Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  More nettlesome yet, the book is sprinkled with factual errors. Sir Bartle Frere is governor of Bombay on page 5 and governor of India on page 122. It was not King Leopold IV of Belgium for whom Stanley staked out a Congo colony but Leopold II; and it was not the Belgian Congo that first came into being as a result but the État independant du Congo, or Congo Free State. Tanganyika became independent in 1961, not 1964. Britain’s population in the eighteen-fifties was not four million but, counting Ireland, more than twenty-seven million.

  When a writer stumbles this carelessly over small, obvious details, it’s a warning that there may be a broader, more revealing pattern of unreliability at work, and with Dugard there is. Almost always, he accepts Stanley’s account of an event at face value. But Stanley, one of the great self-promoters of all time, must always be treated with caution. Should we believe him when, for example, he tells how he quelled a mutiny of his porters, first facing down one armed man who rushed toward him, then whirling around just in time, like a hero beating off multiple villains in a kung-fu movie, to defy another, who was about to fire on him from the other side? Dugard does.

  Or take another episode. In the introduction to How I Found Livingstone, the first of his many boastful bestsellers, Stanley writes, “A journalist in my position . . . like a gladiator in the arena . . . must be prepared for the combat. Any flinching, any cowardice, and he is lost. The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom—the flying journalist or roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom.” He tells a dramatic tale of how he was summoned to Paris by his employer, Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. He found Bennett in his hotel room at night:

  “What!” said I, “do you really think I can find Dr. Livingstone? Do you mean me to go to Central Africa?”

  “Yes; I mean that you shall go, and find him wherever you may hear that he is. . . . The old man may be in want:—take enough with you to help him should he require it. Of course you will act according to your own plans, and do what you think best—BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!”

  Only slightly altering the punctuation, Dugard reproduces this dialogue and takes it as fact. But, according to Stanley’s most careful biographers, Bierman and McLynn, it is doubtful that anything resembling this conversation took place. Records show that Stanley arrived in Paris some ten days later than he said he did. Eight days’ worth of pages from his diary around this time have been torn out. The idea of pursuing Livingstone seems to have come from another official at the New York Herald. The first correspondent tapped for this assignment apparently couldn’t be reached. Stanley, though, had every reason to inflate his own role as a “gladiator” and Bennett’s as a bold editorial genius, because when he published his book, which is dedicated to Bennett, he was still on the Herald’s payroll and wanted the paper to finance his next expedition to Africa.

  That journey became Stanley’s greatest feat of exploration, providing the first European look at most of the Congo River and its vast navigable web of tributaries. Subsequently, he spent five years traveling up and down the river network, building way stations and roads, and basically staking out this enormous territory for King Leopold II. This laid the foundation for the king’s brutal, privately owned Congo Free State. During Leopold’s forced-labor regime and its immediate aftermath, some demographers estimate, the territory’s population was cut in half.

  Stanley returned to central Africa one last time, between 1887 and 1890. Curiously, like the famous journey that began his exploring career, this final trip was a quest for a missing white physician. In this case, it was an eccentric German Jew who followed Islamic customs, became known as Emin Pasha, and was appointed governor of the southern province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He was also putting together a collection of stuffed birds for the British Museum. Emin Pasha had sent word that he was under siege from extremist Islamist rebels and needed help. Stanley jumped at the chance to respond.

  Embarrassingly, however, it turned out that, by the time the explorer and his bedraggled vanguard finally reached Emin Pasha, he was no longer eager to be rescued. “For him everything depends on whether he is able to take me along, for only then . . . would his expedition be regarded as totally successful,” the governor groused in his diary. Stanley wrote another best-seller about the trip, but this time most of his white subordinates survived, and books and journals by them also appeared. They painted a grim picture: of Stanley exploding in temper tantrums, having a deserter hanged, working porters to death, ordering floggings left and right, and administering some himself. When he felt that the expedition might be attacked, one officer wrote, “Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages [a]round.” At the height of the imperial age, however, the revelations about Stanley’s brutality did little to tarnish his fame.

  Why is a book like Dugard’s appearing today? Like everything else, books reflect the spirit in the air. And, after taking some searching and long-overdue looks at race and colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s, we are now living at a time when those in power in Washington see the world as a clash of civilizations and are convinced that their civilization has every right to use force to prevail, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else, just as Stanley was convinced that he had every right to burn down African villages that impeded his progress. At this imperial moment, it is not surprising that someone like him is viewed in such a friendly light.

  2003

  NINE

  Heart of Darkness

  FICTION OR REPORTAGE?

  AT THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST 1890, the steamboat Roi des Belges—King of the Belgians—a 65-foot, boxy, wood-burning stern-wheeler with a funnel, awning, and pilothouse on its upper deck, began a four-week journey up the Congo River. At the captain’s side was a 32-year-old ship’s officer in training, stocky and black bearded, whose eyes, in some photographs, look as if they were perpetually narrowed against the tropical sun. The Polish-born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had arrived in the Congo some weeks earlier, his nautical experience almost entirely limited to the sea. This was his first trip on Africa’s largest river, and his logbook from the voyage is filled with detailed, businesslike notes about such matters as shoals, sandbars, and refueling points not shown on the primitive navigational chart: “Lulonga Passage. . . . NbyE to NNE. On the Port Side: Snags. Soundings in fathoms: 2,2,2,1,1,2,2,2,2. . . .”

  It would be almost a decade before he finally committed to paper a great many other features of the Congo not shown on the map, and by that time the world would know him as Joseph Conrad:

  Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known.

  The European colonization of the African continent, or the Scramble for Africa, was the greatest land grab in history, and one of the swiftest. In 1870, some 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara was still under the control of indigenous kings, chiefs, or other rulers. Within thirty-five years, virtually the entire continent, only a few patches excepted, was composed of European colonies or protectorates. Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Italy had all seized pieces of what King Leopold II of Belgium—who kept an enormous slice for himself—called “this magnificent African cake.” The Scramble for Africa redrew the map, enriched Europe, and left tens of millions of Africans dead. But this history is glaringly absent from the work of first-rank European novelists of the day. It would be as if no major nineteenth-century
American writer dealt with slavery or no major twentieth-century German wrote about the Holocaust. Joseph Conrad is a rare and brave exception.

  The multilayered richness of Heart of Darkness has made it probably the most widely read short novel in English, and certainly the most written about. If the pages of monograph chapters, scholarly articles, conference papers, dissertations, and entire books about Heart of Darkness were laid end to end, they would stretch, it seems, the full length of the Congo River and back again.

  Several curious tensions run through the book. One is between the way the story is painfully rooted in the six grueling months that Conrad spent in the Congo in 1890, nearly dying from dysentery and malaria, and the manner in which the novel is written, where no place—indeed, almost no person—is even named. Not only the colony of the Congo but even the very continent of Africa is never mentioned. If you look at a map, the shape of the “great river” up which Conrad’s alter ego Marlow begins steaming suggests the Congo River—“resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land”—but it, too, is never named. The key settings (the Central Station, the Inner Station) and most of the people Marlow meets (the manager, the Accountant, the brickmaker, the helmsman) are similarly without proper names.

  This technique, used by other writers since Conrad, is certainly one source of the book’s haunting power. We feel that we are reading a parable, a fable, something freighted with mythic overtones. After all, what do the snake and “traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” conjure up if not the Garden of Eden? For this is a book about the end of innocence and the discovery of evil. Written on the very eve of the twentieth century, the novel portrays a façade of benevolence and glory underlain by hideous violence and mass death, something that seems to look forward in an uncanny way to the era of Auschwitz and the Gulag.

  The brutality of those places was foreshadowed by events in colonial Africa. Hitler’s top deputy, Hermann Göring, sentenced to death at Nuremberg for his role in the murder of Europe’s Jews, was the son of the colonial governor of German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia), where the authorities carried out a deliberate genocide when the Herero people rebelled against German rule. The father of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, served as an army officer in German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), scene of another notorious colonial-era massacre. And even as late as the 1950s, the British imprisoned tens of thousands of Kenyans in harsh concentration camps for years in the course of ruthlessly suppressing an anticolonial revolt. The complete list is far longer.

  For many decades, critics and readers in the West usually preferred to look at Heart of Darkness only for what it says about the eternal human condition, rather than to consider it also as a portrait of a particular time and place. In several of its transformations into film, it has been moved completely out of Africa. In El Corazón del Bosque (The Heart of the Forest), the director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragon transplanted it to Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Francis Ford Coppola moved the story to Vietnam in his Apocalypse Now. In part these geographical leaps are testimony to the novel’s power and universality. But would we not think it strangely evasive if a director filmed Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of lvan Denisovich but didn’t set it in the Soviet Union, or brought Elie Wiesel’s Night to the screen but moved the story out of Auschwitz?

  • • •

  What, then, was going on in the Congo at the time Conrad went there that Europeans and Americans for so many years afterward preferred not to confront?

  The colony in which the unsuspecting and still unpublished writer arrived in 1890 was in the early stages of what would be the bloodiest single chapter of the Scramble for Africa. Orchestrating it was Leopold II, the man whose formal title was the name of Conrad’s steamboat, King of the Belgians. Brilliant and charming, ruthless and avaricious, a public relations genius who cloaked his greed in the rhetoric of Christian philanthropy, Leopold was openly frustrated with being king of such a small country. “Petit pays, petit gens,” he once said: small country, small-minded people. Moreover, he reigned at a time when most European monarchs were rapidly losing power to the electorate. And so he wanted a colony where he could rule supreme. The Belgian cabinet was not interested, but that suited Leopold perfectly: he set off to acquire his own.

  To begin with, the king hired the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley to navigate and reconnoiter the Congo River and its wide web of tributaries for him. Next, he successfully lobbied first the United States and then all the major nations of Europe into recognizing the Congo—a territory more than seventy times the size of Belgium—as belonging to him personally. He proclaimed himself its “King-Sovereign” in 1885. It was the world’s only privately owned colony.

  In the early years of the Congo Free State, as Leopold misleadingly christened his new domain, the main commodity he coveted was ivory. Elephant tusks were highly prized because they could be easily carved into a wide variety of shapes: piano keys, statuettes, jewelry, false teeth, and more. The king ordered a network of ivory-gathering posts set up along the colony’s riverbanks, and men who wanted to make their fortunes flocked to the Congo. These adventurers were often eager not just for riches but for combat. Much of the ivory was seized at gunpoint, and as poorly armed Congolese fought back against the foreigners, there were countless rebellions to put down. For many a young European or American, going to the Congo combined the thrills of joining both a gold rush and the French Foreign Legion.

  Like much of the colonization of Africa, the entire ivory-gathering system was based on forced labor. It was forced laborers who carried the white men’s supplies into the interior on their backs; bargeloads of forced laborers, pulled behind steamboats, chopped the wood that fueled their boilers; and Congolese conscripts were dragooned into the ranks of the king’s private army. Conrad recognized Leopold’s forced labor system for what it was. Soon after Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, arrives in the territory, he sees six workers on a railroad construction crew; they “all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.” Other workers, exhausted by their labor, have crawled into a grove of trees to die.

  Although ivory remained valuable, wild rubber would soon supplant it as the colony’s most lucrative treasure. In the years after Conrad’s visit, the death toll of this forced labor system would swell to unimaginable proportions. But Conrad saw the beginning of this enormous human catastrophe, and he saw it with piercing clarity.

  • • •

  The writer’s African odyssey began weeks before he was able to board the Roi des Belges. He first set foot in the territory on June 12, 1890, when, following the long voyage from Europe, he disembarked just inland from where the “great river” pours its enormous torrent of water—in volume second only to that of the Amazon—into the Atlantic. Soon afterward, he set off, accompanied by one other white man and a caravan of thirty-one porters, on the arduous 230-mile trek around the succession of rapids that the Congo River thunders down on the last part of its journey from the central African plateau to the ocean. It was over this same dirt road, several years previously, that the Roi des Belges itself, broken down into more than 250 pieces, had been carried around the rapids on the backs of exhausted porters, or, in the case of heavier pieces of machinery, placed on carriages that each required several hundred men to pull it uphill.

  On this caravan route Conrad first recorded signs of the immense violence that underlay the colony’s operations. In his diary on July 3, he noted, “Met an off[ic]er of the State inspecting; a few minutes afterwards saw at a camp[in]g place the dead body of a Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell.” The following day: “Saw another dead body lying by the path.” And on July 29: “On the road today passed a skeleton tied up to a post.”

  After more than a month of walking, in shaky health, he arrived at the small trading post of Kinshasa; in
land from here, it was clear sailing for steamboats for a thousand miles upstream. A day later Conrad was aboard the fifteen-ton Roi des Belges. It passed only a half dozen other such vessels during its month of traveling upstream. All day long the boat steamed, the smoke from its boiler leaving a trail in the air, its paddles beating the water of a river that, much of the time, was several miles wide. Typically these boats would travel by daylight and then tie up for the night, either at one of the militarized ivory-gathering posts, where firewood for the boiler could be loaded, or just at a spot on the riverbank where the crew of Congolese woodcutters could go into the rainforest and chop trees for the next day’s fuel.

  Finally, the steamer reached Stanley Falls, today the sprawling, decrepit city of Kisangani but then a small settlement of ivory warehouses, a jail, military barracks, a powder magazine, and offices for the colonial officials who controlled the eastern part of the colony. A week later, Conrad and the Roi des Belges headed back downstream—with the current the voyage would only take some two weeks—carrying cargo and a 27-year-old Frenchman, Georges Antoine Klein, a company agent who was gravely ill. Klein died on board a few days before the steamer’s journey ended, a detail echoed in Heart of Darkness.

  Once he was back in Kinshasa, some bitter disappointments punctured Conrad’s Congo dreams. He had hit it off badly with a key official and found that he was not slated to take part, as he had been hoping, in an exploring expedition up one of the Congo River’s major tributaries, the Kasai. The venality and greed of the ivory hunters horrified him. And the malaria and dysentery he had been fighting for weeks grew worse, landing him in a primitive hospital at a Protestant mission station where he apparently had to endure some proselytizing. “He is a gentlemanly fellow,” the American Presbyterian missionary Samuel Lapsley wrote in his diary. “An English [New] Testament on his table furnishes a handle I hope to use on him.” Europeans still had few effective medicines for most tropical diseases, and roughly a third of the white men who came to the Congo in this era died there. Such statistics were kept concealed by King Leopold II, but Conrad saw Klein die and surely heard of many other such deaths. Finally, in October 1890, he canceled his three-year contract and abandoned his African venture. On the long return trip around the lower river’s rapids, his illness was at its worst, and he had to be carried by porters. He arrived back in Europe early the next year, his health permanently weakened and his view of humanity forever darkened.