents a symbolic critique of man’s imperial ravage of Africa for ivory and rubber through a system of brutality and abuse.

Conrad’s motives in Heart of Darkness could be considered as political, psychological or a self-discovery of mind. Albert Guerard views it as a psychological masterpiece, ‘a dream of self-discovery’. Thomas Moser believes it to be a novel of self-discovery but also racist to European imperialism and that, ‘darkness means truth, whiteness means falsehood’, that the trade in ivory is, ‘dark and dirty’ and truths are hidden within the darkness. Avrom Fleishman insists that, ‘In Africa […] the disruptive effect of imperialism on native society was clear to Conrad’. David Thorburn considers the novel as a romantic adventure story where he encounters a real experience of life. (Murfin, 1989, pp.101-106). Benita Parry (2005, p.381) believes that historical analysis of Heart of Darkness is crucial in presenting a critique of European imperialism and the racism idiom cannot be ignored.

The historical implications of the ravage of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884, supposedly to bring free trade on the Niger, is still a much-discussed topic. Leopold II of Belgium’s ‘noble mission’ promised to bring philanthropy and anti-slavery to the ‘Congo Free State’, and ‘to deliver ‘civilization’ in the center of Equatorial Africa’. Leopold’s so-called ‘civilizing mission’ was barbaric, insisting that violence was necessary with ‘wretched negros’, with ‘sanguinary habits’. Using Africans as a cheap labour force, he rapaciously took and exported primarily ivory and rubber (Fothergill, 1989, p.38). Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost (1998, p.119) describes Leopold as one of the most, ‘shrewdest, most manipulative players in the international arena’ and his murderous system of slave labour and enslavement promised little to bring civilization to Africa. He draws parallels between Conrad’s fictional Kurtz, ‘the archetype of the debased white official in the tropics’ and Leopold II of Belgium and suggests he is a model for the figure of Kurtz- ‘All Europe contributed’ to his making (Heart of Darkness, 2017, Norton Critical Edition, p.xii).

According to Benita Parry (2005, p.385), European conquest was reflected in the political and territorial ambitions of Europeans like Kurtz, portrayed ‘as though he wanted to swallow up the air, all the earth, all the men before him’, a ‘weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. Kurtz is a European ivory trader and in Marlow’s quest to locate him to bring him back to civilization, he meets his representatives; Europeans, motivated by greed and ivory, in the ‘merry dance of death and trade’. Kurtz turns out to be the most monstrous of them all, obsessed with power and material possessions: ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my- Everything belonged to him’ (2007, pp.16,60). Marlow admires Kurtz as he supposedly represents the ‘civilizing mission’ with his eloquent report for the ‘Suppression of Savage Customs’, a document that Benita Parry (2005, p.385) outlines as ‘imperialism’s grandiloquent propaganda’, promising a heavenly mission to ‘civilize’, revealing the real motive to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ (p.62).

Benita Parry (2005, pp.385,386) believes the use of black and white in the text relates to death, the sinister, the evil and the savage. The European associations of white with truth is firstly represented in Kurtz’s Intended with her ‘hair and white brow’ with a ‘soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal’. However, the realignment of the positive meaning attached to the white imperial light appears later to represent lies, corruption and greed in Brussels, ‘the heart of Belgium’s heartless imperialism, is described as a whited sepulcher; white fog is more blinding than the night, and sunlight can be made to lie […] the visible object of colonialist desire is ivory and the footnote to Kurtz’s Report (‘Exterminate all the Brutes!’) blazed at you’. Parry comments, Conrad intended Europe to be ‘plunged into gloom by its own imperialist project’, a gloom that invades the waters of the Thames, a place from which an expedition ‘carrying its freight of moral darkness departs for the benighted continent of the imperial imagination’.

Adam Hochschild (1998, p.165) states Heart of Darkness ‘is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature’. ‘Conrad’s stand in’ Marlow, muses on empire and how ‘the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much’. Henry Morgan Stanley (Meyer, 1998, p.118) serves as an example of the European and his work for Leopold in the Congo encompassed in the ‘Eldorado Exploring Expedition’ was ultimately to ‘tear treasure out of the bowels of the land’, like, ‘burglars breaking into a safe’ (Brantlinger, 1985, p.178). Conrad fully understood Leopold’s rape of the Congo, reflected in Kurtz’s last words, ‘The horror! The horror’! His last whisper echo’s within his ‘hollow’ internal emptiness reflecting ‘modernity’s violent machine of expansion and domination’ (Cavarero, 2009, p.411). The ‘horror’ could be also considered to be Kurtz’s own regression into a form of tribal savagery, being converted to heathenism, ‘falling out of the light down the coal chute of social and moral regression’. He has become ‘maddened by the tropics’, ‘gone native’ joining in ‘unspeakable rites’, become an idol to the natives and betrayed the ideals of moral and ethical motives as a European to ‘civilize’ (Brantlinger, 1985, pp.193,194). Ridley believes that Kurtz represents evil by ‘succumbing to savagery’ and that paradoxically the cannibal crewman in the text are depicted as ‘dignified, admiral fellows […] and the superb native woman has both majesty and pathos’ (Ridley, 1963, p.8).

Adam Hochschild (1998, p.165) in Meeting Mr. Kurtz, suggests British colonialists to Conrad, were ‘bearers of a spark from a sacred fire’; maintaining ‘liberty’ under a British flag and splashes of red on the map, ‘were good to see at any time because one knows there is some work going on’. By Livingstone’s humanitarian work of ‘opening up’ Africa commercially and religiously, Britain began to see themselves less as perpetrators and more as ‘potential saviors’ of Africa; whereas the Europeans introduced ‘avarice, treachery, rapine, murder, warfare and slavery’ (Brantlinger, 1985, p.170). As Felix Driver comments, where ‘Livingstone brought light, Stanley brought corruption’. Stanley’s mission was to ‘Strike a White Line across the Dark Continent’ (1991, pp.164,165) and in a blaze of publicity defended Leopold’s new, barbaric approach to exploration, represented in an article in The Times (1896, p.4) (Appendix 1). Benita Parry (2005, p.381) suggests that western readership at the time read of a jungle ‘inhabited by naked black bodies bearing spears and bows’, ‘who howled and leaped and spun and make horrid faces’ whose speech is heard as a savage discord and whose souls are perceived as rudimentary’. Stories such as Heart of Darkness dramatized ‘the dark continent’, The Strand magazine featured articles of African ‘Curiosities’ (Newness, 1897).

Heart of Darkness has come in for criticism in recent years due to the portrayal of black characters. Fadwa Abdel Rahman believes that Conrad creates binary oppositions between black and dark, white and civilized, suggesting that Africa and its people follow ‘Darwinism’ a development of human development inferior to the ‘white civilized’ race and should look to the ‘Other’ as a ‘source of civilization and progress’ (2005, pp.182,184). Adam Hochschild (1998, p.166) states that they are denied a voice, ‘they grunt’, produce a ‘drone of weird incantations’ and ‘a wild and passionate uproar’, they spout, ‘strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language’, a text although ‘laden with Victorian racism’ it best describes the European ‘Scramble for Africa’.

Chinua Achebe claimed that the darkness ‘plagues us still’ and as a writer, keen to clear the negative image of his continent, taught ‘that their past […] was not one long night of savagery from which the first European, acting on God’s behalf, delivered them’. Edward Said’s Orientalism, written in 1978 also wanted to teach that culture is unfairly represented by ‘colonized peoples’ and that there was negative stigma attached to an ‘inaccessible world that helped Europe to define itself by being its opposite’ (AbdelRahman, 2005, p.182). Achebe believes that the disintegration of Kurtz’s mind in the setting of Africa was considered racist: ‘Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?’. Although John Batchelor in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Source of Light agrees with this statement that Africa is used as a setting for a predominately European story, he suggests Conrad does not ‘celebrate’ colonialism’s dehumanizing of Africa and its native people. He believes this in Marlow’s first words, ‘And this also … has been one of the dark places of the Earth’ introduces a parallel between the ‘Roman invasion of Britain and the Belgian invasion of the Congo’ and a comparison of the behavior of the inhabitants of the two countries. He argues that ‘Nigger’ is standard language and a descriptive term in ‘Victorian idiomatic usage’ for a man of Marlow’s class (1993, p.235).

In an interview in The Guardian newspaper (2003), Caryl Phillips meets Achebe hoping to defend the creator of Heart of Darkness but soon realizes that Achebe’s scathing critique of the way Africa and its people were treated by Conrad cannot be ignored. Achebe begins his interview: ‘That man would appear to be obsessed with ‘that’ word’, that word being ‘Nigger’. Achebe believes the derogatory treatment of African humanity is the most ‘disparaging of Conrad’s vision’ which ‘denies Africa and Africans of their full and complex humanity’. He quotes the moment in the novel when the Europeans on the steamer encounter real live Africans in the flesh:

‘[…] shackled form of a conquered monster […] They howled, they leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with wild and passionate uproar. Ugly’.

Achebe does however in his revised 1988 speech believe that Conrad critiqued imperialism on many grounds, one being the hypocrisy of the ‘civilizing mission’ and that Conrad is not the ‘originator of this disturbing image of Africa and Africans and that the so-called European ‘civilizing mission’ was exposed to some extent by this publication. Although, Phillips suggests that in the 21st Century, Conrad’s readers live in a ‘postcolonial world’ and his ‘savage’ description of African humanity that once mirrored the ‘bestial other’ to a Victorian audience would now regarded by some as ‘deeply problematic’ (The Guardian, 2003).

Hunt Hawkins (1992, p.333) in Heart of Darkness and Racism believes that Marlowe ‘dehumanizes Africans’ and describes them as ‘savages, niggers’ and ‘rudimentary souls’, their appearance or behavior is described as ‘grotesque’, ‘horrid’, ‘ugly’, fiendish’ and satanic’ mirrored in animal imagery. Peter Firchow argues that if Conrad did find African faces ‘grotesque’ his judgement is ‘purely aesthetic’ and cannot be attributed to their intelligence or moral standards. There are ‘different degrees and kinds of racism’ and the word ‘racism’ did not exist at that time. The word race was defined in The Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928) as ‘one of the great divisions of mankind, having certain physical peculiarities in common’. ‘Race-thinking’ really developed into the twentieth century when people first encountered ethnic groups and other races through advances in tourism, colonial administration and military ventures (Firchow, 2000, pp.5,8,10).

In conclusion, Achebe is right that African culture and people have been unfairly represented and that Conrad has exploited Africa to examine a break-up of a European mind. However, I do not believe in Achebe’s negative claim that Conrad was a ‘through-going racist’. Conrad’s intention, by powerfully illustrating the distinctive supreme features of the cultural ‘other’ through ‘savage imagery’, provided a stark contrast to the white European whose books in ‘apple-pie order’ are blind to the surrounding ‘inferno’, illustrating the ‘horror’ of colonialism at its worse. This is not a success story of the European conquest in Africa, it instead penetrates the ‘moral darkness’ to expose the character of Kurtz, who degenerated into a ‘savage’ through lack of restraint and epitomizes the reality behind the ‘myth’ of colonization, the ironic ‘noble mission’ and ‘progress’ – its hypocrisy, brutality and corruption. Haunted by Conrad’s vision of ‘black shadows of disease and starvation’ he wrote with an aim to ‘make you see’ to expose Europeans who claiming to be light bearers during their ambitions colonial conquests were ‘hollow at the core’ who instead brought a darkness of death through ‘Germs of Empire’ bringing destruction to the continent.