In the 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has Marlow/Conrad the narrator talking with others on a ship moored on the dark aired River Thames at Gravesend. This river, a river at the heart of the British Empire is the setting from which Marlow begins his reminiscences and then tells his tale.
Steve McQueen’s film Gravesend (2007) is concerned with the mining of coltan, a dull black mineral used in capacitors, which are vital components in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics. Juxtaposing an animated fly-by of the Congo River with footage of workers sifting through dark earth and robots processing the procured material in a pristine, brightly lit laboratory, the film’s disjunctions allegorise the very real economic, social and physical distance this material traverses as it moves from the third to the first world. Its final sequence, a time-lapse shot of a sun setting behind smokestacks, brings everything full circle, rendering visual a scene described at the outset of Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novel, Heart of Darkness.
Maya Jasanoff writes of Conrad and this novel in her book The Dawn Watch.
Heart of Darkness remains one of the most widely read novels in English; and the movie adaptation Apocalypse Now has brought Conrad's story to still more. The very phrase has taken on a life of its own. Conrad's book has become a touchstone for thinking about Africa and Europe, civilization and savagery, imperialism, genocide, insanity - about human nature itself.
It's also about a flash point. In the 1970's, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe declared Heart of Darkness "an offensive and totally deplorable book," rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Conrad, said Achebe, was "a bloody racist." Not long afterward, a half-American, half-Kenyan college student named Barack Obama was challenged by his friends to explain why he was reading "this racist tract." "Because . . . ," Obama stammered, "because the book teaches me things . . . About white people, I mean. See, the book's not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. the European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world."
Page 4., The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
The author Adam Hochschild deals with the historical background to the Heart of Darkness. The exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, including the large-scale atrocities committed during that period, are revealed in an exposé of multiple histories conveniently forgotten or suppressed in his bestseller King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was fascinated with obtaining a colony and focused upon claiming the interior of Africa—the only unclaimed sizable geographic area. Moving within the European political paradigm existing in the early 1880s, Leopold gained international concessions and recognition for his personal claim to the Congo Free State.
His rule of the vast region was based on tyranny and terror. Under his direction, Stanley again visited the area and extracted favorable treaties from numerous local leaders. A road and, eventually, a rail line were developed from the coast to Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa). A series of militarized outposts were established along the length of the Congo River, and imported paddle wheelers commenced regular river service. Native peoples were forced to gather ivory and transport it for export. Beginning c. 1890, rubber—originally manufactured from coagulated sap—became economically significant in international trade. The Congo was rich in rubber-producing vines, and Leopold transitioned his exploitative focus from dwindling ivory supplies to the burgeoning rubber market. Slavery, exploitation and the reign of terror continued and even increased.
Meanwhile, early missionaries and human rights advocates such as Roger Casement, E. D. Morel, George Washington Williams, and William Henry Sheppard began to circulate news of the widespread atrocities committed in the Congo under the official blessing of Leopold's administration. Women and children were imprisoned as hostages to force husbands and fathers to work. Flogging, starvation and torture were routine. Murder was common—tribes resisting enslavement were wiped out; administration officials expected to receive back a severed human hand for every bullet issued. Rape and sexual slavery were rampant. Workers failing to secure assigned quotas of rubber were routinely mutilated or tortured. Administration officials so completely dehumanized local peoples that at least one decorated his flower garden with a border of severed human heads. News of these atrocities brought slow, but powerful, international condemnation of Leopold's administration leading, eventually, to his assignment of the country to Belgian administration.
In the chapter called "Meeting Mr Kurtz" Hochschild says more about Conrad the man and the writer:
Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned. Conrad fully recognized Leoplod's rape of the Congo for what it was: "The horror! The horror!" his character Kurtz says on his deathbed. And Conrad's stand-in, Marlow, muses on 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." yet in almost the same breath, Marlow talks about how the British territories colored red on a world map were "good to see at any time because one knows that some real work is done in there"; British colonialists were "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire."
Marlow was speaking for Conrad , whose love of his adoptive country knew no bounds: Conrad felt that "liberty . . . can only be found under the English flag all over the world." And at the very time he was denouncing the European lust for African riches in his novel, he was an investor in a gold mine near Johannesburg.Pages 146-47
Conrad was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was partly a prisoner of what Mark Twain, in a different context, called "the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages." Heart of Darkness has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years because of its portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few words. In fact, they don't speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce a "drone of weird incantations" and "a wild passionate uproar", they spout "strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language . . . like the responses of some satanic litany." The true message of the book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued is: "Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz . . . should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle al lo! the darkness found him out."
However laden it is with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa. When Marlow says goodbye to his aunt before heading to his new job, "she talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit." Conrad's white men go about their rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the natives, bringing civilization, serving "the noble cause."
All these illusions are embodied in the character of Kurtz. He is both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, "an emissary of . . . science and progress." He is a painter, the creator of "a small sketch in oils" of a woman carrying a torch that Marlow finds at the Central Station. And he is a poet and journalist, the author of, among other works, a seventeen-page report - "vibrating with eloquence . . . a beautiful piece of writing" - to the International Society for the Suppression of savage Customs. At the end of this report, filled with lofty sentiments, Kurtz scrawls in a shaky hand: "Exterminate all the brutes!"
