Frank Sholedice
English 301
The Dark Continent:
Explicit and Implicit Racism in Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is, on the surface, an attack of colonial ideology. From the very beginning of the text, Conrad points out the deficiencies of colonialism and the human costs involved in such a system. These indictments are explicit and readily apparent. However, colonialist attitudes of racial and cultural superiority are present in the text on the surface and on a deeper, less apparent level. There are several instances where Marlow points out the inferiority of Africans. But there are also more subtle indictments of Africa, Africans, and African culture. In the text, Africans are associated with darkness and savagery. Conrad also goes so far as to distort and exaggerate historical facts to paint a picture of Africa that suits his story. Because such negative attitudes about Africa exist on the surface and beneath it, it points to the fact that, even though Conrad may have intended to indict the colonial system, his attitudes of racial and cultural superiority turn the indictment into a contradiction.
Straightforward, explicit attacks against colonialism occur at several points in the text. Within the first few pages, Marlow draws a parallel between the Congo and Europe, which was colonized by the Romans. He says of the Romans that, “They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind” (10). The same description could be applied to the Belgian colonizers in the Congo, and indeed it is. Such strong language against the colonial enterprise can be seen later when Marlow talks about the Eldorado Exploring Expedition:
Their talk however was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them…To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. (33)
Marlow draws a parallel here between the Roman model of colonialism and the European model; both employ senseless violence, murder, and any other means necessary to secure riches. Such indictments of colonialism, however, only appear on the surface of the text; like this example, they are clear and explicit.
Marlow gives another very strong indictment early on in the text when he says, “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” (10). But, says Marlow, “What redeems it is the idea only. An idea…and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…” (10). This is the kind of colonialism that the Belgians are engaged in, a colonialism that is masked by “ideas” of philanthropy and civilizing. Marlow’s comment, then, could easily be read as facetious because any ideas that would attempt to justify colonialism are masks. Colonists, particularly the pilgrims that Marlow meets at the Outer Station, are incapable of having an unselfish belief in any ideas that might excuse colonialism, like philanthropy. They are all taking part in the colonial system to gain something for themselves: money, fame, ivory, a higher position in the Company. Marlow even tells us that they are not worshipping any noble or selfless ideas. Instead, he says of the pilgrims at the Outer Station that, “You would think they were praying to [ivory]” (26). It is impossible, then, for colonialism to be redeemed by any idea because everyone involved has personal and selfish motives. Colonialism becomes a contradiction, espousing selfless ideologies of civilization and philanthropy on the one hand while committing terrible acts of violence in order to gain wealth on the other.
Kurtz, then, becomes an embodiment of this contradiction. His goals in going to the Congo are entirely personal. He seeks to secure a good position for the benefit of himself and his Intended - “‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my…’ everything belonged to him” (49). His motives are selfish; there is no redeeming idea for Kurtz. His philanthropic mission - his report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs - is a veil behind which Kurtz can hide the atrocities he commits. Taking advantage of the natives to help him get more ivory and making them worship him like a god could be labeled as a civilizing mission. The natives worship Kurtz; they bow down before him and offer sacrifices. According to Marlow, Kurtz would be the “unselfish belief in the idea”, but, of course, he is far from it.
But even when Marlow is describing the horrors of the colonial system, a streak of racist language emerges. Soon after he arrives at the Outer Station, he sees a group of slave laborers who have drifted away from the others in their group in order to die. While describing the pitiful state that the men are in, Marlow comments that one of the men “seemed young - almost a boy - but you know with them it’s hard to tell” (20). Marlow is lumping all Africans into the category of “them”, completely removed and very different from the “us”, the Europeans like Marlow. Such a separation and distancing points to attitudes of racial superiority. Another such comment can be seen later on in Marlow’s description of the dying men. He notices that one of the men has crawled, on all fours, down to the river to drink; Marlow says he “lapped” the water as he drank (21). Crawling on all fours and lapping up water would describe a dog better than it would a human, and this is quite possibly the way Marlow sees Africans: as less than human.
It is this removal of humanity from the Africans that Chinua Achebe points out as being the most damning evidence against Conrad’s story (Achebe, 257). This dehumanizing occurs in several places in the language of the text. One example occurs when Marlow describes his fireman. He says, “He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler” (38). Here the African man is referred to as a “specimen”, as if he were some queer object to be pondered over and studied. The fireman is able to maintain the boiler because he has been told that, if he does not maintain the fire in the boiler, the “evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry…and take a terrible vengeance” (39). His ability to fire and maintain the boiler is not the result of human ingenuity; according to Marlow, the fireman is not quite human. Instead, it is the result of superstitions. The most striking example of Marlow’s dehumanizing of the Africans occurs on page thirty-seven, when he says of the Africans, “No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman.” Marlow does not even do them the decency of calling them either human or inhuman (Achebe, 254). Instead, he says they “were not inhuman”. But, Marlow ultimately denies the Africans their humanity when he says, a few lines later, “what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly” (38). The thought that the Africans might be human, just like Europeans such as Marlow, is enough to scare, thrill, and even disgust the European mind.
But, says Achebe, there is another way in which Conrad sets up Africa and Africans to be inferior to their European counterparts. “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization” (Achebe, 252). Africa in Heart of Darkness, he says, is merely a “setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa [is] a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity” (257).
Other critics have argued that Conrad does more than just contrast Africa and Europe. Patrick Brantlinger has argued that he draws comparisons between the two, specifically between the atrocities committed by the colonists and the customs and beliefs of the Africans. Throughout the text, Conrad describes some of the terrible acts committed by the colonists, and the worst acts in the novella are committed by Kurtz. But, because Kurtz’s has “gone native” and committed savage atrocities that would be expected from the natives, the evils of Kurtz are the evils of the Africans as well (Brantlinger, 371). “In short, evil is African in Conrad’s story; if it is also European, that’s because some number of white men in the heart of darkness behave like Africans” (371). By associating African customs with “violence, lust, and madness” and by describing traveling in Africa as traveling backwards to a savage and unrefined state of existence, Conrad sets up Africa as the Dark Continent (371). Even the title of the novella suggests this association.
Even worse than the underlying associations and attitudes that characterize Africans as savage, ignorant, and even evil is the way in which historical facts are distorted and omitted in order to suit the story’s need. It could be argued that these distortions of history are Marlow’s and not Conrad’s fault. However, both Marlow and Conrad were in the Congo and would therefore have had firsthand experience with the historical realities. To play with history in such a way suggests that both Marlow and Conrad knew what they were doing when they chose to paint a picture of Africa that was far from accurate.
Two such examples occur in the novella. The first deals with Conrad’s portrayal of cannibalism among the Africans. He ascribes cannibalism to the Africans as if it were a natural behavior for them. On the boat, Marlow’s entire crew of natives is made up of cannibals, but of course all Africans are not cannibals. It seems unlikely to the point of being absurd, then, that Marlow’s entire crew would be cannibals. Marlow says that he was grateful to them because “after all, they did not eat each other before my face,” as if the cannibals would eat each other without discretion if they became hungry (36). Again, a few pages later, Marlow paints cannibalism as a normal African custom. When talking about Kurtz’s worshipers with Marlow, the head cannibal says,
“‘Catch ‘im,’ he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth - ‘catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us.’ ‘To you, eh?’ I asked; ‘what would you do with them?’ ‘Eat ‘im!’ he said…I would no doubt have been properly horrified had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry” (42).
Marlow feels that it is normal for Africans to want to eat each other. This attitude about cannibalism is far from the historical reality. Cannibalism was not used as a dietary staple. Instead, it was a ritual practiced between two opponents (Singh, 274).
“The idea…is to kill the opponent in such a way that it proves the prowess of the one who does the killing and gives the other person a chance to defend himself and prove his manliness as well, because there is not point in eating a man unless his strength, courage, and heroism will pass into the person who killed him” (274).
By distorting this historical fact, Conrad creates an image of Africans that fits his novella: savage, animalistic, indiscriminate cannibals.
When Marlow wonders why the cannibals have not eaten him and his crew even though their supply of hippo meat spoiled and they must have been starving, he is shocked by the notion that they must be showing restraint. He says, “I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield” (43). Marlow does not expect the cannibals to exercise restraint; after all, they are considered to be no better than hyenas, not even human. The other historical misdeed that Conrad commits is the omission of a fairly important event in the history of the Belgian Congo. Between 1891 and 1894, the Belgians in the Congo waged a war with Arab slave traders over territory and wealth (Ascherson, 172). Unlike the Belgians, the Arabs did things to improve the region: they were responsible for the spread of Swahili as a common language; they taught Africans about administration, helping local rulers to establish bureaucracies; and they revolutionized the African diet, introducing mangos, oranges, avocados, beans, onions, garlic, and tomatoes to the continent (Ascherson, 172). It seems odd then that Conrad, who had been in the Congo from 1890 to 1894, would not mention the Arabs at all anywhere in the book, since they were such a large and important presence in the Congo. However, as Brantlinger suggests, the omission of any mention of the Arabs or the Arab wars “has the important effect of sharpening the light-and-dark dichotomies…‘evil’ and ‘darkness’ are parceled out between only two antithetical sides, European and African, ‘white’ and ‘black’” (371).
It could be argued that the attitudes towards Africans, the way they are portrayed, and the associations that Conrad draws between Africa and darkness are all merely the product of the prevailing attitudes of Conrad’s time. When Conrad wrote the novella, colonialism was at its height. Such attitudes of racial and cultural superiority were common amongst Europeans. However, even if the attitudes exhibited by the text were the product of a colonialist system, they are still perpetuating racist beliefs and stereotypes that are still held today. Professor S. Ekema Agbaw, an African, taught a college class that dealt with Conrad’s portrayal of Africa in Heart of Darkness. She says of her students that, “They did not want to be involved in a discussion that might lead them to confront Western prejudice and racism towards Africans and black people, because, to them, this was an issue of the past, one that was not even significant in the novella” (4). She suggests that the reason for this is that, even a century after the publication of the novella, “Western understanding of African culture has remained superficial” (9). This explains why Heart of Darkness has been seen first and foremost as a literary classic that attacks colonialism and not as racially biased.