That is why the two of them are immortal, and why four hundred years after they were first brought into the world by Cervantes, they continue to ride on, relentlessly, without losing heart. Through La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia, Europe, America and the whole world. And there they are still, in the rain, the roaring thunder, the burning sun, where the stars shine in the great silence of the polar night, or in the desert, or in the jungle thickets, arguing, observing and having different interpretations of everything that they encounter or hear, but, despite this disagreement, needing each other more and more, indissolubly linked in that strange alliance that is between dreaming and waking, reality and the ideal, life and death, spirit and flesh, fiction and life. They are two unmistakable figures in literary history, the one long and lofty like a Gothic arch, the other stout and short, two attitudes, two ambitions, two ways of seeing. But in the distance, in our memories as readers of their fictional epic journeys, they join together and meld with each other and become ‘a single shadow’, like the couple in the poem by José Asunción Silva, that depicts our human existence in all its contradictory and fascinating truth.
Madrid, September 2004
Heart of Darkness
The Roots of Humankind
I. The Congo of Leopold II
On a plane journey, the historian Adam Hochschild found a quotation from Mark Twain in which the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asserted that the regime imposed in the Free State of the Congo between 1885 and 1906 by Leopold II, the King of the Belgians who died in 1909, had exterminated between five and eight million of the native inhabitants. Disconcerted, and with his curiosity aroused, he began an investigation that, many years later, would culminate in King Leopold’s Ghost, an outstanding document on the cruelty and greed that drove the European colonial adventure in Africa. The information contained in the book and the conclusions that it reaches greatly enrich our reading of Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, which was set in that country just at the time when the Belgian Company of Leopold II – who must rate alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the bloodiest political criminals of the twentieth century – was perpetrating the worst of its insanities.
Leopold II was an obscenity of a human being; but he was also cultured, intelligent and creative. He planned his Congolese operation as a great economic and political enterprise designed to make him both a monarch and a very powerful businessman, with a fortune and an industrial and commercial network so vast that he would be in a position to influence political life and development in the rest of the world. His Central African colony, the Congo, which was the size of half of western Europe, was his personal property until 1906, when pressure from various governments, and from public opinion that had been alerted to his monstrous crimes, forced him to cede the territory to the Belgian state. It was also an astute public relations exercise. He invested considerable sums in bribing journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, military men, lobbyists and church officials across three continents to put in place a massive smokescreen that would make the world believe that his Congolese adventure had the humanitarian and Christian aim of saving the Congolese from the Arab slave traders who raided their villages. With his sponsorship, lectures and congresses were organised that attracted intellectuals – mercenaries without scruples, both naive and stupid – and many priests to discuss the most practical means of taking civilisation and the Gospels to the cannibals in Africa. For a number of years, this Goebbels-style propaganda was effective. Leopold II was decorated, praised by religious groups and the press, and was considered a redeemer of black Africans.
Behind this imposture the reality was different. Millions of Congolese were subjected to iniquitous exploitation in order to fulfil the quotas on rubber, ivory and resin extraction that the Company imposed on villages, families and individuals. The Company had a military organisation and abused the workers to such an extent that, in comparison, the former Arab slave traders must have seemed like angels. They worked with no fixed hours and without payment, terrified at the constant threat of mutilation and death. The physical and mental punishments became sadistically refined: anyone not reaching their quota had a hand or a foot cut off. Dilatory villages were sacked and burned in punitive expeditions that kept the population cowed and thus curbed runaways and attempts at rebellion. To keep families completely submissive, the Company (it was just one company, hidden behind a dense thicket of different enterprises) kept in their custody either the mother or one of the children. As it had few overheads – it did not pay wages and its only real expense was arming uniformed bandits to keep order – its profits were fabulous. As he had set out to be, Leopold II became one of the richest men in the world.
Adam Hochschild calculates, persuasively, that the Congolese population was reduced by half in the twenty-one years that the outrages of Leopold II continued. When the Free State of the Congo passed to the Belgian state in 1906, even though many crimes were still being committed and the merciless exploitation of the native population was maintained, conditions did improve quite considerably. Had that system continued, it is in the realms of possibility that these people might have been completely wiped out.
Hochschild’s study demonstrates that, while the crimes and tortures inflicted on the native population were grotesquely horrendous, the greatest damage done to them was the destruction of their institutions, their kinship systems, their customs and their most fundamental dignity. It is not surprising that when, some sixty years later, Belgium gave independence to the Congo in 1960, the ex-colony, in which no local professional infrastructure had been created by the colonising power in almost a century of exploitation, plunged into chaos and civil war. And finally it fell into the hands of General Mobutu, an insane satrap, a worthy successor of Leopold II in his voracity for wealth.
There are not only criminals and victims in King Leopold’s Ghost. There are also, fortunately for humankind, people who offer some redemption, like the black American pastors George Washington Williams and William Sheppard who, when they discovered the true nature of the farcical regime, took immediate steps to denounce to the world the terrible reality of Central Africa. But the two people who, showing extraordinary bravery and perseverance, were mainly responsible for mobilising international public opinion against Leopold II’s butchery in the Congo, were an Irishman, Roger Casement, and a Belgian, Morel. Both deserve the honours of a great novel. The former (who in later years would first be knighted and later executed in Great Britain for participating in a rebellion for the independence of Ireland) was, for a period, the British vice-consul in the Congo. He inundated the Foreign Office with lapidary reports on what was happening there. At the same time, in the customs house in Antwerp, an enquiring and fair-minded official, Morel, began studying, with increasing suspicion, the shipments that were leaving for the Congo and those that were returning from there. What a strange trade it was. What was sent to the Congo was in the main rifles, munitions, whips, machetes and trinkets of no commercial value. From there, by contrast, came valuable cargoes of rubber, ivory and resin. Could one take seriously the propaganda that, thanks to Leopold II, a free trade zone had been created in the heart of Africa that would bring progress and freedom to all Africans?
Morel was not only a fair-minded and perceptive man. He was also an extraordinary communicator. When he discovered the sinister truth, he made it known to his compatriots, skilfully circumventing the barriers erected to keep out the truth of what was happening in the Congo, which were kept in place by intimidation, bribes and censorship. His analyses and articles on the exploitation suffered by the Congolese, and the resulting social and economic depredation, gradually gained an audience and helped to form an association that Hochschild considers to be the first important movement for human rights in the twentieth century. Thanks to the Association for the Reform of the Congo that Morel and Casement founded, Leopold was no longer seen as some mythic civilising force, but rather in his true colours as a genocidal leader. However, b
y one of those mysteries that should be deciphered one day, what every reasonably well-informed person knew about Leopold II and his grim Congolese adventure when he died in 1909 has now disappeared from public memory. Now no one remembers him as he really was. In his own country he has become an anodyne, inoffensive mummy, who appears in history books, has a number of statues and his own museum, but there is nothing to remind us that he alone caused more suffering in Africa than all the natural tragedies and the wars and revolutions of that unfortunate continent.
II. Konrad Korzeniowski in the Congo
In 1890, the merchant captain Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish by birth and a British national since 1888, could not find a post senior enough for his qualifications in England, and signed a contract in Brussels with one of the branches of the Company of Leopold II, the Société Anonyme Belge that traded in the upper Congo, to serve as a captain on one of the company’s steamboats which navigated the great African river between Kinshasa and Stanley Falls. He was employed by Captain Albert Thys, an executive director of the firm and a close associate of Leopold II, to take command of the Florida, whose previous captain, Freisleben, had been killed by local people.
The future Joseph Conrad took the train to Bordeaux and embarked for Africa on the Ville de Maceio, with the idea of remaining in his new post for three years. He disembarked in Boma at the mouth of the river Congo and from there he travelled the forty miles to Matadi on a small boat, arriving on 13 June 1890. Here he met the open-minded Irishman Roger Casement, with whom he lived for a couple of weeks. He would later write in his diary that of all the people he met in the Congo, Casement was the person he most admired. Through Casement he would doubtless have received detailed information about other horrors taking place there, alongside those that were immediately apparent. From Matadi he left on foot for Kinshasa, accompanied by thirty native bearers with whom he shared adventures and setbacks very similar to those experienced by Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness, as he covered the two hundred miles that separated the camp from the Central Station.
In Kinshasa, Conrad was informed by the directors of the Company that instead of boarding the Florida, the boat that he had been asked to captain, but which was being repaired, he would serve as second-in-command on another steamer, the Roi des Belges, under the command of its Swedish captain, Ludwig Koch. The boat’s mission was to go upriver to the camp at Stanley Falls, to pick up an agent of the Company, Georges Antoine Klein, who was seriously ill. Like Kurtz in the novel, Klein died on the return journey to Kinshasa, and Captain Ludwig Koch also fell ill on the journey, so Conrad ended up in charge of the Roi des Belges. Troubled by diarrhoea, disgusted and disillusioned by his Congolese experience, Conrad did not stay the three years in Africa that he had intended, but instead returned to Europe on 4 December 1890. His journey through the hell created by Leopold II therefore lasted just over six months.
He wrote Heart of Darkness nine years later, describing quite faithfully through the character of Marlow, whom it would not be unjust to call his alter ego in the novel, the different stages and developments in his own Congolese adventure. In the original manuscript, there is a sardonic reference to Leopold II (‘a third-rate king’), some geographical references, as well as the authentic names of the Company’s factories and stations along the banks of the river Congo that were later taken out or changed in the novel. Heart of Darkness was published in instalments in February, March and April 1899, in the London review Blackwood’s Magazine, and three years later in a book – Youth: A Narrative; And Two Other Stories – that included two further stories.
III. Heart of Darkness
Conrad would not have been able to write this story without the six months that he spent in the Congo that was being devastated by the Company of Leopold II. But although this experience was the primary material for the novel, which can be read, among many possible readings, as an exorcism of colonialism and racism, Heart of Darkness transcends these historical and social circumstances and becomes an exploration of the roots of humankind, those inner recesses of our being which harbour a desire for destructive irrationality that progress and civilisation might manage to assuage but never eradicate completely. Few stories have managed to express in such a synthetic and captivating manner this evil that resides in the individual and in society. Because the tragedy that Kurtz personifies has to do with both historical and economic institutions corrupted by greed, and also that deep-seated attraction to the ‘fall’, the moral corruption of the human spirit, which Christian religion calls original sin and psychoanalysis calls the death wish.
The novel is much more subtle and hard to pin down than the contradictory interpretations that have been made of it: the struggle between civilisation and barbarism, the return to the magic world of the rituals and sacrifices of primitive man, the fragile layer that separates modernity from savagery. In the first place, it is without doubt, and despite the strong criticism launched against it by the African writer Chinua Achebe who condemned it for being prejudiced and ‘bloody racist’,15 a trenchant critique of Western civilisation’s inability to transcend cruel and uncivilised human nature, like that shown by the white men that the Company has installed in the heart of Africa to exploit the native peoples, to strip bare their forests and their land, and to exterminate the elephant population in search of precious ivory. These individuals represent a worse form of barbarism (since it is deliberate and self-interested) than that shown by the barbarians, the cannibals and pagans, who have made Kurtz a mini-god.
Kurtz, who is in theory the central character in this story, is a pure mystery, a hidden piece of information, an absence rather than a presence, a myth that his fleeting appearance at the end of the novel does not manage to replace with a concrete being. At one point he was intellectually and morally far superior to the bunch of greedy mediocrities that were his colleagues in the Company, according to the stories that Marlow hears as he travels up the river towards the remote station where Kurtz is based, or after his death. Superior because he was then a man of ideas – a journalist, a musician, a politician – convinced, judging by the report that he prepared for the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’, that, in doing what it was doing – collecting ivory for export to Europe – European capitalism was undertaking a civilising mission, a kind of commercial and moral crusade of such importance that it justified the worst excesses committed in its name. But this is the myth. When we see Kurtz in the flesh, he is a shadow of himself, a mad, delirious, dying man with no trace remaining of the ambitious project that had seemingly captivated him at the beginning of his African adventure, a human ruin in which Marlow cannot glimpse a single one of those supposedly extraordinary ideas that had previously engrossed him. The only definite things we manage to learn about him are that he has plundered more ivory than any other company employee and that – in this he is different and superior to other white men – he has managed to communicate with the native inhabitants, to seduce them, to bewitch those savages that his colleagues are content merely to exploit, and, in a way, to become one of them: a little king to whom they express complete devotion and who rules over them as a primitive despot.
This dialectic between civilisation and barbarism is a central theme in Heart of Darkness. For any except the most blinkered reader it is clear that the novel does not argue that barbarism is equated with Africa and civilisation with Europe. There is an explicit, cynical barbarism that the Company embodies. The only reason for the Company’s presence in jungles and rivers is to pillage them, exploiting to this end, with limitless cruelty, the labour of cannibals who are enslaved, repressed and killed without any scruples, in the same way that herds of elephants are butchered for the white gold, the coveted ivory. Kurtz’s madness is the most extreme form of this barbarism that the Company (presented as a demonic abstraction) took with it to the African heart of darkness.
Madness, moreover, is not the exclusive domain of Kurtz, but rather a state of mind or illness that
seems to take hold of Europeans as soon as they set foot on African soil, as the Company doctor hints to Marlow when he examines him, measures his head and speaks to him about ‘the mental changes’ that take place in people out there. Marlow confirms this as soon as he reaches the mouth of the great river and sees a French warship absurdly bombarding, not a concrete military target, but rather the jungle, the African continent, as if the soldiers had taken leave of their senses. Many of the whites that he meets on his journey show signs of imbalance, from the impassive, manic accountant and the elated pilgrims to the nomadic, garrulous Russian dressed as a harlequin. The boundary between lucidity and madness is shattered in the savage, feverish note that appears at the bottom of Kurtz’s report to the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. How much time has passed between the report and this exhortation – ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ – we do not know. What we do know is that between these texts came the reality of Africa, and that this was enough for Kurtz’s mind (or his soul) to swing from reason to madness (or from Good to Evil). When he scribbled this command to exterminate, Kurtz was doubtless already putting it into practice, and around his cabin were heads swaying on stakes.
This tale offers, to say the least, a very pessimistic vision of the European civilisation represented by the ‘spectral city’ or the ‘white sepulchre’ where the Company has its main office, at whose doors visitors are greeted by women knitting. These women, as the critics have pointed out, bear a suspicious likeness to the Fates in Virgil or Dante, who guard the gates of the underworld. If this civilisation exists then it has, like the god Janus, two faces: one for Europe and the other for Africa, where there is a resurgence of all the violence and cruelty in human relationships that we thought had been abolished in the old continent. In the best of cases, civilisation appears as a very thin film below which the old demons are crouched, waiting for the opportune moment to reappear and suffocate precariously civilised men in ceremonies of pure instinct and irrationality, like the ones presided over by Kurtz in his absurd kingdom.
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