King Leopold’s Ghost -- an introduction

High school teachers and college professors who have discussed The Heart of Darkness in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. Readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast the novel loose from its historical moorings. We often read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place.

The quest for ivory

The quest for rubber

One prototype for Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz was Léon Rom, a swashbuckling officer known for displaying a row of African heads around his garden. He also painted landscapes and collected butterflies.

Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five- year old daughter, Boali, a victim of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia.

Two youths of the Equator district. The hands of Mola, seated, have been destroyed by gangrene after being tied too tightly by soldiers. The right hand of Yoka, standing, was cut off by soldiers wanting to claim him as killed.