Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in 1899

 1. Born to Polish parents in Ukraine in  2. His father was jailed for nationalist political actions.  3. Orphaned at age 11.  4. in 1874 he travelled to Marseilles and worked on French ships for four years.  5. Later joined the British merchant navy where he worked for 16 years. He became a devout anglophile.  Much of his writing is about his travels on ships.  Began learning English in 1878.

 What is Colonialism?

The White Man’s Burden Rudyard Kipling Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child. Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain. Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought. Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead. Take up the White Man's burden-- And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard-- The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:-- "Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?" Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less-- Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you. Take up the White Man's burden-- Have done with childish days-- The lightly profered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!

King Leopold II of Belgium

Belgian Congo

He is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King. He used Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, which included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Congo Free StateHenry Morton StanleyDemocratic Republic of the Congo Leopold ran the Congo brutally, by proxy through a mercenary force, as his personal fiefdom. Though he extracted a personal fortune from the Congo, his regime became one of the most infamous international scandals of the turn of the 20th century. The famous 1904 report by the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded mass killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese peoplefiefdomfamous 1904 reportRoger CasementBelgianCongolese Belgium: A small country poorer than its neighbors thought the key to wealth was an African colony. King Leopold took the Belgium Congo as his personal property. In the 1880’s, he gained a vast personal fortune by harvesting ivory, prized in the days before plastic because it could be carved into any shape. Africans were kidnapped and used as forced labor for anything from road building to rubber extraction. Atrocities were common To save bullets soldiers had to prove a kill by cutting a hand off the corpse. If they missed or used a bullet for game, they often cut the hand off a living victim.

 In 1876, Leopold hosted a Geographical Conference on Central Africa, to which he invited famous explorers to discuss ending the slave trade in East Africa and spreading European civilization. At the conference, he appealed to the explorers’ interests in an ideological quest: “To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress”

 The soldiers, to show that they did not expend the cartridges extravagantly... for each cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the flower bed... which was bordered with human skulls. A quaint conceit. The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is Leopold.

The Congo River