Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  • • •

  How much of what he portrayed in Heart of Darkness was based on Conrad’s actual experience? For most of the century after the book was written, the implicit answer from critics was: not much, except for the superficial details of the steamboat journey up- and downriver. They analyzed the novel in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche, of patriarchy and Gnosticism, of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Monographs and Ph.D. theses poured forth with titles like “The Eye and the Gaze in ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Symptomological Reading.” By contrast, Conrad himself wrote, “‘Heart of Darkness’ is experience . . . pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.”

  He is right, and we miss much if we look at the novel only as a work of imaginative literature. “The actual facts of the case” he portrays show the Scramble for Africa at its most naked. Consider the figure at the book’s center, Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz is sketched with only few bold strokes, but he has become our time’s most famous literary villain: the lone white man with his dreams of culture and grandeur, his great hoard of ivory, and his barbarous fiefdom carved out of the jungle.

  No doubt Conrad drew part of Kurtz from deep within himself; that is what gives the reader a tinge of uneasy empathy with Kurtz’s boundless ambition and his vision of himself as the apostle of “the cause of progress” among awestruck savages. But Conrad clearly also took aspects of Kurtz from various men whom he encountered or heard about in the Congo.

  Look, for instance, at the searing scene in which Marlow gazes from the steamboat at what he first thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts near Mr. Kurtz’s house. But through his binoculars he then sees that each is a human head, “black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids.” Biographers long talked of Kurtz’s collection of severed heads as a brilliant example of Conrad’s phantasmagoric imagination; one, Norman Sherry, even described it as possibly a “macabre transference” by Conrad of a well-known episode when an aggressive white ivory-seeker in the Congo was beheaded by African rivals.

  But no macabre transference was necessary: a number of white men in the colony at this time collected African heads and openly bragged about it. One, Guillaume Van Kerckhoven, a dashing, mustachioed Belgian and an officer of Leopold’s African army, told a fellow steamboat passenger in 1887 that he paid his black soldiers the equivalent of two and halfpence in British money for every rebel head they brought him after a battle in order to “stimulate their prowess in the face of the enemy.” Conrad knew the man to whom Van Kerckhoven made this boast.

  Another notorious Belgian head collector was an officer named Leon Fiévez. To a white government agent who visited his post in 1894, Fiévez explained that when local Africans failed to supply his troops with food, “I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people, but that allowed five hundred others to live.”

  We do not know if Fiévez had started these “humanitarian” practices in 1890, but Conrad may have met him that year, for Fiévez had just taken command of the strategic, heavily fortified post of Basoko, a likely refueling and overnight stop for the Roi des Belges on its way up and down the river. Nor was it only Belgians who collected heads. One British explorer-adventurer in the Congo, part of an expedition that received a huge amount of press coverage, in 1887 packed an African’s head in a box of salt and sent it to his Piccadilly taxidermist to be stuffed and mounted.

  The most striking head-collector of all, with an eerie resemblance to Mr. Kurtz on several other counts as well, was a brusque-looking Congo state official named Léon Rom, whose combat exploits earned him various medals and write-ups in Belgian colonial-heroic literature of the day. When commander of the Stanley Falls station a few years after Conrad was there, Rom kept a gallows permanently erected in front of his headquarters. A British journalist who passed through in 1895 described, in the widely read Century Magazine, a punitive expedition Rom had mounted against African rebels: “Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flowerbed in front of his house!”

  In addition, both the real-life Rom and the fictional Kurtz carried out their looting amid pretensions to high culture. In the novel, Mr. Kurtz is an intellectual, “an emissary of . . . science and progress.” Rom also had scientific ambitions: he brought many butterfly specimens back to Europe and was elected a member of the Royal Belgian Entomological Society. Furthermore, Mr. Kurtz is an artist—the painter of “a small sketch in oils” of a woman carrying a torch, which hangs on the wall of the Central Station. Léon Rom, when he was not collecting butterflies or human heads, painted in oils as well. The five examples of his work which can be found today in the vaults of a Belgian museum include a portrait, rendered with some skill, of a bare-chested young African woman, arching her back seductively as one strand of a necklace falls between her breasts. One cannot help thinking of the “barbarous and superb woman” of the novel, Mr. Kurtz’s mistress.

  Mr. Kurtz is also an author. Among other things, he writes a seventeen-page report—“vibrating with eloquence. . . . a beautiful piece of writing”—to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Although Conrad was probably unaware of it, in 1899, the same year that Heart of Darkness first appeared as a magazine serial, Léon Rom, too, published a report on savage customs. It was a jaunty, arrogant, and sweepingly superficial little book called Le Négre du Congo. There are short chapters on “Le Négre en Général,” the black woman, food, pets, native medicine, and many pages about a particular enthusiasm of Rom’s—hunting. Of “the black race,” Rom says, “its feelings are coarse, its passions rough, its instincts brutish, and, in addition, it is proud and vain. . . . The black man has no idea of time, and, questioned on that subject by a European, he generally responds with something stupid.”

  One final parallel: Mr. Kurtz succeeds in “getting himself adored” by the Africans of the Inner Station. Chiefs crawl on the ground before him, the blacks obey him with slavish devotion, and from them he has chosen the “barbarous and superb woman” as his bedmate. In 1895, a disapproving Belgian lieutenant confided to his diary a similar portrait of a fellow officer:

  He makes his agents starve while he gives provisions in abundance to the black women of his harem. . . . He got into his dress uniform at his house, brought together his women, picked up some piece of paper and pretended to read to them that the king had named him the big chief and that the other whites of the station were only small fry. . . . He gave 50 lashes to a poor little negress because she wouldn’t be his mistress, then he gave her to a soldier.

  Significantly, the diarist introduces his account by saying, This man wants to play the role of a second Rom.

  On August 2, 1890, Conrad and Rom may have met. About five miles before reaching the small riverside post of Kinshasa, where the Roi des Belges was waiting, Conrad and his caravan of porters passed through the neighboring post of Leopoldville. All told, only about twenty white men were living in these two places, each of which—long before they were both absorbed into the giant metropolis today called Kinshasa—was just a scattering of thatch-roofed buildings. Léon Rom was then station chief at Leopoldville. His diary, which in a neat, almost calligraphic hand records any raid or campaign that could win him another medal, shows no expedition away from the post that day. If he was on hand, he certainly would have greeted any caravan with white newcomers, for these arrived only a few times a month. Conrad spoke near-perfect French, so they would have had a language in common.

  Did Conrad meet Rom—or Fiévez or Van Kerckhoven? Did Rom tell him about his scientific, artistic, and literary ambitions, or did Conrad hear of these from others? Did Conrad see one of Rom’s paintings on the wall, as Marlow does one of Kurtz’s? We will never know. But whether specific memories provided building blocks for the character of Mr. Ku
rtz or whether Conrad simply worked on intuition, the novel captures its place and time with uncanny accuracy.

  • • •

  Heart of Darkness is not always an easy book to read. At times the voice of Marlow seems too extravagant, and too vague. Marlow’s portrayal of Kurtz’s appalling brutality seems at odds with his repeated professions of loyalty to the man. Parades of ponderous adjectives—inexorable, unspeakable, unfathomable—rumble past relentlessly. “Sentence after sentence,” wrote the novelist E.M. Forster, “discharges its smoke screen into our abashed eyes.” The poet John Masefield found the novel to have “too much cobweb.”

  What accounts for this? When he wrote the book, Conrad was clearly wrestling painfully with something deep within himself. Before his six months in Africa, he once told his friend the critic Edward Garnett, he had had “not a thought in his head.” But what he found in the Congo—dead bodies strewn about; the skeleton tied up to a post; workers in chains; an entire economy founded on the whip, the gun, and forced labor—was, he wrote in an essay published only a few months before he died, “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” Some of his angst may have stemmed from embarrassment and guilt about his own youthful naïveté. He had hoped for a glamorous job skippering a steamboat on an exploring voyage. But, as his novel says of Kurtz, his time in the Congo may have “whispered to him things about himself which he did not know.”

  But the whispering was complicated, for there was a political struggle going on in Conrad’s soul, although he never articulated it and never would have used that word to describe it. On one hand, he was writing the most scathing portrait of colonialism in all of European literature. No one who reads Heart of Darkness can ever again imagine the colonizers of central Africa as benevolent. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire,” Marlow says, “with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Nor does Conrad imply that there is anything uniquely Belgian about this burglary. Fortune-seekers in the Congo came from throughout the Western world: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

  What gave Conrad, almost alone among the novelists of his time, the ability to see the arrogance and theft at the heart of imperialism? And to see that Leopold’s much-promoted civilizing mission was founded on forced labor? Much of it surely had to do with the fact that he himself knew what it was like to live in conquered territory. He had been born Polish, but throughout the nineteenth century the land that is Poland today was divided among three neighboring empires, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and Russia. The latter, where most of the writer’s family lived, was the most repressive; when Conrad was three, Cossacks charged into churches to break up memorial services for a Polish nationalist hero. Furthermore, for the first few years of his life, tens of millions of peasants in the Russian Empire were the equivalent of slave laborers: serfs.

  Conrad’s poet father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish nationalist and, somewhat hazily, an opponent of serfdom, although both he and his wife came from the class of country gentry that had sometimes owned serfs. For his nationalist activities, Apollo was thrown into a harsh Warsaw prison and then exiled to northern Russia. His wife and four-year-old boy went with him, and their time in the frigid climate exacerbated the tuberculosis that would kill her when Conrad was only seven. Apollo died a few years later, and his funeral procession, in Austrian-occupied Kraków, turned into a huge demonstration of Polish nationalism. Although nothing in Conrad’s writing makes any comparison between Poland and Africa, should we be surprised that this boy who grew up among prison veterans in exile, talk of serfdom, and the news of relatives killed in uprisings, was ready to distrust imperial conquerors who claimed they had the right to rule or enslave other peoples?

  Paradoxically, in everything else about his politics, Conrad was deeply conservative. He hated labor unions. He had no use for the socialist idealism in which so many British intellectuals—including several close friends—had great faith. And above all, he was profoundly loyal to his adoptive country, Britain, which, of course, was the greatest colonial power of them all. Early on in the novel, when Marlow sees a map of Africa dominated by the British Empire’s red and feels the color is “good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done” he is speaking for his creator. Indeed, Conrad once declared in a letter that “liberty . . . can only be found under the English flag all over the world.”

  Similarly, despite his searing portrayal of white greed, Conrad was very much a man of his own imperial time when it came to race. The Africans in this novel barely ever even speak. Instead they grunt, they chant, they 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 . . . like the responses of some satanic litany.” Heart of Darkness has come in for some attacks in recent years for its racism, most notably from the distinguished Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Yet there is even a contradiction within this contradiction, because at the same time as Conrad’s narrator flaunts these racial stereotypes, calling the Africans of his crew “cannibals,” he says, “They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them.” And he speaks of the “subtle bond,” a “distant kinship” he felt with his black helmsman.

  One final paradox: It was nearly a decade between Conrad’s trip up the Congo River, when he saw so clearly the lust for quick riches of his fellow white men, and the time when he finally got that experience onto paper in this novel. In the interim, the novelist made a disastrous try at gaining quick riches himself. Although the details remain shadowy, he apparently invested and lost almost all his savings in South African gold mining shares—a loss all the more embarrassing because it came just as he got married and hoped to start a family. The South African gold rush of the late 1880s and ’90s was, like the simultaneous ivory and rubber boom in the Congo, one of the great bonanzas of the Scramble for Africa. Tens of thousands of miners flocked to Johannesburg from all over the world—as did merchants, pimps, and prostitutes hoping to make money from them. Mine owners amassed huge fortunes. Meanwhile, the hardest, most dangerous and lowest-paid manual labor underground was done by Africans. Pushed off their land and desperate for money to survive, they died by the thousands in mining accidents, were forced to leave their families behind in distant rural areas, and were deliberately provided with few recreation facilities except drinking places, which recycled much of their meager earnings back to mine owners, several of whom owned the major distillery. How much of all this was Conrad aware of? How did he feel about his failed attempt to cash in on the gold rush? We will never know, but this may be yet another of those internal struggles which in the end added depth to an extraordinary book.

  1998, 2012

  TEN

  On the Campaign Trail with Nelson Mandela

  IN A HUGE EXHIBITION SHED the size of an aircraft hangar at the Pretoria fairgrounds, Nelson Mandela has arrived before most of his audience. This is not unusual in South Africa’s first, tumultuous democratic election campaign. Few black South Africans have cars, and train routes are designed to move them between their workplaces and the distant townships where they have been forced to live, not to sites like this one. And so today’s audience is being bused in, mostly in packed minivan taxis.

  As the hall begins to fill, Mandela strolls about, smiling, joking, chatting, and shaking hands with supporters and the few journalists on hand. He wears a loose blue shirt with a white floral pattern, loafers, and dark red socks. Except for hearing aids in both ears, he looks younger and healthier than a 75-year-old who has spent more than twenty-seven years in prison. He stands erect. There is a majesty about him, but of a relaxed, not august, kind. Today he seems clearly buoyed by the electric ripple of excitement that follows him as he walks slowly through the crowd.

  The African National Congress (ANC) is waging this historic campaign in alliance with the South African Com
munist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which has organized today’s events. Several thousand of COSATU’s more than 1.3 million members are filing into the hall this morning, singing, chanting, and doing the toyi-toyi, the shuffle-dance long associated with black protest gatherings. Close to 50 percent of South Africa’s industrial and commercial work force is unionized—a figure many times the percentage in the United States. The unions have won major victories despite years of harassment and arrests of union leaders and firebombings of union offices. Today’s audience includes metal workers, transport workers, and local government employees. Some of the latter have been bused in from Bophuthatswana, a nearby black “homeland,” where, to the ANC’s great delight, the longtime dictator installed by the apartheid regime, Lucas Mangope, has just been toppled by a popular revolt. “Bop,” as it’s called, is now officially part of South Africa again and will vote largely for the ANC.